square white world

We, the hereditary chiefs and heads of the tribes of the Northern parts of New Zealand, being assembled at Waitangi, in the Bay of Islands, on this 28th day of October, 1835, declare the Independence of our country, which is hereby constituted and declared to be an Independent State, under the designation of The United Tribes of New Zealand.

All sovereign power and authority within the territories of the United Tribes of New Zealand is hereby declared to reside entirely and exclusively in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes in their collective capacity, who also declare that they will not permit any legislative authority separate from themselves in their collective capacity to exist, nor any function of government to be exercised within the said territories, unless by persons appointed by them, and acting under the authority of laws regularly enacted by them in Congress assembled.

The hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes agree to meet in Congress at Waitangi in the autumn of each year, for the purpose of framing laws for the dispensation of justice, the preservation of peace and good order, and the regulation of trade; and they cordially invite the Southern tribes to lay aside their private animosities and to consult the safety and welfare of our common country, by joining the Confederation of the United Tribes.

They also agree to send a copy of this Declaration to His Majesty, the King of England, to thank him for his acknowledgement of their flag; and in return for the friendship and protection they have shown, and are prepared to show, to such of his subjects as have settled in their country, or resorted to its shores for the purposes of trade, they entreat that he will continue to be the parent of their infant State, and that he will become its Protector from all attempts upon its independence.

Agreed to unanimously on this 28 day of October, 1835, in the presence of His Britannic Majesty’s Resident.

signatures of 35 rangatira (chief is not really an adequate translation – but there is much about this whole translation which is inadequate – sourced from here) follow and 4 pakeha witnesses

I certify that the above is a correct copy of the Declaration of the Chiefs, according to the translation of Missionaries who have resided ten years and upwards in the country; and it is transmitted to His Most Gracious Majesty the King of England, at the unanimous request of the chiefs.

(Signed) JAMES BUSBY, British Resident at New Zealand.

(note: New Zealand for Nu Tireni)

Our flag – since it is the flag of the united tribes or Te Kara o Nu Tireni:

if we are to demolish the pretensions to art in a piece, what from theatre would be retained in a theatre minus art? Would it be like a formal occasion where there is the sense of exaggeration, in the ostentation of a social ritual? Perhaps Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics could play a part in this, the artist hosting a dinner party rather than producing a privileged cultural artifact. This would say something both about Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and about theatre: a transversal relation would be established – how strong would this connection appear to be? Is relational aesthetics a theatricalisation of contemporary art practices and a practical non-art? or even an appropriation of what is in theatre its excess for the sake of renovating artistic practices?

Why should I give the opinions of a few disgruntled punters who seem to want reviewers to shit on everyone’s play the time of day?

Conducting detailed scans of the brain of a patient undergoing a near-death experience, scientists could find no evidence of any conscious activity. Indeed, there was found to be no room in the brain for consciousness when it is in the process of shutting down all its functions. However, on the patient recovering consciousness, something had been going on; the patient’s visions were consistent with some kind of mental activity not accounted for in the science.

This leads to the speculation that consciousness is mediated through the brain not located in the brain but all around. Rather than being centred in the brain, the brain is merely a filter.

Under certain conditions conscious experience that is normally filtered out might enter the brain, explaining the woman who suffered a severe brain trauma and on recovery found she suddenly had an expert grasp on quantum physics. She is still alive and currently at the forefront of her field in France. Then there are cases of people recovering from neurological insults to the brain or neuropathologies who find that they have mysteriously acquired languages of which they had no prior knowledge – the man who came back from such an event and found he could speak and understand Cantonese.

Consciousness is not produced by the brain but is already there for the brain to find. This is not a new idea but goes back to William James and Henri Bergson who were thinking along similar lines at the beginning of the twentieth century.

– The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, Penny Sartori

Minus theatre nonetheless researches theatre. It makes a point of differentiating theatre from itself in terms that it is not performance, not narration, storytelling, not colonial, parochial, and not a mode of art, as theatricality or exaggeration, but art itself.

Is it more a matter of the linkages between senses and how they can be blocked? Or broken?

Spritz reader … what this thing does is accelerate reading by flash-carding words at a ridiculous rate so the eye registers an image, an ideogram! and doesn’t scan. All it does is focus and … read. Word by word. At a ridiculous rate. I said that. A novel in 40 minutes. There’s something about the tactile and the eye. How does the eye feel about this? Haptic sense repressed.

“I don’t know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches us, our lives. He’s not very pleased with us.”

Obscure hierarchies

Is it more a matter of the linkages between the senses and how they can be blocked? or broken?

It’s clear there were other things with a strong hold on his attention.

You’re still very young. Do you ever feel angry?

The truth is beautiful.

Someone declared the pier unsafe.

It was all so wrong, she said.

Masters of Persia – a heavy metal band that uses the ancient language Persia and sometimes mixes it up and plays ancient Persian instrument in a heavy metal style – of course these guys (the lead singer is a girl, she reminds me of E.) live in exile, outside of Iran. And they’re both angry and religious, religiously angry – they practice Zoroastrianism. I haven’t found a clip.

A giant man is nodding off to sleep in the bus shelter.

He lurches forward and catching himself he pulls himself back up, waves, like a weed rooted in the ocean bed, pulling him back and forth… In the wash of sleep.

here’s a weird

document

a

sort of

for each man

kills

the thing he loves

for the internet

Standard Big Bang theory says that everything begins with a big bang, a huge explosion. Terrorists started the universe. But when you calculate how much high tech explosives these guys would have to have at their disposal to start the universe formation, they would need 10⁸⁰ tons of high tech explosives, compressed to a ball smaller than 1 centimeter, and ignite all of its parts exactly at the same time with precision better than 1 in 10,000.

…

According to inflationary theory, one may avoid many of these problems if the universe began in some special state, almost like a vacuum-like state. The simplest version of such a state involves something called “scalar field.” Remember electric and magnetic fields? Well, scalar field is even simpler, it does not point to any direction. If it is uniform and does not change in time, it is invisible like vacuum, but it may have lots of energy packed in it. When the universe expands, scalar field remains almost constant, and its energy density remains almost constant.

…

Think about the universe as a big box containing many atoms. When the universe expands two times, its volume grows eight times, and therefore the density of atoms decreases eight times. However, when the universe is filled with a constant scalar field, its energy density remains constant when the universe expands. Therefore when the size of the universe grows two times, the total energy of matter in the universe grows eight times. If the universe continues to grow, its total energy (and its total mass) rapidly becomes enormously large, so one could easily get all of these 10⁸⁰ tons of mater starting from almost nothing. That was the basic idea of inflation.

…

Not everyone knows that when the universe expands, the total energy of matter does change. The total energy of matter plus gravity does not change, and it amounts to exactly zero. So the energy conservation for the universe is always satisfied, but it is trivial: zero equals zero. But we are not interested in the energy of the universe as a whole; we are interested in the energy of matter.

If we can have a regime where we have some kind of instability where the initial zero energy can split into a very big positive energy of matter, and a very big negative energy of gravity, the total sum remains zero. But the total energy of matter can become as large as we want. This is one of the main ideas of inflation.

We have found how to start this instability, and how to stop it, because if it doesn’t stop, then it goes forever, and then it’s not the universe where we can we live. … My idea was how to start it, continue it, and eventually stop it without damaging the universe. …

…

… I could start in a red part of the universe, like in the Soviet Union, and you can start in a blue universe, and then, after inflation, after each part becomes exponentially large, each of us would look around and say, just like Einstein and Newton did: “This is the universe, this is the whole thing, it is single-colored.” And then some of us will try to explain why the universe must be red, and others will try to explain why the universe must be blue, all over the world. But now we know that from the point of view of inflation, it’s quite possible that our universe is divided into many regions with different properties. Instead of the cosmological principle that asserted that the whole world is the same everywhere and all of us must live in the parts of the universe with similar properties, we are coming to a more cosmopolitan perspective: We live in a huge inflationary multiverse. Some of us can live in its red parts, some can live in blue parts, and there is nothing wrong about this picture as long as each of its parts is enormously large because of inflation.

…

I found that in the first model of new inflation, which I invented back in 1981, the universe could expand 10⁸⁰⁰ times during the inflationary stage. It was surreal; we have never seen numbers like that in physics. When I was giving my first talks on new inflation at Lebedev Physical Institute, where I invented this theory, I had to apologize all the time, saying that 10⁸⁰⁰ was way too much. Probably later, I said, we’ll come to something more realistic, the numbers will decrease and everything will become smaller. But then I invented a better inflationary theory, the theory of chaotic inflation, and the number became 10^{1000000000000}. And then I found that inflation in this theory may continue eternally.

… [follow the link below to Andrei Linde’s talk because it is really an example of how the best theory and the best physics even if it involves the whole universe has a humorous quality and lots of funny stories] …

Interestingly, most of the books on astronomy still describe inflation as exponential expansion during the cosmological phase transitions; this theory was so popular that nobody even noticed that it died back in `82. But a year later, in ’83, I invented a different scenario, which was actually much simpler. It was chaotic inflation, and it did not require the universe to be hot to start with.

… I abandoned the idea of the cosmological phase transitions, metastability, false vacua …

In chaotic inflation, where the potential energy has the simplest parabolic form, no specifically flat pieces of potential are required, you just take a model like that, and if the field is sufficiently high, there are quantum fluctuations, and the scalar field wants to go down, but quantum fluctuations sometimes throw it higher. The probability of jumping high is very small, but if you jump, you are exponentially rewarded by the creation of huge amounts of new volume of the universe. You start with a tiny part of the universe, and then it just spreads and spreads. It’s like a chain reaction. It is called “branching diffusion process.”

…

In the paper of ’86 where I discovered eternal chaotic inflation, I also noted that if you have eternal inflation in string theory, then the universe will be divided into enormous number of different exponentially large parts with different properties corresponding to large number of different stringy vacua, and that’s an advantage. That was what later became string theory landscape.

… quantum fluctuations become essentially classical when the universe becomes large. They give rise to galaxy formation.

…

If you marry string theory with the theory of eternal inflation, then one can have one type of vacuum in one part of the universe, another vacuum in another part of the universe, and it is possible to jump from one vacuum to another due to quantum effects. Lenny Susskind gave this scenario a very catchy name, string theory landscape.

… when we’re talking about this vacuum state, vacuum state means homogenous state describing our three dimensions, three dimensions plus one. But the remaining six dimensions, they may squeeze like this, or they may squeeze like that. There are lots of different topologies in it. In addition to different topologies, there are different fields, which may exist in this six-dimensional space, so-called fluxes.

… in ’86 we did not know a single example of a stable string theory vacuum; we just expected that there should be exponentially many such vacua. In 2003 we learned how to find such vacua, and then it was realized that indeed there a lots and lots of them. So that is the present view.

… 10⁵⁰⁰ is an abnormally large number, it tells you how many choices of vacua do you have. You have this huge amount of possibilities. And by the way, there is a question, which many people ask: “How do you know?” How do we know that we have this multitude, that these other parts of the universe are somewhere inside our universe?

This is the picture: the universe is very, very big, and it is divided into parts. Here is one realization of the string of vacua. There, in the same universe, but far away from us, it’s a different vacuum. The guys here and there do not know about each other because they’re exponentially far apart. That’s important to understand in order to have a vision of the universe. It’s important that you have a choice. But if you do not see these parts, how do you know that they actually exist, and why do you care?

Usually I answer in the following way: If we do not have this picture, then we cannot explain many strange coincidences, which occur around us. Like why vacuum energy is so immensely small, incredibly small. Well, that is because we have many different vacua, and in those vacua where vacuum energy is too large, galaxies cannot form. In those vacua, where energy density is negative, the universe rapidly collapses, and in our vacuum the energy density is just right, and that is why we live here. That’s the anthropic principle. But you cannot use anthropic principle if you do not have many possibilities to choose from. That’s why multiverse is so desirable, and that’s what I consider experimental evidence in favor of multiverse.

…

How many possibilities are there? And the answer, and this is purely a combinatorial answer, is that if n is the number of times the size of the universe doubled during inflation, and you take 2³ⁿ, this will show you the volume of the universe after inflation. Where the volume grows by 2³ⁿ, the total number of possible configurations, which may occur there because of these quantum jumps, will be also proportional to 2³ⁿ. This will give you the total number of possible configurations of matter that you can produce during inflation, and this number typically is much, much greater than 10⁵⁰⁰.

… inflation goes forever, so one could even expect that this number is infinite. However, during eternal inflation each jump can be repeated; it can repeat itself. Scalar field jumps again to the state where it jumps again, to a state where it jumps again, and eventually it start producing identical configurations of matter.

Think about it this way: previously we thought that our universe was like a spherical balloon. In the new picture, it’s like a balloon producing balloons, producing balloons. This is a big fractal. The Greeks were thinking about our universe as an ideal sphere, because this was the best image they had at their disposal. The 20th century idea is a fractal, the beauty of a fractal. Now, you have these fractals. We ask, how many different types of these elements of fractals are there, which are irreducible to each other? And the number will be exponentially large, and in the simplest models it is about 10 to the degree 10, to the degree 10, to the degree 7. It actually may be much more than that, even though nobody can see all of these universes at once.

– Andrei Linde from here

Inflationary theory takes advantage of results from modern particle physics, which predicts that at very high energies there should exist peculiar kinds of substances which actually turn gravity on its head and produce repulsive gravitational forces. The inflationary explanation is the idea that the early universe contains at least a patch of this peculiar substance. It turns out that all you need is a patch; it can actually be more than a billion times smaller than a proton. But once such a patch exists, its own gravitational repulsion causes it to grow, rapidly becoming large enough to encompass the entire observed universe.

…

The inflationary theory gives a simple explanation for the uniformity of the observed universe, because in the inflationary model the universe starts out incredibly tiny. There was plenty of time for such a tiny region to reach a uniform temperature and uniform density … For the tiny universe with which the inflationary model begins, there is enough time in the early history of the universe for these mechanisms to work, causing the universe to become almost perfectly uniform. Then inflation takes over and magnifies this tiny region to become large enough to encompass the entire universe, maintaining this uniformity as the expansion takes place.

The “classical” world that we perceive, in which every object has a definite position and moves in a deterministic way, is really just the average of the different possibilities that the full quantum theory would predict. If you apply that notion here, it is at least qualitatively clear from the beginning that it gets us in the direction that we want to go. It means that the uniform density, which our classical equations were predicting, would really be just the average of the quantum mechanical densities, which would have a range of values which could differ from one place to another. The quantum mechanical uncertainly would make the density of the early universe a little bit higher in some places, and in other places it would be a little bit lower. So, at the end of inflation, we expect to have ripples on top of an almost uniform density of matter. It’s possible to actually calculate these ripples.

… we still don’t know what most of the universe is made out of.

The stuff we do know about — protons, neutrons, ordinary atoms and molecules — appear to comprise only about 5% of the mass of the universe.

– Alan Guth from here

My Faithful Mother Tongue