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Since my FmH posts automatically flow to my Facebook page, does anyone know if there is a way for the comments of those who respond on FB to a given post to find their way to my WordPress comments page for that post?
‘Embassytown‘ by China Miéville: Book review –This is definitely on my summer reading list. His last book, The City and the City, embodied a fascinating and original conceit, although it was not succinctly realized. (via latimes.com).
“Fred Alan Wolf… resigned from the physics faculty at San Diego State College in the mid-1970s to become a New Age vaudevillian, combining motivational speaking, quantum weirdness and magic tricks in an act that opened several times for Timothy Leary. By then Wolf was running with the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a Bay Area collective driven by the notion that quantum mechanics, maybe with the help of a little LSD, could be harnessed to convey psychic powers. Concentrate hard enough and perhaps you really could levitate the Pentagon.
In How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, David Kaiser, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turns to those wild days in the waning years of the Vietnam War when anything seemed possible: communal marriage, living off the land, bringing down the military with flower power. Why not faster-than-light communication, in which a message arrives before it is sent, overthrowing the tyranny of that pig, Father Time?
That was the obsession of Jack Sarfatti, another member of the group. Sarfatti was Wolf’s colleague and roommate in San Diego, and in a pivotal moment in Kaiser’s tale they find themselves in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris talking to Werner Erhard, the creepy human potential movement guru, who decided to invest in their quantum ventures. Sarfatti was at least as good a salesman as he was a physicist, wooing wealthy eccentrics from his den at Caffe Trieste in the North Beach section of San Francisco.
Other, overlapping efforts like the Consciousness Theory Group and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group were part of the scene, and before long Sarfatti, Wolf and their cohort were conducting annual physics and consciousness workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
Fritjof Capra, who made his fortune with the countercultural classic “The Tao of Physics” (1975) was part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, as was Nick Herbert, another dropout from the establishment who dabbled in superluminal communication and wrote his own popular book, “Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics” (1985). Gary Zukav, a roommate of Sarfatti’s, cashed in with “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” (1979). I’d known about the quantum zeitgeist and read some of the books, but I was surprised to learn from Kaiser how closely all these people were entangled in the same web.” (via NYTimes book review).
This movement interested me back in the day, since I studied both theoretical physics and the psychology of consciousness, altered states, etc. I also had no idea that most of the luminaries in this field were so intertwined.
I am not a big Facebook user. I don’t keep up assiduously with posts of people to whom I’m connected and if I hadn’t set up my WordPress posts to flow automatically to my Facebook page there’d be almost nothing up there. It puzzles me why people would communicate 1:1 through FB rather than email. I do keep a ‘daybook’ of notable things I did on a given day, but it is for me to refer back to later, not for anyone else. (Is it really interesting to anyone much beyond Gavin and me, for instance, that this morning, blocks away from where the Bruins were parading through the Boston streets with their Stanley Cup and thousands of idolators, I went to hear a harpsichord recital at the Boston Early Music Festival by an old friend of mine, Gavin Black, in from out of town? It was superb, by the way. ) So the major reason I’m there is so people can find me and vice versa. Being networked as an end in itself, not so much as a tool.
Every so often I go through the people FB suggests I might want to befriend to see if there is anyone I really know, or used to know. Many, or most, of these are suggested because they and I have mutual friends. I’ve noticed a curious fact about these suggestions. Within the past year or so, I passed some kind of tipping point. When I click on the mutual friends’ notation to see how I’m connected to these people, I usually find that the several friends we have in common are disparate, from different and unrelated realms or epochs of my life. (“She knows both x and y?”) My FB network is closing in on itself. Maybe it is just an artifact of the fact that the suggestion process is based on prior connections but I still find it surprising. Would love to see a cloud-type diagram of my FB network, depicting links between people in some graphic way.
Recent work about the ‘degrees of separation’ notion suggests that there are particular nodal people who are broadly connected and act as bridges for other, more marginal people to connect more broadly. I guess I must have some of those in my network. With FB, however, it may not be people who are truly a friend to many, but rather people who are simply less discriminating about linking to others. Although when I have linked to people I don’t really know I have usually really enjoyed the ensuing connection, my principle is that I don’t want to ‘friend’ people to whom I would not really refer as friends, broadly speaking. (That’s probably why I don’t go to my high school and college reunions.)
The looping back on itself of my network reminds me of this, “A Subway Named Moebius”, a 1950 science fiction story by A. J. Deutsch which for some reason has stuck with me ever since I read it as a child, and about which I have written here before. Deutsch:
“The principles of connectivity state that as a system makes more connections to other parts of itself, the connectivity of that system increases in an exponential fashion to staggering levels. The subway under New York City had been growing in complexity for years. It was so complex, in fact, that the best mathematicians could not calculate its connectivity.
Then the first train disappeared. The system was closed, so it couldn’t have gone anywhere, but when all the trains were pulled, they still couldn’t find it. The searchers would see a red light, wait curiously, and hear a train passing in the distance, sometimes so close that it appeared to be just around the next bend. Where was the train? What happened to the passengers? Professor Tudor has a theory…”
And here is a page which collects, along with the aforementioned story, other ‘Moebius literature.’
A couple of other observations about my FB network. I’m surprised to see I’m one degree of separation away from some pretty famous people, mostly writers, politicians and folksingers. I have resisted the temptation to ‘friend’ them just because of their notoriety.
Where's Waldo?
With regard to those people to whom I’m connected by surprisingly unrelated paths, I wonder if they are sitting there similarly surprised when my name comes up on their suggestion lists. (“Eliot knows both x and y?”) If so, I don’t end up hearing about it. I’m not sure other people peruse the lists of suggested connections with the same interest and curiosity I do. The ‘degrees of separation’ stuff has always fascinated me. No man is an island, and all that…
I would love your comments on this. Are you in my network? Are you connected to me by disparate paths or links?
Leopold Bloom
How to cross Dublin without passing a pub: ‘ “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub,” muses Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses. It’s a conundrum that has intrigued literary visitors to the city for years and, until now, frustrated them.
The Joycean quandary has just been solved by software developer Rory McCann, who came up with an algorithm to help him chart a pub-free route through Dublin’s streets. Starting by plotting out 30 points around the city’s canals, to represent the size Dublin would have been when Ulysses was published, he used data from the online editable map, OpenStreetMap, to pin down the locations of Dublin’s 1,000-plus pubs,. He then set his algorithm to work to find a winding path across the city that does not pass within 35m of a pub.’ (via guardian.co.uk …thanks to abby).
…and a happy belated Bloomsday to all.
More on the worst Supreme Court justice in living memory (via NYTimes.com)