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Compression and Expansion

It is innumerably hard to imagine assessing all that I have, in such a short time, dismantle each element from it’s moorings, pack them in such impersonal cardboard boxes, and hope beyond hope that nothing will befall any of “them”. I cannot seem to conceptualize that everything will be ok. It saddens me that I am so attached to these things. I already worry that I will not have enough time to read all of my books and make enough art. Goddess knows I yearn for that time without feeling guilty. I have no one to blame but myself. 

  • Track Name

    Concrete Walls

  • Album

    Fever Ray

  • Artist

    Fever Ray

literaryjukebox:

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace

Song: “Concrete Walls” by Fever Ray

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No matter where we are I we too may always be linked, entangled, inexorably with our souls, like the roots of the oldest tree…Mon Cher..

  • Track Name

    Beauty Of Uncertainty

  • Album

    Drastic Fantastic

  • Artist

    KT Tunstall

literaryjukebox:

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988) in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Song: “Beauty of Uncertainty” by KT Tunstall

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If this is true for me, then I must be gorgeous…oh how silly I am..

Visualizing the Connectome

neuroticthought:

by Neuroskeptic

Last year, I blogged about a new and very pretty way of displaying the data about the human ‘connectome’ – the wiring between different parts of the brain.

But there are many beautiful ways of visualizing the brain’s connections, as neuroscientists Daniel Margulies and colleagues of Leipzig discuss in a colourful paper showcasing these techniques.

Here, for example, are two ways of showing the brain’s white matter tracts, as studied with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI):

Another striking image is this one, a representation of the brain’s functional connectivity – the degree to which activation in each part of the brain is correlated with activity in every other part.

The functional connectome is inherently difficult to visualize in 2D (or even 3D), but in this ingenious display, the brain’s surface is shown covered with hundreds of little brains, each one a colour-coded map of the connectivity from that particular point:

The Margulies paper is about more than just pretty pictures, though. The authors also discuss the scientific questions and theoretical tensions that surround the choice of one visualization over another:

Scientific figure and illustrations are – to paraphrase Tufte – where seeing turns into showing. The capacity of these images to influence our interpretation of data and to direct the questions of the scientific community make visualizations worthy of careful consideration during their production…

If we present a figure that clarifies the scientific content, but does so by creating a distortion of brain space, is that bad practice? What if the caption and methods explicitly stated that the contents of the figure were not to be taken literally? To what degree should a visualization be allowed to stand alone?

In my view, the study of connections has been dominated by images, more than any other branch of neuroscience. It’s rarely easy to say where ‘method’ or ‘analysis’ ends and ‘visualization’ begins.

This is not a bad thing – connectivity is spatial, by definition, and to understand space is to visualize it. But it does mean that in the connectome, there is always a danger of valuing aesthetics over accuracy, beauty above brains.

Margulies DS, Böttger J, Watanabe A, & Gorgolewski KJ (2013). Visualizing the Human Connectome. NeuroImage PMID: 23660027

I need this for my methods section!!

That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.

A fine addition to history’s finest definitions of art from Greil Marcus’s fantastic 2013 SVA commencement address on how the division of high vs. low robs art of its essence. (via explore-blog)


to be for the sake of my art for sure…

Here I love you—by Pablo Neruda—for (my) Stubborn One..

Here I love you.

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself,

The mood glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.

Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.

A silver gull slips down from the west.

Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.

Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.

Far away the sea sounds and resounds.

This is a port.

Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.

I love you still among these cold things.

Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels

that cross the sea towards no arrival.

I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

I love what I do not have. You are so far.

My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

As I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

You cannot know everything about the creature that you love, and you also can’t control that relationship. And maybe that’s okay — because we can’t control relationships. In fact, if we did control them to the degree that we want, it would probably provide us with nothing. Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences.

Love and Art – wisdom from creative duo Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton. (via explore-blog)

Just have to set us both free…

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