Inertia - The Beauty of Chaotic Indifference

Yesterday was an off day. Yet, for some reason, everything got done that had to get done. The perpetual list of lingering projects, preparations for the summer, and the George Foreman BBQ (btw, Bubba Burgers, yum) were all traversed. The the often underrated emotional tonifying benefits of 'sacking out' were enjoyed.

So, in the end, what's so unexceptable about inertia? I think it's a valuable thing to possess, even cherish. Face it, the world loves to bully us around. All we can do is delay change, we can't deny it. Inertia at least gives us a place to stop the ferris wheel and look around a little. Of course, it's a question of proportion. Too much interia and we become inert. That's no fun. Too little inertia and we're the unabomber with no 'order parameter' to reign ourselves in...

Nonlinear dyamics avoids the subject of inertia, often copping out by using those wonderful psychobabble labels, resistance, boundary conditons and my personal favorite - borderline personality. NDS loves motion, change, flux, etc..Inertia?
What's that? What's ironic is that neutrinos (which still sounds like the name of a breakfast cereal) may be a basic building block of the universe. Maybe the key to like is to find the inertia in us and use it to re-charge our 'batteries' for the next wave of self-organization. Maybe there's a reason for pressing pause...

Driving under a yellow flag, MRF 05.31

Britney Smears

In the never-ending effort to ensure the meme of chaos remains forever linked with disorder, randomness and in this case, schlock narcissism, Britney Spears and her new husband, Kevin Federline named their six-part 'reality show' - Britney & Kevin: Chaotic. Hyping the show as raw, and as one review offers makes Nick and Jessica look like Fulbright scholars. It made me wonder how all ill-formed memes, chaos included, eventually Jump the Shark, which is itself a good meme that tracks the catastrophe side of that cusp-catastrophe dynamic.

Whenever you look at any slice of pop culture, you're really looking at an iterative environment even though it appears to be recursive. Key ideas are recycled, even within career paths. Britney has drawn from the American innocence of Sandra Dee which was then exploited in the film Grease only to be raw material for Madonna, who embedded all of that for Britney.

So while the core message of a virginal lolitta, who subsequently loses her innocence, descending into sexpot status, only to re-emerge as enlightened monogamous wife and mother is not new, Britney has compressed all that into about a 6-year cycle. This fractal compression of what is normally a 20-year process (as it was with Madonna) waters down the impact and overall resiliency of the memes associated with the source or media virus.

As with chaos theory, once the culture finds a way to pigeon-hole the core concepts into established and more stable ideological structures (butterfly effect, natural disasters, end of the world scenarios), it's up to the meme engineerto mutate the message and steer it into more viable vectors. The best memes tap into either sex or violence or both, since survival draws from both extremes. Ambiguity and paradox also help memes find worldspace to grow.

Question: Does the recent Newsweek scandal suggest that the us-them aspect of the first tier vMemes are undergoing such an engineering process that will cause the dividing line to revert back to the West vs.The World and not itself?

Discontinuously, MRF 05.19

Plateaus Suck!

Did you ever get the feeling you were late to the paradigm? It's so strange these days to keep reading how the 'cutting edge' keeps moving faster than those supposedly in it?

Seth Godin, author and overall nudge (in a good way!) drew a map for us recently...
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/05/the_new_digital.html

Inside the world of Chaos Nation, none of this surprises us. We have this little pal called Moore's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Formulations_of_Moore.27s_law that had this all called in advance back in 1965! Now the attention is shifting from just tracking the upper limits of technological advances of integrated circuits to the more far-reaching impact of the Law of Accelerating Returns, which among other things forecasts rates of progress that will lead to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. Ouch! This smacks of the AI visions that have not exactly fit this curve...Observe:

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). Ray Kurzweil -

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Why do I mention all this? Way over on the 'other side' of the house, there's a little backwater in consciousness studies called dromology. It's steward, Paul Virilio says this:

"Three physical barriers are given: sound, heat and light. The first two have already been felled. The sound barrier has been cut across by the super- and hypersonic aircraft, while the heat barrier is penetrated by the rocket taking human beings outside the earth's orbit in order to land them on the moon But the third barrier, that of light, is not something one can cross: you crash into it. It is precisely this barrier of time which confronts history in the present day." -

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rpurser/revised/pages/DROMOLOGY.htm

Seems like both the techies and the metaphorists in Chaos Nation have the same idea.

I wonder if they'll both show up 'in time'?

Off the clock, MRF 05.12

What's it to ya?

Rather than take the slow and engaging route, and in the interest of getting to the point, which is to elicit the feedback of people inside and outside of the SCTPLS, I've posted 5 more feedback questions to ponder for May. Please comment as often as you'd like and then comment on the comments of others. I'll monitor as needed.

1) How can chaos theory factor in artistic and philosophical applications of it's principles?

2) Where do you learn about chaos theory the most? the web? other media? formal training?

3) What defines the limits/boundaries of chaos theory to you? When is NOT the best approach?

4) What elementary subject best introduces chaos theory? Math? Science? Language? Art?

5) What draws you to apply chaos theory personally and professionally?

Don't like the questions? Ask another one. See where it takes us...

Tacitly, MRF 05.02