This isn’t all that great a poem, but the idea it expresses is something I’ve been struggling with for a while.
Around what does society swing?
What is the pivot, the crux?
What great idea, what a thing,
sparks and ignites such a flux?
Arbitrary though it may seem,
underneath it does have a cause,
a root buried deep in some meme,
a weight against all of the flaws.
Chaotic it is, and profound,
enigmatic puzzles abound,
it won’t ever seek to perfect,
so all it can do is direct.
The sun’s swift descent,
another ended cycle,
the sky turns to flame.
(Purging urban soot,
from my heart, from my spirit,
demanding nothing).
It sounds like an interesting hypothesis, somewhat akin to my own:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
The academic publishing model has always been a strange one: scientists publish articles for free, journals insist on taking the copyrights from these authors, and then have the audacity to charge viewers for access to work they had no part in creating!
This seemed so wrong to me that I started writing a long essay on the problem back in 2004, which I never finished because the open access movement started to take hold soon after (so there was no need).
Despite the growing popularity of the open-access movement, many journals still remain closed. Well, what happened to music seems about to happen to academic publishing.
The Pirate Bay is launching a new site called The Student Bay. I can’t read Swedish, but my guess is that it will trade academic material, copyrighted or otherwise.
Now, I don’t condone piracy in and of itself. However, I do embrace making learning material universally accessible, and I view the universal right to learn as a higher right in my moral hierarchy than copyright. I’m not simply saying this from the student’s end, either: I have plenty of IP of my own, which I’ve always given away freely. This includes my academic papers, which I’ve usually posted on my own site for people to read following publication.
Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that I view this as a very positive development. I suspect that authors themselves will upload their works here; certainly I am considering it. And that is going to make things very hard for journals, because there’s a good chance that the first lawsuit brought against an author for infringement on his own work will provoke a sweeping reform of the system itself. This would be suicide for the journals.
They’re parasites. I can’t say I’d be sad to see them go.
A life is a heroic thing,
to never throw away.
To cherish always, and to keep,
with meaning in each day.
To count the seconds as the years,
both always in your grip,
to know the price of time is dear,
and never let it slip.
To bring creation into being,
and move from mind to sight,
ideas to grapple with the dark,
and from it extract light.
To eschew the path that most would take,
as easy as it seems,
instead to forge your own new way,
on the power of your dreams.
To lift the burdens of another,
but not become his thrall,
nor seek to be his master,
to be a friend; that’s all.
To always keep an open mind,
but sometimes ask for proof,
not accepting or rejecting,
just seeking out the truth.
A life is a heroic thing,
it’s yours to use or give,
so treat it with respect,
so that we all may live.
Mankind could do so much
if only we would let
our imagination
soar.
For a while, I had pondered the same question that Hamming did: “What makes great scientists great?” What is interesting is that I arrived at almost all of the same conclusions.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
I still occasionally stop –
and think,
“what if I could study algorithms?”
But that has passed.
My mathematical talent
What if it found
a trainer to match?
But that too has passed.
Could I render music,
imagined, inchoate, flawless,
upon the canvas of reality?
I suppose I’ll never know.
Why is biology
so natural and intuitive,
even though I’ve never studied?
The biologists won’t tell me.
Society, for all its quirks,
follows a set of rules,
intuitively, I know some,
but how to write them up?
“It shows promise, it shows promise, it shows promise.”
And yet you leave it to wither!
Do you have any idea of the agony
of talent left untrained!?
Of vision divorced from realization?
Cut off, to goad, to promise,
and to crumble before reality –
over and over, illimitable!
This is the result
of forcing men to specialize –
we have unlimited potential,
but potential is not enough.
I think I may have just came up with the very distilled essence of secondary integration in the process of sorting my own feelings out:
Defiant
I swim against a prodigious current,
and I know that I must falter.
It draws me towards the fall,
the inexorable fatal plunge.
But each stroke I take,
I count a small victory,
a stand.
For my right to exist.
For the betterment of the world.
For those who came before me.
And for everyone,
who has ever screamed,
defiantly at the heavens:
“No! There is a better way!”
For them,
For us,
I swim against the current,
because I am right.
While looking up information on the aforementioned Wizard’s Rules to see whether my guess of “Confessor”‘s theme was accurate, I stumbled upon an interesting explanation of the First Rule that was apparently given in the book:
“People are stupid, they will believe anything, either because they want it to be true or because they are afraid it is.”
Wizard’s First Rule: Chapter 36, Page #397, US Hard Cover (revealed by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander).
* Explanation by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander: “People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”
(Wikipedia)
It is clear from the explanation that I owe somewhat of an intellectual debt here. The rule itself doesn’t even need explicit mention (we’re all stupid, and all genius is but a lesser form of stupidity), but the explanation is helpful. One of the foundational principles of my “panidealist” philosophy is the inability to fully estimate the objective range of applications of an idea. This is a particular flavor of the last sentence in the explanation (although I strengthen “rarely” to “never”). Although that principle was largely observed from experience (it was practically shoved down my throat whenever I attempted to explain my research on the divisor function and I would have thought of it, Wizard’s Rule or not, because it was simply made so clear to me again and again), this doubtless counts as an additional influence on that aspect of my philosophy. Credit where it’s due; I’ll cite Goodkind in my Treatise 🙂