Lotus is a five-piece instrumental band from Philadelphia. Their music is highly tempered by electronic styles such as deep house and drum 'n bass, but inside the sonic layers seep heavy doses of jazz, funk, and world music. Their high energy live shows feature tightly composed material balanced with stretched out improvisation. The sounds shift from spiritual and meditative to jubilant and energetic from dark dance floor burners to spaced-out waves of ambiance.
What's the true story with the Sargasso Sea? Is there actually a huge mass of floating seaweed in the middle of the Atlantic? Do ships have a difficult time traversing it? Are there abandoned ships stuck in it, and if so, how many and are there any famous anecdotes? I have heard that Columbus once encountered it; is this true?
In a new study detailed in the May 18 2007 issue of the journal Science, researchers have shown that eddies, episodic swirling current systems, pump nutrients up from the ocean’s depths to feed the phytoplankton.
“Eddies are the internal weather of the sea, the oceanic equivalent of storms in the atmosphere” said McGillicuddy, also the study’s leader.
Genetic programming creates growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. After a series of breakthroughs in the early 2000s, Genetic Programming has had a formidable and rapid development which led to the production of computers that innovate and find solutions not only equal to but sometimes better than some of the best work of humans expert in some given fields. John Koza's invention machine earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.
One of the central challenges of computer science is to get a computer to do what needs to be done, without telling it how to do it.
In acting as an invention machine, evolutionary methods, such as genetic programming, have the advantage of not being encumbered by preconceptions that limit human problem-solving to well-troden paths. This is how it works.
The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow.
The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are
equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That's an
image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. There is something
tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in
itself the sense of both fascination and the terror of life.
Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life
consists in eating other creatures. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that's about all it is.
And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is not
arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being
reborn, like the moon.
[Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myths with Bill Moyers. New York, Doubleday, 1988 pdf]
This was then.
And this is now:
If indefinite lifespan is on the cusp, would people really want to live forever?
And if they do, what would that mean for the world?
"Time and the pure essence of Heaven, the moisture of the Earth, the powers of the Sun and the Moon all worked upon a certain rock, old as creation. And it became magically fertile. That first egg was named "Thought"...Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it came a stone monkey. The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!"
---Saiyuki [1]
[1] Saiyuki is a 2006 Japanese historical TV drama based on the 16th Century Chinese story Journey to the West [2]. It is a successor to the popular 1970's TV show Saiyuki, known outside Japan as Monkey.
[2] Originally published anonymously in the 1590s during the Ming Dynasty, part of the novel's enduring popularity comes from the fact that it works on multiple levels: it is a first-rate adventure story, a dispenser of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment. More >
"From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a unifying life force that flowed in and through all things--the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals--and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same Great Mystery."
-- Chief Luther Standing Bear, Teton Sioux tribe
19 May 2008 @ 22:57
