TOo. many airplanes

Reading Time: < 1 minute

While 150000 are demonstrating against (for) climate, every 5 seconds average one big airjet is roaring over the city center for landing.

Bringing in more demonstrators?? Come on…

I remember – the usual old man’s catch-phrase – when in the city park above there was silence. Now you can touch the jets. Vibrating. And trumpeting success announcements by the airport society. Doubling passengers! Growing! Expanding!

I just want my silence back. I don’t need this silly mass tourism.

You cannot get into time

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Asking the schoolboy, at breakfast, how we possibly could make a time-travel, he shruggs his shoulders. Right so. There is no way.

Is the “mental” me existing without my body? No. And consciousness is hardly to be deconnected from the body.

However.

Time is no entity. Time is continuity. We don’t “split” time, we just assign markers to it: seconds, minutes, hours, days and other insignificant marker names. It doesn’t reach out to what time really is. If we could – COULD! – split time into sort-of atomic particles of time-segments/particle or such, we then could handle it. But there is no such thing as particles of time. When, for example, “light” gives us a hard time to know what it is, waves? particles? … or something else, then we have to say that time is yet another typ of animal.

Immagine time travel. Not only you would want to take your consciousness with you to register where you “arrive”, you might want to have a body, too. But you would never find that magic “point of origin” in time, because that “point” does not exist. Time is not to be “zoomed in” and getting to an atomic level where there is no more zooming further. There is no zooming-in anyway. Putting a lot of markers in a short time span is only a technical problem. Ontologically it doesn’t change anything.

If we are talking about billions of billions of years or about a milli-second: there is no difference. The question is only: What PROCESS is happening?

So: time is created by materia itself and materia defines “time-duration” by the process of changing/morphosis.

Time is a different category of existence, it is attached to existence.

When there was no universe, there was … no time.

CAT MUSIC?

Reading Time: < 1 minuteMy cat makes music. She is playing the piano. The result of the music is something inbetween Stockhausen, Xenakis or minor names, as if using graphic notation. Some notes here and there, “a-tonal” of course, maybe some “clusters”. (I should add an audio file hence I catch her doing those performances.

When Stefan Koelsch in his recent book “Good Vibrations” (2019; Klett) asks in the introduction what makes human beings different from animals, he answers: Music.
Sorry, Prof. Koelsch, this is bullshit. (As some more in that book.) My cat is making music. Maybe not so much what we – “human beings” ! – think what defines music.

Now to the point of all of this: I don’t want to make music in a style my cat can do. And I don’t believe in Stockhausen and contemporary shit any more when I think what it takes to “compose” music that sounds so much like a cat can do. Something is wrong there, people. Maybe some notes are wrong. Are we all going … cats?

PS. The cat JUMPS on the keyboard. Has she any ideas about frequencies? Tuning? Intervalls? Chords? Melody? Harmony? Polyphony etc etc . Nope!!!

life hacks?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Reading “medium” now during six weeks it comes to me as more and more like a repeating “loop” of rather young-ish posters who accumulate more or less the same info from the internet into a category called “life hacks”. Whatever the implications of such a word are, it doesn’t work for me that way.

The basic problem is a daily rhythm of activities which might conflict heavily with partners and family.

What I am extracting from such aggregated “wisdom” are the concepts. It remains unclear to me what the aims of those “life-hackers” actually are. They seem to be fishing all in the same pond but for different reasons. One of those reasons is called “productivity”. Does this build a strange pyramid of priorities in social life in that everybody has to be very productive?

It is madness. If you are, say, 25 years, or maybe even 35, you might believe in such concepts which are to me theoretical and even forced. For how long will you keep up this “productivity” madness? Idealism isn’t always bad. But it isn’t always good either. Living together with other people requests probably a humble element in one’s own lifestyle. You need not only time to spend with them, but – more difficult to fit with ambitious daily schedules – you can’t always schedule those moments yourself.

Again: I keep excerpting ideas from those posts with diminishing curiosity. Some are interesting, maybe even helpful. Maybe I will try them out. The sheer amount of such “hacks” yet don’t fit in my life. I would become overwhelmed with such context and would have to replace an already adopted habit with a similar – better? – different one. I don’t need thousands of songs on my iPhone either.

It is like what I read in my research about keyboard-layouts. Someone said: “I don’t like fiddling with my muscle-memory”. It is true, that muscle-memory only comes with time spent doing some specific, repetitive actions. You can’t learn even two such activities at the same time, because you would be confused. Confusion is it what comes in the end. But I think I need more Confucius.

Hallo Welt!

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As we are in the German speaking part of the world, that famous mini-phrase “Hello world!” might remain, albeit a relic of times gone by.

Some tags or topics to come:

  • keyboards (for typing)
  • coffee (like in “espresso”)
  • la pavoni (see above)
  • just intonation (not the opposite of “un-just intonation”) – and the conundrums of temperament
  • recipes (cooking for eating)
  • new music (more conundrums)