I’m now going to cash in two weeks out of the six annually I have just alotted myself as vacation from long-form blogging on stefangeens.com. When I return, I expect the site to have been redesigned, because site design to me is a bit like gardening — hands-on but aesthetically pleasing in prearticulate ways — and that is exactly the change I need“Whatever information aesthetics conveys is prearticulate — the connotation of the color and shapes of letters, not the meanings of the words they form. Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea. Those associations may be universal, the way Disney’s big-eyed animals play on the innate human attraction to babies. Or they may change from person to person, place to place, moment to moment.” Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style..

I’ve also been thinking about making changes to the kind of content I post. I’ve figured out the short essay format now, so I was toying with the idea of forbidding it — all English-language prose, actually — as an allowable form for future postings here. Since blogging should be a learning experience, I figured, I should allow myself to write only in Swedish, Dutch, French, and in English rhyming couplets.

I soon realized that not even I would want to read such a blog, so that would probably be taking things too far. Still, I like the idea of a blog aiming to minimize its readership as a means of staying true to itself, and to that end I think I will write more quirkily in the future, and lie on occassion, and blur fact and fiction when it suits me. I think that writing to the expectations of a readership can increase visits in the short term at the expense of what the author feels might be most important, just like a political party that gravitates towards the center in a bid at popularity loses its soul in the process. So consider this realignment an attempt to avert the fate of Sweden’s Folkpartiet.

Quirkiness? Minimizing readership? Here is an example of what I mean: Over the next few weeks I want to read/reread the following books: Lee Smolin’s Three Roads to Quantum Gravity; Gödel’s Proof; a very well-reviewed book (available free in its entirety online) on the Riemann Hypothesis; and the relevant bits about Rule 30 in Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (available online free as well). The reason? I need all four to explore the idea that there is no randomness, after all, at the quantum level in the universe, but that things are strictly determininistic, the result of unfathomably many simple processes leading to complex states for which there is no precise description shorter than actually running the universe from scratch — hence the ability of scientific equations to describe aggregate properties of systems but not predict exact statesEarlier posts about this stuff:
“Time is Discrete”
My Rule 30 Flash app. Is there something akin to Rule 30 dictating interactions between the smallest possible units of space-time, churning out complexity in the form of particles? Is that the Theory of Everything? I need to repolish my tools for understanding at least a bastardized version of such a possible ToE if and when it is discovered in my lifetime.

From an amazing online tutorial on the distribution of prime numbers.What do Riemann and Gödel have to do with this? For me, prime numbers represent a basic graininess in mathematics — The Riemann zeta function approximates their distribution, but cannot predict precisely when they occur, in my mind providing an analogy to how rule 30 might create grainy results at the quantum level that equations can only approximate in the aggregate. Meanwhile, Gödel mapped — using prime numbers — statements about numbers to statements about logic, and showed that just as there will always be new (prime) numbers that are not the product of smaller numbers, there will always be new truthful logical statements that are not provable using more basic axioms. (At least that’s my current layman’s understanding of his proof, but I may be off, and hence the need of a reread.) If an eventual Smolin/Makropoulou-Kalamara ToE posits the universe is a huge distributed computer, then Gödel’s work, dealing as it does with number patterns, would be directly applicable! It would be a beautiful way of showing how our universe’s logic and the basic quantum structure of space-time are inseparable, one the corollary of the other.

During the next few weeks, I will still be blogging away at MemeFirst. Meanwhile, also, check out Anthony Lane’s love letter to Ingmar Bergman in The New Yorker, on the occasion of a Bergman retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. It sounds like he actually flew to Stockholm a few weeks ago just to get in the mood:

The weekend before your first Bergman movie, take a flight to Stockholm and, once there, a ferry out to the islands. This will not be hard, the capital itself being composed of fourteen islands, and the archipelago to the east offering twenty-four thousand more. Nowhere in Europe can you quit civilization and find yourself in wilderness with such speed, and that transition alone is a key to the dreams of escape in early Bergman, and to his later nightmares about what we may discover in our isolation. Think of Monika and her beau, the camera pitching slightly on the prow of their boat as it chugs through the city and out into open water; think of the two women, the silent patient and her chattering nurse, who hole up on a stony isle in “Persona”; think, finally, of Bergman, who has based himself since 1966 on that same hideaway, Fårö, a hundred miles south of Stockholm, and who chose it, two years later, as the site of “Hour of the Wolf” and of his coruscating war film “Shame.” Thanks to jet lag, you will have a chance to follow the arc of a Swedish summer evening. All the passages in Bergman, you will realize, where the characters are too hazy and restive, and the heavens too bright, for any hope of repose are not just fanciful conceits or loaded metaphors. They are weather reports, and when the girl in “Summer Interlude” recalls, “There was no time to sleep,” she is referring not only to endless sex, fine proposition though that is, but to the sacramental whiteness of the nights.

Bergman’s evocations of Swedish summers have clearly been the catalyst for many a foreigner’s fantasies about Sweden, not least Lane’s. To see what he means, catch Summer with Monika if you can.