Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
“Very well. Let’s have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
That’s not the whole story; along with this epic translated poem, there’s this whole saga of (among other things) the two inventors trying to work on a thinking machine. This thing that makes the poem is one of the prototypes; one of them starts saying 2+2=7 and gets mad when one inventor starts yelling at it that it isn’t, and chases them both up the hills and into a cave trying to kill them… it’s just great. It’s fantastic. The whole thing is great, and it’s translated into English flawlessly.
I miss how unique and unpolished the art in old school speculative fiction used to be allowed to be. I love the angle-dragon and I feel like nothing like him would be allowed to exist on the cover a non-self-published book nowadays.
It’s harder to get a job as an e-commerce livestream host this year, and the average salary for livestream hosts in China went down 20% compared to 2022, according to the analytics firm iiMedai Research.
Maybe all the influencers can be AI and all the product-spamming bots can go in their comments section and the digital ads can display on that page to that audience and we can all go back to growing tomatoes and playing the piano for each other
Yeah, I think you’re right: I’ve seen the argument (I read the ADL page), and I just don’t agree with it. In particular I didn’t like how we’re back to saying that he “paraded around on stage wearing an SS Nazi uniform.” It makes about as much sense as those people who attacked the actress who played Skyler from Breaking Bad (or more accurately if they attacked her when the entire thesis of Breaking Bad was how Skyler was a bad person and it’s a terrible thing to let yourself become like Skyler.) I mean, it may be that the ADL simply didn’t give enough time to the situation to really understand it and misunderstood the intent of that uniform in that particular show, because they do have genuine Nazis to deal with who show up in genuine Nazi garb.
I have Jewish ancestry myself, and I see the actions of the Israeli government pretty similar to how Roger Waters sees it. Being anti-Semitic and wanting a particular group of Jewish people to stop committing crimes are two very different things; if you define being anti-Israeli-apartheid as being racist, then I’m racist too. Furthermore a person who uses racism as a shield against someone who criticizes their actions for reasons that have nothing to do with race, I think hurts their ethnic grouping in the long run a lot more than they help it.
So, I’m really not trying to be combative with you about this. I actually did exactly this already to find the Guardian link I sent. I’ve now read the second link, the CNN article, which says basically more of the same – that he’s potentially in trouble for playing that satirical character in “The Wall” because of Germany’s strict regulations against Nazi iconography. Also he doesn’t like Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Nothing about racism that seems at all convincing to me. There are some people who call him anti-Semitic because he disagrees with Israel’s government, but long story short those are two very different statements to me. You’re free to have a different opinion, but I read the two articles and I’m not convinced.
IDK man. It sounds to me like you’re falling back on “It’s all there, do your own research, it’s all there” and sort of talking down to me because of my viewpoint, but I feel like that’s not a fair thing to ask – if this stuff is easy to find, you’re welcome to find some and send it to me and I really will take a look. I’m genuinely open to someone showing me why I need to change my view if you’re into the idea of investing the time to do that, but I don’t feel like I should have to indefinitely search for new sources when I’ve already invested a certain amount of open-minded time into trying to research the question.
Like I say, I have actually read a few articles trying to look for the information. I see that there are certain people who think he’s a racist. I read their reasons and in my opinion they’re wrong. But you’re free to see it differently.
You do know that’s the “bad guy” speaking at that point in The Wall, right? It’s pretty complex and this is only my take on it, but I interpret the whole album as basically a titanic struggle between authoritarianism and humanity in a bunch of different contexts and in that section the antagonist (authoritarianism) is the one speaking.
Do you have some kind of citation on him being racist? I read this just now but I’m not convinced. “The Wall” is among other things a pretty strong statement in opposition to fascism and the holocaust (which is not an especially bold stance to take), but it sounds like he’s also against Israel’s modern-day version of apartheid, which is a little more bold stance and one I definitely agree with. That doesn’t mean he’s anti-Semitic.
Why he likes Putin and Russia I have no idea. He had pretty complex feelings about WW2 because the Nazis were very clearly the “bad guys,” but also his dad got killed in the war when he was just a little kid, so he also just hates war in general. If I wanted to be charitable I could say he’s applying that logic to Ukraine (maybe there’s some kind of justice to this war, but also war is so horrible that we should just make peace with Putin and end it at whatever cost, even if Russia “wins,” so no one else has to lose their dad.) That’s not to say I justify his view – it’s just me trying to make some kind of sense of it.
In some contexts yes… honestly for me I have a problem with two people getting frisky to that level in a packed theater while a play is going on that people came there to see. I don’t think they should go to jail or anything but I would definitely want them kicked out, and, it seems like they’d be happier in a hotel or something anyway, so win-win.
Jann Wenner has ALWAYS been a gargantuan prick. This was pretty well known all along, but people kept it shushed up because from its inception through at least the early 90s, getting a nod from the Rolling Stone was a career maker (or breaker). Hell there’s even a cheesy old Dr. Hook song about it.
That’s sad to me. Oh well, these things happen. If people are finding it out and publicizing it and punishing him for it (now that he’s no longer in a position to damage their careers 😐), then better late than never, I guess.
Eric Clapton, Ted Nugent, and Roger Waters
Fuck me, what did Roger Waters do? I know he supports Russia in Ukraine for some godawful reason but I thought that was some recent early-onset dementia or something. I like Roger Waters, does he have some kind of awfulness I wasn’t aware of?
But that’s what I’m saying: Back in his day, it was all white men. He was a little outside the mold that he even would put a black person on the cover or work with women as human beings with abilities (Annie Leibovitz) instead of as machines for coffee/filing/sex. In his mind I think that’s still super progressive. But, all the people who really run shit are white men; it’s not at all weird that all the “masters” in his book are white men, any more than it’s weird that all his employees are humans. What sense would it make if they weren’t? That would be just putting someone who isn’t a master into the list for some weird other reason, not because they had important things to say.
I really have no idea about the guy, I’m just sort of guessing here. But it seems pretty plausible just based on that interview.
Maybe the two go hand in hand. I knew a lot of people when I was young who wanted to change the world, then as soon as they could start doing pretty well if they stopped caring, they stopped caring. Maybe if you can’t ever do pretty well, you never stop caring.
There were some exceptions to that, but it was pretty upsetting to me how quick most people folded once rent was due. I mean, I get it. But also it was quick.