I can’t remember who it was who had expressed interest in Lovecraft (Matt, Jesse?), but I thought this might be interesting.
The game also allows you to stamp your own style onto the proceedings via an advanced AI system that can react to your method of play. Cthulhu enemies can roam freely around the environment – opening doors and tracking you down single-handedly or in groups. To stay alive you won’t just be able to outshoot them, you’ll need to outthink them as well.
An appropriate end to BL2 with Beckett’s Endgame. The folks in class were able to connect Clov’s windows to Television and restricted views it promotes (Ahmed reminds us that the world is more than CNN’s square of space), enabling a wonderful conversation about the irony of ceratin positions on globalization, media, and attitudes about knowledge.
Hamm says, “One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me.”
I didn’t mention terminal paradoxes, but the arc of semester pretty much revealed itself, the story of the course finding resolution, its end suggested by its beginning. Hamm and Clov’s point of view is restricted to their own stagnant space. They aren’t Wordsworth remembering walks at the Abbey, nor do they share Blake’s passion for the devil. The world is different. Not the same England. This was one small window into the story of British Literature. Barbauld to Beckett. Youth to age, age to youth. Life to death. Ideas to Hamm asking for Clov to think one. Clov never leaves. He can’t, perhaps, get out of the story.
The end of the semester is a sad time because it’s a favorite thing of mine to sit with people and talk about the good stuff week in and week out. But it must end.
This post comes follows from these steps. My good friend Jean-Marc proposed this Cartesian enclosure:
Mathematics is the only sure path that leads to heaven. Remember that God created the integers and everything else is the work of man.
Note that I take this in the psirit of fun in which it was offered and pretend no expertise. Here’s my response
Can one prove the existence of integers? Let’s take the positive integer 2. Two what?
Here’s Jean-Marc’s response
The question of existence or inexistence of integers (or mathematical objects in general) is purely philosophical. Hence, it is hard to debate. Nonetheless, you must recall the 3 main dogmas that are at the core of the Foundations of Mathematics: Platonism, formalisms, and constructivism.
The Platonist holds that mathematical objects are real, immutable, and independent of the human mind. So, according to those folks, mathematics is already out there waiting to be discovered. The formalist, in contrast, claims that mathematics is a compilation of definitions, axioms, and theorems that are not about anything real. The constructivist’s view is quite different from the previous two as he views mathematics as a collection of ideas that can be obtained via finite constructions. So, the Cantor Set (that you and I talked about recently) would be seen as useless and a complete waste of time by the constructivist.
I hope this answers your questions on existence or inexistence of mathematical objects. With respect to your comment “Let’s take the positive integer 2. Two what?” I am not sure I know what you mean here. Are you talking about the numeral 2 or the number 2? Either way, your answer is in the preceding paragraph.
I want to end this email on a note of curiosity. How do String and Quantum disprove Leopold Kronecker’s view that “God created the integers”? My curiosity will only be satisfied if your response is not philosophical. I would want to see an argument that is deductive in nature.
Unfortunately, the original question was philosophical re: Kronecker, who perhaps should not have ascribed integers to God, unless he could prove that tensor theory was also a divine creation. My response is, I believe, non-philosophical and asks for some demonstration of God’s hand in the creation of integers as a matter of play. Troubling scientific waters, I would claim.
Therefore, the question “2 what?” asserts that it’s the oranges that are real not their relation to one another and asserts further that integers can only be the work of man.
As to the platonist, formalist, constructivist triplet, consider the Kronecker Delta. Do we know what “idea” the symbol refers to? We know the formalism. And can build build 3index objects. Isn’t it the elements that matter?
A piece of Hiroaki Sato’s translation of Masayo Koike’s The Most Sensual Room from How2
From the open window I hear the sounds of the neighbor’s house. Why aren’t you finishing your homework? The noise of plates. Would you come here and help me a bit? The noise of plates. What did you do with that? The noise of a washing machine. The soft ringing of a telephone. Hello, hello? Hello, hello? The beep signaling that the washing machine finished its work. We don’t know the faces of our neighbors. Nonetheless, they come in. Like a flood. Our neighbors’ daily routines, into this vacant room.
Thanks to Daniel Green for the opportunity to find this.
My project to put together a “Content Management/Course Architecture” system just isn’t moving. There are lots of nice open source items to work with, lots of options: Joomla, TextPattern, and other systems, including WordPress, but the ideas aren’t collecting.
I want a system that students can come to as a node for thinking. A link to a forum via topic feeds, links out from feeds to relevant readings and articles, and something else that I can’t think of at the moment (maybe a calendar). It would have all regular functions: category links, link lists–all the regular stuff.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I could build it all at this site but then we’d be dependent on my host for delicate information, but it’s the college’s responsibility. The college servers are locked down for this individual push. The work I’ve done thinking about such a system could be deployed quite easily. The systems function just fine. Ultimately, the output–student work–isn’t mine to play with.
And there’s more. The problem may be matching the tech to experience. How is learning as an experience different than moving through an unfamiliar house or having a good meal. Elgg is a collection of tools and capabilities, as are most software. It’s capabilities push a certain engagement around the theme of learning: weblog, portfolio, connectivity, and collectivity. Thus Elgg requires a kind of context and experience. But it’s not really what I’m thinking about in terms of an architectural learning space, because I’m not thinking of it as a thing but as an experience (sure, like a sonnet). If a student wants to develop a weblog on their own as a means of collecting and connecting to their interests, that would happen outside the node but would or could reconnect to it (which gives me a thought).
Most people know the figuring of the area of a circle is A = pi x r squared. It was Archimedes in the 3rd century BC who did the figuring in Measurement of the Circle. But what I find important about this is not the formula but the kind of thinking that proved the point. Archimedes writes
Since then the area of the circle is neither greater than nor less that [the area of the triangle], it is equal to it.
The suppositions go: A< T or A=T or A>T. If the first and third don’t work, then the second must be true, double reductio. For kicks: 1st case
A – Area (inscribed polygon) < A - T leads to T < Area (inscribed polygon) Area (inscribed polygon) = 1/2hQ < 1/2rC = T where h = apothem, Q = the perimeter of the polygon and C = the circumference of the circle Since here T < the area of the inscribed polygon and the area of the inscribed polygon is also < T then the supposition of A < T contradicts itself
and so forth. Here I’ve paraphrased Will Dunham’s Journey through Genius: The Great Theorums of Mathematics. Archimedes proves the area and approximates pi in the same text but does so by a wonderful bit of questioning and analysis. The area is important, but without the skill of bringing it all together, the mathematician is guessing.
I performed a seacrh for the word assessment on this weblog and found posts that tracked a few elements I’ve been thinking about. This post grabbed my attention, this paragraph in particular
I would generalize that if most people heard that life existed on Jupiter, they wouldn’t think much of it, unless thy also heard that that life had crowded onto ships and was on its way to enslave planet Earth. This is why science fiction writers make aliens nasty rather than innocuous. It keeps us interested. Do you buy this?
I’d rewrite the last few sentences this way
This is one reason why science fiction writers make aliens nasty rather than innocuous. It keeps us interested. Do you buy this?
Yes, I still buy it. But how do I now draw it into a different context. In my writing course over the summer, I’m preparing individual and team-driven projects that focus on Hartford. The theme of the course will be: how do we get college graduates to move to and live in Hartford. The core here is a fundamental argument. One of the first issues we’ll tackle is the nature of place as seen from the point of view of the people in the class. From this initial work, we’ll extrapolate to establish what makes a place exciting, interesting, and or unlikable. What do others think, also? I’m wondering if I can use some of the material that Carol and Sally have used on their work on the “city” in their courses in this project? The next issue may be: how does Hartford compare to other cities relative to positives and negatives? The course would end with arguments about how Hartford does indeed offer a good deal of positive place or how it doesn’t? Would Hartford as Place appeal to people looking to move there? If not, why not? If yes, why? What is required of good places? What thinking is required to generate ideas about this given such a complex city? Is metaphor required? Comparison?
This is one approach. Another approach could examine the “place” as it exists for the people who live there now and how it works and doesn’t based on readings dealing with different approaches to urban living and developments in Hartford, a subject which has generated an enormous amount of literature, perfect for purposive and analystical reading. There’s lots of exciting thinking going on about this and my own wanderings in the city (which is more familiar to me than the suburbs–like but unlike El Paso, Texas) has provided anchor for this approach in a writing course. I’m currently thinking about trimming down the scope, but keeping to the focus, and am considering individual work that grows out of team discussion about the things that make places interesting to think about: the flow of travel, architecture, geography, environment, economy, thought space, unity, safety, work, and technology.
Abilities-based will be continued with on writing as a primary means of conveying description, making connections, evaluation, and an appropriate amount of research given a student’s particular angle on the final argument based, perhaps, on the input of their group.
Ruairi Glynn writes of Michael Fox
Michael Fox shows how interactive architecture doesn’t require a degree in computing, electronics, and architecture just to get things going. The combination of simple practical skills from these disciplines within a conceptual framework is capable of creating something much more exciting than the individual disciplines would appear to offer.
From Carianne Mack and Malinda Theisman about their installation at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis:
The images we have created on the wall originated from each of our
apartments and represent piles of disorder in our everyday lives; a disheveled bed and an overflowing laundry basket. Our materials – shredded office paper, cardboard boxes and other ephemera – represent the accumulation of innocuous things in our daily lives that often cloud our ability to feel in control of our surroundings. We then looked to the color and organization of maps for the wall drawing, in effect mapping the geography of our lives.
Disorder, geographical space, and the mundane. I wish I could see this up close.
For some reason I’m looking forward to the selected works of Subcamandante Marcos because it links back to a lot of writing I did just after college when I developed a fascination for the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico.
A young man, one of the Mariposa kids, makes his way south with his grandfather and loses himself among the rebels. He eventually falls in love in Guadalajara. He never meets Marcos, though. But he meets enough.