zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — serpent, dragon — take your pick ]
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I’ve been interested in the form of the serpent that bites its own tail at least since I was in Oxford and wrote the poem:

Putting it in a circle-with-tail like that, however, was a much later business, dating to a time when I was figuring out how to annotate recursion in a HipBone game move, and suddenly realized I’d tumbled on the smallest HipBone game board in the process..

Recursion is a key indicator, as Douglas Hofstadter explained in Godel Escher Bach, and as the Cretan philosopher Epimenides knew, with St Paul echoing him at Titus 1.12:

One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.

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The God Hates Fags church protesting Kim Davis, the Rowan (Kentucky) County Clerk who fasted, prayed, and then refused to issue licenses to gay couples who wished to marry, is surely a serpent bites tail moment..

Madness.

Unless, perhaps, publicity is your god, your sole aim and glory.

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Sources:

HuffPo, Kentucky Clerk Says She ‘Prayed And Fasted’ Before Deciding To Stop Issuing Marriage Licenses

HuffPo, Westboro Baptist Church Picketed Kim Davis For ‘Enabling Fag Marriage’

[ by Charles Cameron — Hofstadter Langdon Kim — for Gabi Nasemann, & in recognition of Gödel Escher Bach ]
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My friend the photographer Gabi Nasemann recently inquired whether I knew John Langdon‘s book, Wordplay, and I responded, DoubleQuote-style, with Scott Kim‘s Inversions:

I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Kim lo these many years past at the Computer Game Developers Conference, and he was kind enough to say of my HipBone Games:

Your game does seem to really call to mind the Bead Game. Almost a divination system, much more metaphorical than most games.

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Scott Kim and his friend Doug Hofstadter both have a keen interest in Bach, so I thought it might be neat to see Scott’s treatment of the name — an ambigram, lower panel below — and how John Langdon might treat it — upper panel:

Langdon’s Bach I assembled from his own typeface, Biform, which apparently seeped from his grasp into the wider world under the entirely irrelevant name Lampoon.

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Of all Langdon’s ambigrams, the one that’s no doubt best known — since Dan Brown used it in one of his execrable books — is his square of the four elements, upper panel, below:

It was a nice touch, though, that Brown offered Langdon an hommage by naming his professor of symbiology after him. No doubt the fictional Robert Langdon would be familiar with the glorious diagram of the elements created by Oronce Fine, which he’d have run across in a 1549 Harvard Houghton Library volume, Le Sphere du Monde, and which I have elsewhere compared with Jewish and Christian diagrams:

Sembl and HipBone gameboards are in the same genre.. being games of linkage that you play with your mind:

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Sources and further readings:

John Langdon, Ambigrams

Scott Kim, Ambigrams on Google Search

Scientific American, Remembering Martin Gardner, with Douglas Hofstadter

Slate, Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?

The New Yorker, Harvard_ No Symbology Here

Wikipedia, Robert Langdon

Random House, The Official Website of Harvard Symbologist Robert Langdon

John Langdon, Biform

John Langdon, Lampoon

Triple Canopy, This is your brain on paper

[ by Charles Cameron — first post in a series, with brief intro to series on top ]
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Okay, a three-post series coming up, of which this is post one. To help you navigate:

This post reports a conversation between Adam Elkus, Marc Andreessen (briefly) and Daniel Griffin about “@pmarca style” DoubleQuotes

DoubleQuotes — origins discusses the seeds of my own DoubleQuotes practice in the form of a visualization game from 1994

DQs in the Wild and DQs @pmarca style offers links to a number of examples of “prior art” relating to all of the above.

Some readers may be interested in all three, which would delight me — for myself, they’re an attempt to corral a dispersed set of matching ideas, mostly for the record.

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So here’s the conversation, as far as I managed to track it. It opens with Adam quoting a paragraph from Jean-Marie Guéhenno‘s The Problem with Coalition Airstrikes in Syria, which he finds paradoxical, followed by his comment to that effect:

Author says there is no military solution, advocates one immediately afterwards http://t.co/i13ZELN3qC pic.twitter.com/aiMmAax0J2

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

this is a nice example of a @pmarca-style double quote spotted in wild.

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

given that war isn't an end in and of itself, the "no military solution" mantra is bizarre. As long as you are fighting you believe that….

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

,,,,,you can use violence (kill people or threaten to kill people) to achieve a desired political end.

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

hence the paradox of author using the military to convince parties in conflict that there is no military solution to conflict.

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

@Aelkus This kind of thing is such the triumph of hope over experience. !

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) October 7, 2015

@pmarca One day I hoped I could find a nice natural example of the "do x!" "don't do x!" people you often tweet about, and tonight I got it

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

@pmarca "there is no military solution!" "we'll bomb them to show them there is no military solution!"

— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) October 7, 2015

@Aelkus these always remind me of @hipbonegamer's posts on @zenpundit – looking back they were referred to as DoubleQuotes back to 2010.

— Daniel Griffin (@danielsgriffin) October 7, 2015

@Aelkus @hipbonegamer @zenpundit You've prob. seen them, but – earliest I could find & w/ explanation of their use: http://t.co/MlJpD1Kq1t

— Daniel Griffin (@danielsgriffin) October 7, 2015

@Aelkus @hipbonegamer @zenpundit More recent explanation at the end of this post: http://t.co/ye4ko3zDTL

— Daniel Griffin (@danielsgriffin) October 7, 2015

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It was in fact Adam who first drew my attention Andreessen’s style of “double-tweeting”, as we’ll see in the final post in this series.

Next up: DoubleQuotes — origins, or what the HipBone Games looked like, shortly before I first considered playing them on a board.

[ by Charles Cameron — turning the wheel ]
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When Erik Schelzig tweeted:

Tenn. Senate Speaker @RonRamsey says Oregon shootings mean it's "time to prepare," urges Christians to get handgun carry permits. #TNLeg

— Erik Schelzig (@schelzigAP) October 2, 2015

Kevin Kruse responded

When Christ said "blessed are the peacemakers," He wasn't talking about Colt single action revolvers. https://t.co/HEnCjhTkZw

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 2, 2015

— and that’s about as neat and sweet a statement of the peace paradox as any I’ve seen.

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War and Peace: yang and yin?

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John 14.27:

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.

I don’t believe there’s any promise of the cessation of war here — the peace offered here is a peace that’s operative in times of both war and peace.

It must be peace from the warness of war, peace even in fighting, no?

To my mind this is the koan all peace-lovers, peace-keepers, and peace-makers must grapple with: stillness within?

I’ll be returning to this — “the dance at the still point of the turning wheel..”

[ by Charles Cameron — what color does a chameleon turn in a hall of mirrors? ]
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There’s an interesting ascetic aesthetic in photography which prefers black and white to full spectrum color, but the black and white in question has a rich spectrum of its own, a continuum of shades of grey between black and white poles. Not so with black and white choices of the sort President Bush proposed when he said:

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

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Some of the nuances to consider:

David Kilcullen on this video at 48.55:

A lot of families in Afghanistan have one son fighting with the government, and another son fighting with the Taliban. It’s a hedging strategy.

Compare:

In Syria, many families face a terrible dilemma

In recent months I have noticed a trend of some families sending at least one of their children to join ISIL because that was the only way for them to generate an income in the family.

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And then this:

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Afghan Allies’ Abuse of Boys

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

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This:

Is the CIA undercounting civilian deaths from drone strikes?

Determining the number of civilian casualties under such circumstances is a difficult task — even for the human rights groups that devote significant resources to doing so. If the CIA is simply counting zero civilians killed in operations where it can’t say for certain who the agency is even firing at, that doesn’t inspire much confidence in their numbers.
assumed to be combatants.

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And then there’s the paradox, found even in scripture:

The Synoptic Gospels attribute the following quote to Jesus of Nazareth: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30), as well as its contrapositive, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Luke 9:50; The Synoptic Gospels attribute the following quote to Jesus of Nazareth: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30), as well as its contrapositive, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Luke 9:50; Mark 9:40)

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As I said at the top of this post —