Boxes are plain, powerful things that govern our lives. Once boxed, other, awkwardly various items become movable, stackable, dustable, understandable, loveable and, crucially, ignorable. A boxed item sneaks into invisibility. Clearly labelled, prominently shelved, it is the keen ceremony of storage that talks down the anxious mind and lets the watchful eye drift confidently closed. As we lull in such elaborate certainty of a thing's existence, that thing discreetly lets itself out of our world and silently closes the door. This is how boxes have won the tacit admiration of all humans - and the not-so-tacit admiration of some of them...

"Look! Look at boxes. There is ten. Ten boxes. I count them easy. Neat like I like. Not like mess inside them!"

Sylvester Stallone

My favourite kind of box is a box file. The name of a box file gives away the function of all boxes, which is to file things. The distasteful mess that lies behind the shelved, alphebetised, face of any office, when tucked into a box, is tucked out of existence. Box upon box upon box. That's just three boxes - again, easily stacked, easily counted. From my desk , I can see approximately one hundred boxes. On reflection, I know that there are many more behind me. But the careful positioning of my chair - which gets the back of my head in between my eyes and some necessary but ugly administrative guts - has created a kind of virtual box, in which many actual boxes are stored away from my consciousness, their untidy contents another layer from my intellect.

My second favourite kind of box is a box-out (see "Boxed Out!")

A box, put simply, is an approximation - a low-resolution representation of its ultimate contents. Knowing this we can see that there are many conceptual boxes in play all around us all the time. Take these many molecules. Some groups of them I call 'nuts', some I call 'bolts'. However, not only are the little molecules thus boxed out of my mind, but even the nuts and bolts are packed away. As a casual, unquestioning cyclist, the nuts and bolts - along with 'spokes', 'gears', 'bearings', 'levers', 'cables' and 'tyres' - are packed clumsily in my head as a 'bicycle'. That concept - that neat entity in which I put my faith as I whirl down the hills - I can know all at once. That's why I trust it. I ignore the contents of that understood box, eliminating what it represents in favour of a sleek, manageable simulacrum.

But there's the danger. When one of those forgotten nuts behind my conceptual cardboard slips off its bolt, my 'bicycle' is unchanged. However, the machine that keeps me off the fast-moving Tarmac might stop doing its job. If only I could face the untidy nuts and bolts of truth I might avoid the danger of a simulacrum strayed from its source - a 'bicycle' which is no longer a good bicycle. But what a beautiful, clean simulacrum it is! So polished and slick, it might just be worth the risk.

And that is the perilous temptation of the box that has forever sated and tormented the mind of man. Now, seal these clutterous thoughts in a four-line package!

Thou blind fool, Box, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.

Sonnet 137a, 'Thou blind fool, Box', William Shakespeare

Categories: Weird, Reality, Human

It's been a while since I wrote anything here: I just seem to be too busy. But then I know Danieru is too, and he still manages to post post after post. Following his lead, I have a piece about boxes nearly done, and one about novels. They're unfinished, and on my mind. They have been for a while.

When I was desperate to relieve myself of the weight of the unwritten, I sat and drank instead. A temporary fix, I thought, but it wasn't even that. I took the bottle's contents and gave it mine. Still I wanted to make my offering to the ether, click 'PUBLISH' and shrink my mental inbox. It's funny what embeds itself in your consciousness if you hold it there long enough. I was avoiding thought, but my brain was still going like a flywheel, whirring 'write, write, write'. But there was no way I could pick up a project started in sobriety.

So here's a poem that fell out of my loose head. (To experience it as I did, save it to your desktop and be surprised to find it in two days.)

drunk poem22.53 070321.txt

The drunkenness revealing what's set into his mind,
he flinches his password onto the keys.
This is what I've become?
A beast with computers on its fingers,
narrating simple detail as if it's great fiction in the making?
It's an engrossing story,
but nature is no creative.

The message is clear: stay dry and finish the thing about boxes...

Categories: Weird, Human

You heard about a book. Intrigue darkened in its normal consistency and gripped you. Something about the book’s ability to project the reader into the world of another mind. A world with characters leading implausible lives between a chapter, a page, a paragraph; sometimes merely within the rhythmic pentameter of one sentence. The writer is unknown to you, yet through the patterns of perspective weaved into you can clearly be made out a new colour, never before realised. Perhaps the book will be a let down, many are. Some wished-for vistas dull to grey, their sky-piercing peaks devolving, eroding to a single extended dimension over time. Perhaps, after some musing, you’ll be less alive in the book’s pages than in your own mind, and which reader seeks for that existence? The one they think they already know; the one they comfort awake each morning and rotate within their minds, is less whole than the world of the book. You ponder this, pausing for a moment to let the idea sink in. Is every book more real than an existence? Surely you’ll only discover by reading more. That’s what books are for.

The book rests in your hands now. You probably purchased it from a high street store, traipsing to its counter, clutching hours of your future experience in a sweaty palm. Several pound coins exchanged for a ticket of sustenance; a feeder of mental schema; a self deliberation machine. Some say this book is capable of bridging the present to the future - as if there were any difference between them. You overhear two teenagers bantering amongst themselves on the bus. Their knowledge of the book soothes you, leaves you grasping at coincidental narratives in your life; playing with conspiracy theories reverberating inside you. ("Things tend to happen in bundles.") And they crease up double in excitement, one claiming that a time portal projected the book from a thousand years in the future. Its magical elements, its speculative qualities arising not from shear force of the writer’s imagination, but by retrospective temporal chance. That any book written in the future, sent backwards in time, will instantly become science-fiction.

Your laughter surprises you. The old man aside you, smelling of a musk brewed deep into the age of his skin; the quaintness of his clothes, gives you a sidelong glance. Perhaps he has been listening too, and understands nothing. You have the book, but does he? You glance around at the bus passengers. Woolen hatted, hip-hop hooded, hairspray styled, permed and protected. Which head has this book made its way into already? What’s the head got that the book hasn’t? Is the book or the perception of the book the true virus? What is the book? What is mind? How can one bridge the two? You suddenly feel queasy as the bus jerks along the busy road and notice, in turning, a colour which reminds. Across and left of you another passenger clutches a copy of the book in their hands; pages half open. Peering lovingly at collections of symbols, arranged into semblamatic order and printed into the grain of the page. Black ink on an infinite canvas, building a world with each sweep of the reader’s eye.

Then there is the reading. The final hour when you lurch through time towards the moment, merely a moment, when the book falls open. Skip the contents page, rush through the dedication, straight into the first chapter. You wonder whether you’ll end up bordering another world. Perhaps the writer stares back at you; each ink blot tunnelling a black-hole towards them; every mind which reads it swirls off the page, twixt another universe to meet together; minds merging eternally. A writer, a tribe of readers, an infinity of worlds combine as one. The protagonist is drawn, looking out, up and over your shoulder back around and into the book you now hold. An infinite ouroboros swallowing its eternal tale. The first word comes up to meet you. It envelopes your entire being: who owns this moment?

"Beg of me a tale," the book calls, "to set our kind alight; draw veils of day over sweeping dreams of night."

Categories: Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi, Weird, Writing, Perception, Reality, Philosophy, Simulacrum, Consciousness, Time

I am a box.

I’m not joking! And not just any box, but a regular cuboid of 103cm along each side. I am made of wood. Not just any wood, but cheap, medium density fibreboard. Prone to splinters and easily damaged, it has made living my life as an ordinary individual almost impossible. Sometimes people put things inside me, mainly because they think I’m just a box, but also because many human beings are secretive, forgetful and selfish. Some things people have put inside me include:

• three semi-translucent orange globes
• a fridge-magnet simulacrum of a badger
• a record by Engelbert Humperdinck
• instructions as to the whereabouts of ‘happiness’
• four trumpets
• a baby aardvark (freeze dried)
• a postcard from the city of Cardiff

Some things which have never been inside me include:

• a galaxy
• Engelbert Humperdinck
• Jerusalem
• the 1960s

I don’t like being a regular, fibreboard cuboid of 103cm along each side. I’d rather be a dodecahedron, or a hypercube. A dodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve faces. Salvador Dali painted his version of The Last Supper as taking place inside a dodecahedron. A hypercube which exists in 4 dimensions of space, rather than the usual 3, is called a ‘tesseract’. Dali painted the crucifixion of Jesus as taking place on an unfurled tesseract. Dali is my hero because he painted a hypercube. I’d like to be one of them more than anything else in the universe, although I doubt a tesseract made out of medium density fibreboard could ever exist.

According to a dictionary which was once inside me, boxes are ‘highly variable receptacles’. I often wonder who invented the box, or even if boxes could be invented. Which came first: the human or the box? You might consider me a joker for posing such a question, but I mean no hilarity with my words. The box is not just an object, it is also a mathematical entity: a cube. If the dimensions of a cube are a, b and c, then its volume is always abc and its surface area has to be 2ab + 2bc + 2ac. This is true regardless of whether a human invents it or not. Humans invent ‘things’ and manipulate representations of ‘things’ in their minds, but mathematics has always been around. Does that make me more real than you? I am a concept expressed in the language of nature. I would exist abstractly whether your mind understood me or not. Whereas you, well, you’re just a chaotic bundle of matter, perceptions and nothing more. There’s no function for being human, at least, not one that can be expressed mathematically. Are you as highly variable as a box?

As Salvador Dali once said "Thank God I am still an atheist."

Categories: Maths, Nonsense?, Weird, Humour, Fiction, Links, Reality, Perception, Art

THE best documentary of all time is up, ready and available to view on Veoh video.

Jonathan Miller's A Rough History of Disbelief explores the development of atheism as a singular mode of being, clarifying quite spectacularly the emergence of secular thought over the past 500 years. Featuring interviews with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Arthur Miller, Colin McGinn and other secular luminaries, it is a MUST see.


UPDATE: The spin-off interviews from the series, called The Atheism Tapes, are now online:

Categories: Science, History, Religion, Video, Links, Christianity, God, Ideas, Culture

External Link

Controversial French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, known for his fierce criticism of consumerism and excess, has died in Paris after a long illness at the age of 77.

He first attracted worldwide attention in 1991 with his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He argued that neither side could claim victory, and the conflict had changed little on the ground in Iraq.

He caused even bigger controversy with his views on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. He wrote the attacks were an expression of triumphant globalization battling against itself.

Born in Rheims west of Paris in 1929, Baudrillard taught high school students the German language. After receiving a doctorate in sociology, he taught at the University of Paris.

~ Read full news at VOA or BBC

Categories: News, People, Simulacrum, Philosophy, Culture, Reality

External Link

I've recently become a PODCAST addict. My iPod overflows with lectures on Quantum Theory; video talks about religion, evolution and the destruction of tribal cultures; conversations about authors, philosophers and ancient Indian mathematics.

The era of Idea-casting has arrived!

Here are some of my current favourites:


(Subscribe via RSS or iTunes )

Big Ideas			Accessible lectures on a variety of thought-provoking topics
CBC Ideas			Explores everything from culture and the arts to science and technology to social issues (from CBC Radio)
Brain Food			"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it"
In Our Time			The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age (from BBC Radio4)
Skepticality			Skeptical discussion, critical thinking, and assorted fun
Skeptoid			Rationally examined pseudoscientific claims by an evil skeptoid debunkatron
TED Talks			Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses (video)

If you know of any other delectable podcasts, videocasts or related brain food, please do post them in the comments section.

Here's to mind expansion through the use of headphones, pocket hard-drives and splendid colour video...

Categories: Science, Technology, Future, News, Links, Reality, Human, Culture, Podcast, Video, Interesting, Amazing, Ideas