Not quite the City of God

Devils Dancing around the City of God

In reading science fiction there were always supercomputers. Sometimes intelligent. There was the idea of the Internet, but there was never the full visualisation of it. If there had been the World Wide Web would have been invented by nerds in DARPA and not a mensch in CERN. Never mind the flying cars, the idea of the Intenet is far, far more exciting. The tempting and exciting thought was this:

If we had all the knowledge of the world: or at least a fair proportion of it, at our fingertips, couldn't we become wiser and better people. Wouldn't it be like the old bible story of Babylon. A perfect Science Fiction story, with Leviathan, the angry Old Testament space God hiding in the clouds on his column of flame, shouting in megaphones, burning people and offerings up with lasers, zooming about in jetpacks, dropping vitaminised mana onto the desert, conducting breeding programmes getting really pissed off that humanity was getting its act together without him:

"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make computer networks and, and link them thoroughly. And they had servers for their stone foundation, and all maner of connections for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us make the world into one city and make the Internet into a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And God came down to see the city and the tower, which the human children had built. And God said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language and are interconnected; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language and theirn connections and computing power, that they may not understand one another. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the global city and the tower of the Internet. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."

Adapted from Genesis 11: 1-9

Instead of course we have all discovered that the main problem with the Internet is that it weakens your focus and that information storage and retrieval is a huge issue. My wife studied information science and her masters in 1989-90 was in this stuff. Google is one indexing solution but a very poor, post hoc one. The other question is human nature.

Still. Presumably that amazing potential is still there to learn and grow unconfounded. We just need to develop a little hyperfocus in order to achieve what we set out to. Hyperfocus, almost to the level of a pathology.

St Augustine: The City of God

The Zimmers

Doesn't Feynman sound like Tony Curtis?

The character of physical law Feynma n

Part 2

Feynman lectures on physics

Vedic mantra - deep

http://www.vedamantram.com/audio/mahanyaasam2.mp3

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

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Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

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Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

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