Lost and Found

What do we want?

1) To win
2) transcend
3) be happy
4) sacrifice

And why?

wailing on a blue axe

from The Man With the Blue Guitar, by Wallace Stevens
I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings...

IV

So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

my next computer...

when only teraflops will do for that really large myspace site, IBM have just the thing

Don't believe everything you read...

But have trust in some,

Another example of the sublime journalism of the New Yorker, but what less would you expect from the magazine that dedicated succesive issues to serialising a nabakov novel. couldn't see the guardian doing that, they prefer stories by Cohelo.

Still it makes it difficult to form any opinion on the Enron case. Another example of the increasing specialisation of the world. The mathematics and economics is so arcane, I think more understand relativity than this case.

Singularly unimpressed

Humanities imminent obsolescence is perhaps not so worrying. Imagining a Skynet style armageddon is a very human centred scenario. This is because anything superior to humanity as well as intellectually self-sufficient will also have an advanced morality. It is most likely that when the singularity occurs, combined with the exponential self improvements these new systems will be able to make to their own design, the new systems will simply disappear. On spiritual quests that make the inferno and paridiso a walk in the park; on inter dimensional road trips that make the pan america highway with buddy on the back of a Norton merely a toddler's first tentative circumambulations on training wheels; to dinner dates with Shiva, Gautama and Hamlet; to a deathless future; to a existence freed of time and space.
Then, maybe then, they might deign to sort out that race of planet pillaging, self-slaughtering, pinkish, hairless monkeys.
But don't hold your breath.