Friday, December 8, 2023

Illinois

 
Gliatto, Sal 1923 St. Cyr

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Honest Broker 3


Most people report having an inner voice. For example, 83 per cent (3,445 out of 4,145 people in our sample) ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘When I read I tend to hear a voice in my mind’s ear.’ A similar proportion – 80 per cent – ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.’ This proportion goes up even more when asked about social problems: 85 per cent ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement ‘When thinking about a social problem, I often talk it through in my head.’

But 85 per cent is hardly everyone. What about those who disagree with these statements? Some of them report experiencing an inner voice only in specific situations. For example, when it comes to reading, some say that they hear a voice only if they deliberately slow down or are reading something difficult. But a small percentage (2-5 per cent) report never experiencing an inner voice at all. Like those with aphantasia who assume their whole lives that visual imagery is just a metaphor, those with anen dophasia – a term Johanne Nedergaard and I coined to refer to the absence of inner speech – assume that those inner monologues so common in TV shows are just a cinematic device rather than something that people actually experience. People with anendophasia report that they never replay past conversations and that, although they have an idea of what they want to say, they don’t know what words will come out of their mouths until they start talking.

It is tempting to think that there is a trade-off between thinking using language and thinking using imagery. Take the widespread idea that people have different ‘learning styles’, some being visual learners and others verbal learners (it turns out this idea is largely incorrect). When it comes to imagery and inner speech, what we find is a moderate positive correlation between vividness of visual imagery and inner speech. On average, those who report having more visual imagery also report experiencing more inner speech. Most who claim to not experience inner speech also report having little imagery.

This raises the question of what their thoughts feel like to them. When we have asked, we tend to get answers that are quite vague, for example: ‘I think in ideas’ and ‘I think in concepts.’ We have lots of language at our disposal that we can use to talk about perceptual properties (especially visual ones) and, of course, we can use language to talk about language. So it is not really surprising that people have trouble conveying what thoughts without a perceptual or linguistic format feel like. But the difficulties in expressing these types of thoughts using language don’t make them any less real. They merely show that we have to work harder to better understand what they are like.



Paradoxically, although language is what allows us to compare notes and learn about differences between our subjective experiences, its power to abstract may also cause us to overlook these differences because the same word can mean many different things. We use ‘imagine’ to refer to forming an image in the mind’s eye, but we also use it when referring to more abstract activities like imagining a hypothetical future. It is perfectly reasonable for an aphantasic to not realise that, in some cases, people use ‘imagine’ to mean actually forming mental images that have a perceptual reality.






"I’m told that the avant-garde art market depends largely on 300 wealthy people living in eight cities"

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-secret-practices-of-magical-musicians



Saturday, November 11, 2023

Honest Broker 2


































Aquinas & Angels


"Aquinas furnishes several proofs for the thesis that each angel constitutes by itself a single species. First, since each separate substance is a subsistent form, it has a unique, incommunicable proper definition, and so must be a species in its own right: that is, species and individual wholly coincide. Secondly, since separate substances are utterly removed from matter, they lack the potentiality for the numerical diversification of their forms, because matter is the source of the individuating pluralization of a given species. As pure forms, angels admit only of specific differentiation. It follows that there cannot be two angels of identically the same species. Thirdly, the purpose for the multiplication of individuals within one species is to ensure the perpetuation of the specific nature, in any instance where such entities are corruptible. But separate substances are not subject to any decay whatsoever. Consequently, there is no need for a plurality of angelic individuals within the bounds of one species: each angel actually exhausts the full range of the possibilities inherent in its specific nature." 

Furthermore, in the case of simple substances, the notion of genus is entirely attendant on the meaning of the specific nature, which both determines and is determined by itself alone. That is, the absence of any determinable matter in the separate substance precludes the potentiality required for a genus. The specific essence per se locates each finite spirit within a definite “grade of being,” yielding a natural linear inequality of entitative degree among the angels. Nonetheless, although the proximate genus of an angel cannot be logically and properly distinguished from its specific difference, the human mind can legitimately broadly categorize all finite, purely spiritual beings as members of one so­ called “genus” (taken in a loose sense).

Although the substance of each angel innately includes all the intelligible likenesses pertaining to the whole gamut of its natural knowledge, it does not make use of all these imprinted species at once in its actual understanding. Regarding its natural cognition, an angel can know simultaneously only the plurality of those things subsumable under a single intentional form –not the noetic contents comprised under distinct intelligible similitudes. In particular, it cannot contemplate the total spectrum of its native knowledge all at once. Thus, even though the angelic mind is never in a condition of absolute or essential passive potentiality with respect to its natural knowledge (as is the human possible intellect, which acquires knowledge from a privative state of primitive ignorance), yet, because it is not always exhaustively considering everything that it knows, it does undergo an accidental transition from relative potency to exercised act when it decides to advert to and reflect on some habitually possessed epistemic datum. As Aquinas declares, “[I]n the intellect of a separate substance there is a certain succession of understandings; there is not, however, movement properly speaking, since act does not succeed potentiality, but [rather] act succeeds act.” Still, this limiting feature does radically differentiate angels from the omniscient Deity, Who knows everything without successiveness in one eternal act of understanding identical with His Divine Essence.

Now a major distinction among them, a criterion disclosing their natural inequality, lies in the degree of universality of their innate ideas. Indeed, since God understands all things through one Idea identical with His Infinite Essence and since intellectual substances rise in dignity the nearer they approach His supreme Unity, it follows that an angel occupying a stratum of greater eminence knows larger tracts of reality covered by fewer intelligible species than an angel of lower ontological status (though even the latter succeeds in comprehending the cosmos via a mental map of it). For a weaker intellect always needs a more multifarious variety of detailed concepts to grasp what a stronger mind can encompass with fewer, but more universally embracing, cognitive principles.

Moreover, we note that, because angels do not abstract their ideas from sensible objects, their universal concepts are by nature prior (not posterior)to the material world. Furthermore, the angelic universals are not merely general notions about broad classes of things, but rather unified media by which the angel also knows singulars in an intensely distinctive fashion: within one universal idea there is contained a representative similitude of the properly rich density of manifold species and specimens.

An angel itself can be said to undergo local motion (again, by an analogical use of the term), in that it can successively apply its power to different places. Its so-called “movement,” though, does not betray any intrinsic potentiality on the part of the angel itself: the passive potency resides totally in the object receiving the action. Moreover, the angel’s “movement” is not necessarily continuous; indeed, its movement will be discontinuous if it instantaneously exchanges the focus of its causal efficacy from the whole of one arena to an utterly diverse locale. In the latter case of discrete motion, it bypasses the entire intermediate magnitude linking initial and terminal positions. Thus, an angel can violate the usual laws of space-traversal by effecting quantum leaps.

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Saturday, November 4, 2023

Autechre

We Are the Music Makers : music forum

w/ "ambient megathread"

Map of draft beer price by European country

 https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17m2crn/how_much_do_europeans_typically_pay_for_draft/

the level of variation is great

Plant drawings

 https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/02/mary-delany-botanical-collages/

Ted Gioia on sci-fi


Glass plate old pictures

 https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/11/terri-cappucci-glass-plates/

Ken Grimes - schizophrenic alien-obsessed artist

Intellectual Property Killed the Movie Star

 https://jacobin.com/2023/03/movie-stars-celebrities-intellectual-property-film-industry-franchises#:~:text=The%20lead%20actors%20in%20today's,connect%20with%20audiences%20and%20shine.

Martin Scorsese on Marvel

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html

Monday, October 30, 2023

European soccer


Germany

w/ some stuff about Walter Kreisch
shows the trampling football went through in East Germany


Begirfsliga / Bezirksliga : District League
Oberliga: Upper League  - (East Germany)
Ostzonenmeisterschaft : East Zone Championship
Ãœbergangsrunde : Transitional Round

 Eine statistif zur : A statistic for

Jahre : year
Nach : after
Uhr : clock


1950-4-18 standings?



 Greece



Romania


Serbia





Africa

Zambia



Extra:

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Friday, October 13, 2023

Honest Broker

 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-12-favorite-problems

Start with a list of favorite problems and new information can be checked against them


https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-american-graffiti-invented-classic

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/i-answer-questions-from-readers music, is rock dead?, the horror of archives
"I suspect that the fear that we have exhausted melodies is actually a disguised concern that commercial music today is embracing very simple formulas. If we expanded our musical palette, many of these apparent limitations would disappear. "


"I realized, early on in my consulting work, that the single biggest mistake large corporations make is investing too much to keep their old business units alive—when they would be wiser putting that cash to work in new opportunities. The major record labels in the current moment are poster children for exactly this mistaken sense of priorities. They will support the ‘old songs’ business model at all costs—it’s a core part of their self image—but return on investment will be dismal."

Skinner box heaven



verra verra interesting


But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years.  Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over  English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”

If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.

But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/8-pieces-of-advice-for-struggling

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/thomas-pynchons-gravitys-rainbow

https://thomaspynchon.com/professor-irwin-coreys-acceptance-of-pynchons-national-book-award/