Posts Tagged ‘Julian Calendar’
“The intelligence of the universe is social”*…
Recently, (Roughly) Daily looked at AI and our (that’s to say, humans’) possible relationships to it. In a consideration of Jame Bridle‘s new book, Ways of Being, Doug Bierend widens the iris, considering our relationship not only to intelligences we might create but also to those with which we already co-habit…
It’s lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be. We humans tend to see ourselves as the anointed objects of evolution, our intelligence representing the leading edge of unlikely order cultivated amid an entropic universe. While there is no way to determine any purpose or intention behind the processes that produced us, let alone where they will or should lead, that hasn’t stopped some from making assertions.
For example, consider the school of thought called longtermism, explored by Phil Torres in this essay for Aeon. Longtermism — a worldview held, as Torres notes, by some highly influential people including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, tech entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn, and Jason Matheny, President Biden’s deputy assistant for technology and national security — essentially sees the prime directive of Homo sapiens as one of maximizing the “potential” of our species. That potential — often defined along such utilitarian lines as maximizing the population, distribution, longevity, and comfort that future humans could achieve over the coming millennia — is what longtermers say should drive the decisions we make today. Its most extreme version represents a kind of interstellar manifest destiny, human exceptionalism on the vastest possible scale. The stars are mere substrate for the extension and preservation of our species’ putatively unique gifts. Some fondly imagine our distant descendants cast throughout the universe in womb-like symbiosis with machines, ensconced in virtual environments enjoying perpetual states of bliss —The Matrix as utopia.
Longtermist philosophy also overlaps with the “transhumanist” line of thought, articulated by figures such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, who describes human nature as incomplete, “a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.” Here, humanity as currently or historically constituted isn’t an end so much as a means of realizing some far greater fate. Transhumanism espouses the possibility of slipping the surly bonds of our limited brains and bodies to become “more than human,” in a sense reminiscent of fictional android builder Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner: “Commerce is our goal,” Tyrell boasts. “‘More human than human’ is our motto.” Rather than celebrating and deepening our role within the world that produced us, these outlooks seek to exaggerate and consummate a centuries-long process of separation historically enabled by the paired forces of technology and capital.
But this is not the only possible conception of the more than human. In their excellent new book Ways of Being, James Bridle also invokes the “more than human,” not as an effort to exceed our own limitations through various forms of enhancement but as a mega-category that collects within it essentially everything, from microbes and plants to water and stone, even machines. It is a grouping so vast and diverse as to be indefinable, which is part of Bridle’s point: The category disappears, and the interactions within it are what matters. More-than-human, in this usage, dismisses human exceptionalism in favor of recognizing the ecological nature of our existence, the co-construction of our lives, futures, and minds with the world itself.
From this point of view, human intelligence is just one form of a more universal phenomenon, an emergent “flowering” found all throughout the evolutionary tree. It is among the tangled bramble of all life that our intelligence becomes intelligible, a gestalt rather than a particular trait. As Bridle writes, “intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does. It is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.” In Bridle’s telling, mind and meaning alike exist by way of relationship with everything else in the world, living or not. Accepting this, it makes little sense to elevate human agency and priorities above all others. If our minds are exceptional, it is still only in terms of their relationship to everything else that acts within the world. That is, our minds, like our bodies, aren’t just ours; they are contingent on everything else, which would suggest that the path forward should involve moving with the wider world rather than attempting to escape or surpass it.
This way of thinking borrows heavily from Indigenous concepts and cosmologies. It decenters human perspective and priorities, instead setting them within an infinite concatenation of agents engaged in the collective project of existence. No one viewpoint is more favored than another, not even of the biological over the mineral or mechanical. It is an invitation to engage with the “more-than-human” world not as though it consisted of objects but rather fellow subjects. This would cut against the impulse to enclose and conquer nature, which has been reified by our very study of it….
Technology often presupposes human domination, but it could instead reflect our ecological dependence: “Entangled Intelligence,” from @DougBierend in @_reallifemag (via @inevernu and @sentiers). Eminently worth reading in full.
* Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
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As we welcome fellow travelers, we might recall that this date in 1752 was the final day of use of the Julian calendar in Great Britain, Ireland, and the British colonies, including those on the East coast of America. Eleven days were skipped to sync to the Gregorian calendar, which was designed to realign the calendar with equinoxes. Hence the following day was September 14. (Most of Europe had shifted, by Papal decree, to the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century; Russia and China made the move in the 20th century.)
“a publisher’s emblem or imprint, especially one on the title page or spine of a book”*…
Knowing a book (or its publisher anyway) by its cover (art)…
Colophons started out as short statements providing a book’s publication info—details like where and who and when. Those statements often included little emblems, logos, which are now also referred to as colophons (from the Greek kolophōn, meaning “summit, final touch”), and they slowly made their way to the spines of books. Like tattoos or mascots, many of these logos depict animals, often fish (or dolphins): FSG, Anchor Doubleday, Aldine Press, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Birds are another well-represented category: Penguin, Bantam, Norton, and Europa Editions, to name a few. So if you’re going to be judging a book by its cover (you’re probably kidding yourself if you think you don’t) then you better start factoring in the colophon as well.
These symbols are often taken for granted because most readers are, understandably, less familiar with publishers than writers or booksellers are, but they have a totemic quality to them that’s worthy of consideration, functioning not just as trademarks but as little windows into the personalities of the publishing houses and the people who run them. The following list is a very unofficial ranking of some of the more interesting colophons, the ones that take risks or have more of an emphasis on design, something unique about them, that offer subtle clues as to what awaits us inside…
“An Unofficial Ranking of Publishing Colophons“: Dylan Brown (@dylanwalsdorf) on the fishes, kangaroos, and borzois that adorn our books.
[With thanks to MK]
* “Colophon” as defined by Oxford Languages
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As we linger over logos, we might recall that in Britain on this date in 1752 absolutely nothing happened. There was no “September 3” (nor September 4-13) in Britain that year, as 1752 was the year that Britain converted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which required an adjustment of 11 days. Thus, that year British calendars went from Wednesday, September 2 directly to Thursday, September 14.
Most historians believe that persistent stories of riots in England at the time, demanding “give us our eleven days,” are an urban legend, fueled in part by an over-enthusiastic take on Hogarth’s 1755 painting “An Election Entertainment”:
“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear”*…
Anger, like other emotions, has a history.
It is not merely that the causes of anger may change, or attitudes toward its expression. The nature of the emotion itself may alter from one society to another. In classical antiquity, for example, anger was variously viewed as proper to a free citizen (an incapacity to feel anger was regarded as slavish); as an irrational, savage passion that should be extirpated entirely, and especially dangerous when joined to power; as justifiable in a ruler, on the model of God’s righteous anger in the Bible; and as blasphemously ascribed to God, who is beyond all human emotions.
Profound social and cultural changes—the transition from small city-states to the vast reach of the Roman Empire, the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome—lay behind these shifting views, but all the positions had their defenders and were fiercely debated. This rich heritage offers a wealth of insights into the nature of anger, as well as evidence of its social nature; it is not just a matter of biology….
The history of anger– indeed, the very fact that it has a history– sheds light on the elevated emotional climate of today: “Repertoires of Rage.”
* Mark Twain
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As we wrestle with wrath, we might recall that in 1752 in Britain and throughout the British Empire (which included the American colonies) yesterday was September 2. The “jump” was occasioned by a switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, as a product of which almost all of “western civilization” was then on Pope Gregory’s time; Sweden (and Finland) switched the following year.
“I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to stop going to those places.”*…
The “Hanoi Street Train”
As we depart the 2010s, a period that gave rise to influencers and forced us to grapple with our carbon footprints, and set sail for the ’20s, we at Fodor’s are asking ourselves a simple question: How can we be better travelers in the decade to come?
We’re hardly alone in asking it. We all desperately wish to see and experience this wonderful world, but how can we do so responsibly? Ultimately, we must each, individually, come to our own conclusions. And that’s how we view this year’s No List.
Every year, we use the No List to highlight issues—ethical, environmental, sometimes even political—that we’re thinking about before, during, and long after we travel. For this year’s No List, as we do every year, we highlight places and issues that give us pause. The underlying issues are ones that we’ll certainly be grappling with in the decade to come…
Fodor’s explains why we might NOT want to visit a baker’s dozen famous tourist destinations in 2020– their “No List”: “Thirteen places to reconsider in the year ahead.”
* Henny Youngman
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As we move off the beaten path, we might recall that this date, January 1, debuted in 46 BCE with the advent of the Julian calendar. It became the first day of the year in 1622; that honored had previously belonged to March 25.
January 1 is both the furthest away and closest day to December 31st. Because of time zones, the first person born in a year can be born before the last person of the previous year.
Happy New Year!
“It is not enough that I succeed, others must fail”*…
Who said “it is not enough that I succeed, others must fail”? According to Tiffany Watt Smith, in this spry book, it might have been Gore Vidal or Genghis Kahn. According to the internet it is either La Rochefoucauld or Somerset Maugham. Having thought about it a bit, it might actually have been me, or perhaps it was Watt Smith herself. The point is that it doesn’t really matter since taking pleasure in another’s misfortune turns out to be a pungent but free-floating feeling that pops up everywhere. The flavours might change – as an academic cultural historian Watt Smith is far from suggesting that emotions are universal across time and place – but there is something familiar to us all about the odd stab of pleasure we get when an enemy or even, God help us, a friend, stumbles.
So it is odd that the English language does not have a word for this grubby little pleasure – instead we have to borrow from the German and call it Schadenfreude (literally “damage-joy”)…
Kathryn Hughes considers that delicious feeling of satisfaction at the “epic fails” of somebody else in a review of Tiffany Watt Smith’s Schadenfreude- the Joy of Another’s Misfortune: “Damage-joy.”
* see above
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As we try not to snicker, we might recall that it was on this date in 45 B.C.E. that the Julian Calendar came into effect. It was the predominant calendar in the Roman world, most of Europe, and in European settlements in the Americas and elsewhere, until it was refined and gradually replaced by the Gregorian calendar, promulgated in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.
(The Julian calendar remains useful for some scientific, especially astronomical, purposes, as it provides a linear count of days from a starting point. which was introduced by Joseph Scaliger in 1583. Julian Day 0 is defined as noon on Monday, January 1, 4713 B.C.E. (in the Julian Calendar). Regardless of leap years and calendar changes by the Romans or Pope Gregory, the Julian date number enables the easy calculation of the number of days between two dates by simply taking the difference in their Julian day number. This is useful, say, for astronomers’ calculations of the dates of eclipses. Thus, the Julian day number of a day is defined as the number of days since noon GMT on 1 Jan 4713 B.C.E. in the Proleptic Julian Calendar, and each Julian day number runs from noon to noon.)
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