Wednesday, March 23, 2011

multimedia links

I have been adding to this blog for a fairly long time at this point, and I think it is fair to say that it is significantly devoid of substantial value. Harebrained thoughts expressed in poorly constructed sentences about things very few people care about. Toss in a bunch of links that are now long since broken because stuff has moved, and we have a pungent cornucopia of sludgy digital detritus, hmm?

anyway, in yet another attempt to add some value to this travesty, I include some multimedia links:

http://soundcloud.com/utenzil  <-- mp3 links

http://utenzil.com/mp3/free <-- more mp3 links

http://youtube.com/utenzil  <-- youtube channel

http://utenzil.com/  <-- main music project website

http://facebook.com/utenzil  <-- Utenzil facebook page

Thanks for reading (although I am pretty sure the o nly traffic I get is from people looking to place comment spam!)

Friday, March 18, 2011

Some either sci-real or sci-fi about time perception

So here is my notion/theory that is either just silly or maybe just a little silly. I had some questions, like this: "why should things in the dark have different colors? Could the colors be functional?"

The second set of thoughts/question was "All matter on earth, living or otherwise, is constantly bombarded by solar neutrinos. Solar neutrinos are weakly interacting with matter. Could solar neutrinos, albeit invisible and weakly interacting, be somehow involved in biologial processes, particularly thought?"

I thought this because a) the brain is a different color than all the other organs in the body and b) the brain looks something like a neutrino detector and c) it can be the case that very, very, very small amounts of some substances-- nanograms-- can alter thought processes. So thought processes may be susceptible to the weak interactions of neutrinos.

I also thought this because signals, nerve signals, are actually more of a "cascade" across cell membranes. They are asynchronous, and they often have a start and an end. But if our thoughts are asynchronous, how can we perceive time? That is, without something marking 'measured temporal units', how can we perceive or experience time? In fact, we *share* temporal coordinates, so it is like our time sense is coordinated, like the clocks on cellphones are synchronized by the network.

Another thing that I thought about was neutrino detectors. Structurally, neutrino detectors look a lot like brains.

Solar neutrinos can pass through matter and we are bombarded by a constant stream of these. Again, I understand that thought/nerve signals are kind of a "domino" effect of cascading charges throughout the body, and as such it seems like these are not synchronous. My curiosity (because I've got a background in computers) is why we should perceive time if our thoughts/brain signals are asynchronous. In a computer, you have a "clock signal" that is a constant pulse. The clock signal is used to ensure instructions happen as quickly as possible, but is a separate system from the instruction interpretation/calculation components of the computer.

My thought, which I have no basis for other than kind of a self-amusing notion, is that solar neutrino collisions with key brain structures provide enough "ticking" to provide the 'temporal metronome' that allows us to perceive time. Again, the nature of neutrinos is that they are "weakly interacting", but in a system designed to respond to their interaction (like a neutrino detector) they have discernable "blips", which are called scintillation light. In other circumstances, they can induce Cherenkov radiation, another type of light.

So my more general curiosity is: does some solar neutrino interaction occur within the brain in a way that it is useful to the brain's function?

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

A Tiny Bit of Personal Stuff

I said I would not post too much personal stuff, but just to say I am married. My wife is a teacher. She's a really good teacher, I think a little strict sometimes, especially with me. But, I go with the flow and learn each day.

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

A really interesting idea

I have a thing I do, to keep my mind sharp, and that is to look up words that I am not quite sure of the meaning of, but have some idea of. The word that occured to me was "cytocheme" but then I realized it wasn't "cytocheme" but "cytochrome".

So I looked up "cytochrome" and I thought 'ok, that is a part of a cell that has colors'.

And then I thought, "why should a cell have colors? Cells live in the dark.".

And then I thought about neutrinos, neutrinos that hit us supposedly billions of times a day. And neutrinos, when they hit something, are supposed to give off little blips of blue light. But then I thought about energy in general, how energy gets absorbed, and then wondered if the colors in cells were functional, so that when a cell got exposed to a certain kind of energy, it would cause some energy to be absorbed. And then I thought about neutrinos, blipping little blue blips of light, and sending those to cells, which would absorb their energy.

Isn't that interesting?

[edit] I am going to elaborate a bit on this if I may-- so, anywhere there is light in an otherwise dark place, that light will cause different kinds of energy to occur based on the colors surrounding it. Even if it is a very, very very small amount of light.

[edit edit] A little bit more, to tie in with previous posts, neurotransmitters deal with multiple signals at once. I am thinking they do this because they are surfaced with different colors when the little sparks go "blip".

[edit edit edit] and a little more: the reason medicines work in the brain the way they do is because they alter some parameter of the various colors involved.

[edit....]

and of course that is silly, because that is not how they work. But, it might be interesting that when neutrinos give off light in a place full of chemicals and different colors, that different types of energies are found.

In a very dark place, where only neutrino lights blip, the type of energy something absorbs or rejects from that light could be determined by it's color. So it is tranduced into that type of energy.

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

why The Stupid ?

In my previous post I mention The Stupid, to grasp the "moment of stupid". Why? Well, because from a 'quest for originality' standpoint, everyone seems to be going for "the clever", don't they? Do you see what I mean? No one will expect anyone going for The Stupid. It is kind of like 'The Producers' logic. Ha ha. Ha?


But, no, more ... well, a little more... seriously: The Stupid is the cause of so much suffering. There is a thing I remember reading about islanders in the Southwest Pacific, they share their dreams, and discuss their dreams. If one of them has a nightmare, he/she is encouraged to confront the monsters in their dreams, and to try to bargain with them or defeat them and cause them to give them a present.

There are other primitive cultures that regard all of life as a Dream, of course, and we compose The Dream as we move through it. So, listen:

Isn't The Stupid like a monster in our Dream?

We need to catch The Stupid and bargain with it, I think.

or is that Stupid?

A glimmer of a direction, this is it.

Sometimes one might think oneself creative in the act of creating something, othertimes, one might be creative without thinking about it. I think we would recognize the former as being somehow 'disingenuous/insincere' when compared to the latter, but maybe the latter is less 'cerebral/intelligent' when compared to the former.

First world artists who incorporate the 'naive' art of tribal or more ancient/exotic cultures into their work are sythesists, [edit] NO! synCRETists, a sort of creativity. I am thinking that some examples show us that if they grasp the right exotic culture at the right moment in history and inject it into our awareness with the proper influence, they resonate with the larger collective consciousness.

Picasso is an obvious and successful example of this, incorporating African motifs into his work at the turn of the 20th century, when the perception of the first world mainstream had a nascent awareness of the existence of Africans as actual people, and maybe more important as a people and culture that imaged various aspects of the human reality that were neatly kept in cupboards and only hinted at by the predominant European culture: overt imagery dealing with fertility, sensuality and passion.

So the African/tribal idol/mask imagesthat Picasso conveyed into the larger global cultural consciousness were like "active pharmaceutical ingredients" in his art, and the medium-- paints, colors, palette, subject material-- were like "excipients", the flavored syrup, the gel capsule.

Something of a belief, but also something for which there is clinical evidence, is that underneath it all, there is a shared commonality between every culture/people comprised of humans, who in turn have "realized" a synthesis in order to operate.

The Synthesis is one of perception and physical reality. You perceive and know that there are mechanics involved in perception which are ruled by physical realities. We perceive physical realities through these mechanics, and believe that we can perceive the workings of these mechanics, despite their involvement in our perceiving of them, through scientific endeavor. This belief seems reasonable enough, I do not challenge this belief but merely state it is a belief. Repeated application of scientific methodologies has yielded results that support it which is why we believe it.

So as we apply our perceptions to the understanding of reality, we exercise reality, dwell in reality, and alter reality. How cautious should we be in this, how bold? We are very bold, really. We slap things together and cause noise and light and heat and sparks. On a personal level, our perceptions of pain, fear or discomfort might indicate that we are being too bold, but we often ignore or surpress these perceptions in pursuit of a higher understanding or fulfilling experience. We tell stories, we make them up and tell them, insinuating these into other's memories. We make noises, making them up because it is interesting or amusing to us.

Today I read about someone who takes a foreign instrument with an unusually tuned scale (to our ears) and incorporates this with more usual Western instruments. This is interesting, an interesting synthesis/formula.
Is it smart? It takes some smarts to research these things, to know of them, to know their values and mechanisms and methods.

Do you have to be smart to be creative?

No. Because being smart is a thinking thing, and we stated earlier that you can be creative without thinking about it. So...

so...
so what if rather than trying to be smart, we forgo being smart when trying to be creative. we be simple. we be stupid. Stupid.

What if.. what if we Place Ourselves in the moment of Stupidity. The locking oneself out of the house. The forgetting of one's car keys. The losing a glove, a sock. The forgetting the words to a song, or the name of a person in front of one's face. The moments one dreads, then laughs about later. The times one is roundly ridiculed for, derided for, scorned and vilified for.

This is a universal human commonality. These are universal human commonalities, the Simple, the Stupid. The unwitting, the senseless-yet-it-is-there, it happens. Horrible horrible things happen, life changing, reality altering things happen, due to The Stupid. Great things, clear things, happy things happen, due to The Simple: "It all happened because of one simple thing...".

I had an experience I will tell you about. Long ago, when I lived on my own, for a brief time I lived in a shared house, essentially renting a room. There was a boy who was a relative of the woman who owned the house, he was 10-12 or so and he emotionally/mentally challenged, and he would come there from time to time. He was very mentally disorganized and wild, had to be badgered into behaving controllably. He didn't really speak, she could understand what he would indicate and he would listen to what she said, but it was like the connections were very brief. He would race up the stairs, and down the stairs, but seemed kind of antsy like he was doing something wrong no matter what he was doing, sort of a pure energy kind of being.

One day something happened outside after he got home from school and some kids were mean to him or something, and he was upset and the lady was upset (she was either his mom or his aunt, it wasn't clear). She told him to come and sit on the couch, watch TV, which I happened to be doing just before I had to go to work-- I worked in the afternoon then.

He sat down next to me on the couch. I think I said something to him, "Hi, how are you?" or something. He kind of leaned against me there and then kind of took hold of my arm, like he was scared or sad, and he leaned his face against my arm. Truth be told, he was normally a kind of irritating presence, all that wild energy, but I felt sorry for him and so I thought I should say some reassuring sorts of things to calm him down.

So he was holding my arm with both his hands, and kind of resting his mouth on my forearm while I was watching TV. I had to get up to go to work, so I started to move.

He dug his fingernails into my arm. I looked down at his face, and he was looking up at me with a look of sheer malevolence on his face. I was really taken aback, it was like the whites of his eyes were red. I looked into his eyes and there was no connection, he was just locked into this hateful face mode, and he was not going to let go of my arm, and he was looking at me like he wanted to kill me.

So here I thought I was consoling a little scared kid, but instead there was this daemonic creature locked onto my arm, and now *I* was scared.

I tried to pry him loose, using not just a little bit of strength, no luck. He kind of made a growling sound, as if to say "No way, this is my arm. I found it".

Finally, I called for his aunt/mom, "He won't let go!". She snapped some orders at him and he came out of it, running over to her and then up the stairs in his furtive manner.

Now that I think about it, he was probably treated very poorly, maybe even horribly abused. He was utterly stupid, and simple, but he existed and he was human, and for that brief time he was more powerful than I, so smart and complex.