infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Bayreuth Opera Inferno
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2010/03/bayreuth-opera-inferno.html
Friday, March 12, 2010. From the Summer of 2003. After having found out that we had won, I looked forward to scalping the tickets and being able to live comfortably off the proceeds for the next three years. My girlfriend- die-hard enthusiast that she is- insisted on actually going. This was probably for the best, for, as we discovered, the market for festival tickets can be surreal in ways that resemble the more bizarre parts of the narcotics trafficking industry. This area of Bavaria has a rural, conse...
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: 2014 in short films
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2015/01/best-science-fiction-short-films-2014.html
Wednesday, January 07, 2015. 2014 in short films. My favorite genre picks from this past year. The most action-packed was a fan film tribute to cyberpunk classic Deus Ex: Human Revolution. One with surprisingly high production values. While it starts out too slick and Hollywood, there are unexpected reversals and some fluid choreography, as well as well-developed tension in the final third. Courtesy of Machinima Prime. Delivers chilling moments in a conflict that has long since taken on a life of its own.
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Beautiful Space Photos: Summer edition
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2014/07/space-photos-summer-eddition.html
Sunday, July 20, 2014. Beautiful Space Photos: Summer edition. Some of these were featured by NASA on Twitter earlier this year to celebrate the Academy Award nominations garnered by Gravity. Also: Apollo photos to celebrate the 45th anniversary of humanity's first landing on another world. Public domain, courtesy of NASA unless otherwise noted. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). A novella based on the award-winning short story "Lisa with Child." Available through Amazon.com. Available on Amazon.com.
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Book review: The Court of the Red Tzar
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2014/12/book-review-court-of-red-tzar.html
Thursday, December 18, 2014. Book review: The Court of the Red Tzar. It’s hard not to go numb when reading almost any history of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1950s. The number of atrocities famously curves upward from the level of human suffering into emotionless numbers. Montefiore’s eminently well researched, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tzar. Avoids inflicting such a loss of feeling by staying focused on individual and familial tragedy. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). Available from Amaz...
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Copenhagen Cable Access
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2010/03/copenhagen-cable-access.html
Saturday, March 13, 2010. I think I wrote this back in the fall of 2003, when I had been in Sweden for about two years. When we moved to Lund we ended up changing cable TV providers and picked up a couple of new channels in the bargain. My favorite of these is Copenhagen's municipal cable access channel. The programming is…varied. An example of a day's offerings:. 17:00: Information on immigrants rights. 18:00: Hardcore right-wing Christian pro-Israeli propaganda in English, straight from the States....
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: 2013 in Short Films
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2014/01/2013-in-short-films.html
Sunday, January 05, 2014. 2013 in Short Films. Eleven months on and I'm still convinced. That short films are the new science fiction shorty story. Thanks to the Internet, they have the kind of reach and distribution that written short stories used to enjoy back in the heyday of science fiction magazines here in the US. While 2013 didn't produce as many solid, high concept pieces as 2012. Here's what I enjoyed. By Coyl Drumb remains my favorite. As for 2013 far as cyberpunk action with shades of Akira.
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Human thought
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2011/04/evolution-of-human-thought-something.html
Friday, April 01, 2011. The introduction from the document that I use to keep track of everything I've learned about human thought over the past fifteen years. The Evolution of Human Thought. 8220;Something beyond our understanding occurs.the transformation of an objective cerebral computation into a subjective experience.”. 8220;Minds are what brains do.”. Procedural memory- also known as reflex memory or muscle memory- was the first system of durable memory to arise in our evolutionary history [3].
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: The Hobbits of Sweden
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2010/03/hobbits-of-sweden.html
Saturday, March 20, 2010. The Hobbits of Sweden. An old but favorite essay, written in 2002 after the first year in Sweden was over, and things were still going relativly well. This was also in the middle of the three years when the Lord of the Rings. Films were coming out.). Being in part a description of the curious nature and odd habits of the native peoples of the savage northern kingdom known as Sweden. Of all other societies on muddled Earth the Swedes most closely resemble the Japanese in both cul...
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: The year in music | 2014
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-year-in-music-2014.html
Wednesday, December 31, 2014. The year in music 2014. Electronica and ambient is to my generation of music geeks what serious jazz was to our predecessors. The post-rock, post-pop, post-alt music of a non-mainstream adulthood. My favorite discovery of the year: Christian Löffler, via Questionable Content. In particular, Löffler's Young Alaska. A sublime standout, even in a year that saw an unusual number of artists mixing energy and subtly in the same tracks. When it came out in 2009 . Electronic swing&#...
infmonk.blogspot.com
Consilience: Biology, evolving aesthetic, and perception
http://infmonk.blogspot.com/2010/09/perception.html
Sunday, September 12, 2010. Biology, evolving aesthetic, and perception. Our evolutionary history has defined the continuum of what we find beautiful. The biological wellspring our species' aesthetic is a matrix of cues, colors, shapes, and an awareness of solidity or fluidity embedded primarily in the sensory cortices of the brain. And that would be pattern recognition. One of the basic functions of our brains' cross-talking sensory modules is to pull order out of the jumbled impressions that the world ...
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT