Constructive Criticism

An important principle in the philosophy of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality.

I believe techniques from math and science are able to help us produce stronger organizations (if the educational and political barriers can be worked through).

This is a piece I made recently titled In Transit.

Mao wrote The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics… The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within…

Recently I have been doing some math again.

$$\newcommand{\Set}[1]{\\{ #1 \\}}$$ In his book Logics of Worlds, Badiou gives a formal mathematical definition of a “world”, but does not construct a single concrete example.

A few more prints I’ve done recently.

Here is a short piece of music I wrote this afternoon.

Happy New Year!

Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice” is an incredible film.

These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 31rd, 2024.

These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 23rd, 2024.

I renamed the blog again.

Tonight I went to the Acquired podcast live show.

Laputa, from Gulliver's Travels.

In the ant community, each worker performs its proper functions.

The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps — Grothendieck, in a 1982 letter to Ronald Brown Compu…

There is an intellectual movement called “rationality” which, if one has any connection to the tech world, is difficult to avoid in the Bay Area.

Here are some Risograph prints I made in 2023 and the first half of 2024.

Bathing is fun Bathing is already a popular pastime in the bay: from Archimedes Banya to Good Hot to the (sadly gone) Essex tub.

This is a list of projects I am seeking collaborators on.

There is an interesting paper from earlier this month called “Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence” by Rosas, Geiger, Luppi, Seth, Polani, Gastapar, and Mediano.

I added a page to the site of books I am reading, have read, or want to read.

This past Saturday (May 4th) we held the first event in a new series called “Seeing Red”.

This Pesach, I helped organize a Seder for lefty Jews.

Please let me know if you are interested in reading or discussing any of these books with me.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophical foundation of Marxism, and historical materialism is its scientific foundation.

Mondragón is a famous complex of cooperatives, primarily based in the Basque country.

Poetry flows from the fingertips like threads of silk Birds have nests and spiders webs And humans friendships.

Soren Mau’s ‘Mute Compulsion’ does an excellent job of calling attention to the ways that our environment – physical, social, technological – mutely compels us to act in certain ways.

To start, two quotes: Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That’s h…

Several interesting properties of the human mode of history: Humanity has the capacity for surplus labor.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. – Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto Communism is the riddle of history solved. – Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Lying in my bed, I hear the clock t…

The cover Announcing a release of an English translation of Marta Harnecker’s Los conceptos fundamentales del materialismo histórico, or The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism in English.

For many years this blog was called Parametricity.

Most of us are familiar with the potential discomfort of passing a person begging on the street.

My words are not mine and yours are not yours And neither were Shakespeare’s so don’t worry Echos Or reverberations My organ receiving/transforming/transmitting Who does that beautiful sound belong to?

Mute compulsion is a very nice book.

Last month, flying over the Atlantic in the throes of an existential crisis brought on by too strong an edible (which I had taken to try to sleep through the flight), I had the following disturbing self-insight, which while stonerish is also true: Much of…

The following is a translation of an article from Caminos (A Cuban journal of socio-theological thought).

Housing and the Cuban Revolution “In the first three years of the revolution, 1959-61, all measures were taken to disarticulate the capitalist system at its base.”

This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race”.

This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race”.

This post has two follow-up posts: “Will Socialism End Racism?”

Per Marx and Engels, every closed social order is doomed to one of two fates: Self-annihilation due to its own internal contradictions.

Crisis is endemic to capitalism, but in fact it is endemic to all organisms (i.e., patterns of matter apparently being driven through time by a logic other than that of matter itself).

On one level, there is no real separation between humanity and the rest of the natural world.

Capital has two core contradictions, or incompatibilities, with the world it exists within: The contradiction with human nature: the class divide which sees some exploited, made to suffer, deprived materially and spiritually of their natural human right to

The following is written as a sort of near future sci-fi short story, to illustrate life in a virtual commune.

This post proposes a new organizational form called a “virtual commune”.