Survey & Range

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

The broadening of the concept of a "tool" may be the most important metaphorical development of our time.

So in many ways pragmatism (minus Peirce) feels like an important beginning for cybernetics1 & systems theory, and in a weird way computer science and even machine intelligence?

Brian Eno, in AI's walking dog, compares LLM output first to "confectionary" and Weisswurst sausage, "made of available scraps on the butcher's floor."

One of this blog's themes is the idea that we suffer from undue nostalgia, and an idealization of America's past.

Michael Levin, for Noema Mag (2025), presents a modification of Rosenblueth et al's 1943 cybernetic schema:

Tower and Bridge appear to be the two most common structural metaphors in modernist literature.

Spotify has solved the matching problem.

Reading le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching, I am struck that so many spiritual texts see the pursuits of (1) worldly power (2) spiritual satisfaction, inner contentment, happiness ...as totally inimical.

Modern poets have been thought of & distinguished many ways, but the way that I like to think of them: either optimists or pessimists, either panegyrists or doomsayers of their modern Age.