Allspace in a Notshall

Ever notice that as the capacity of data storage increases–and people’s perception of it also increases, the value of money decreases in conjunction?  I don’t mean the actual monetary value of money necessarily, but more people’s perception of the vastness of a given amount.

If you look at the current stimulus package of 2009, officially called the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009“, the numbers will startle you or should, but do they?  According to the New York times, the total amount of the bill is $789 billion:

On Jan. 28, 2009, the House of Representatives passed an $819 billion stimulus plan by a vote of 244 to 188. The measure passed without a single Republican vote in favor. Intensive negotiations in the Senate led three moderate Republicans to lend their support to an $838 billion version of the bill, getting Democrats over the 60-vote hurdle needed to prevent a filibuster. Final passage of the Senate measure on Feb. 10 by a 61 to 37 vote was followed by a whirlwind round of negotiations with the House that produced agreement the next day on a $789 billion final version of the bill.

If you click on the link to the wikipedia article of the break down of this stimulus package, you’ll see basically where the money is going to, but does the word “billion” seem to just wash over you without any effect of the reality of the word?

Let’s do a quick refresher: one billion is 10⁹, or 1,000,000,000.  So when you read the list you get sentences such as the education break down–which I have a great interest in–that look like this:

Education

Total: $90.9 billion

* $44.5 billion in aid to local school districts to prevent layoffs and cutbacks, with flexibility to use the funds for school modernization and repair (State Equalization Fund)
* $15.6 billion to increase Pell Grants from $4,731 to $5,350
* $13 billion for low-income public schoolchildren
* $12.2 billion for IDEA special education
* $2.1 billion for Head Start
* $2 billion for childcare services
* $650 million for educational technology
* $300 million for increased teacher salaries
* $250 million for states to analyze student performance
* $200 million to support working college students
* $70 million for the education of homeless children

Personally, I don’t even see the numbers or the math that operates behind the scenes. The words million and billion simply do not affect me anymore. I seem to not even notice them so that when I do think of the numbers, the only thing I visualize is “$650″ or “$200″. And of course, this could be due to the fact that as a college student surviving on two okay paying jobs and financial aid in the sum of loans, grants, and work-study, these numbers are the numbers I deal with in every day, mundane life.

Contrast that with just last years Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, who’s budget was a measly $152 billion.  And contrast that with Bill Clinton’s stimulus package of 1993 which around $30 billion.  What was the perception of this amount back then and how is it now?

Interestingly, I’ve noticed this perception with the hard drive space on the drives of my computer and the storage capacity of my MP3 player, as well as the lack of any storage space required for my newest internet obsession, last.fm.  I no longer think in terms of megabytes, but now my base-unit of the perception of storage is now done in gigabytes and terabytes.  I can remember thirteen years ago when the full install of Front Page Sports Football Pro ’96 was 28 megabytes and nearly wiped out the remaining space on the family computer.  And now, computer games’ installations are in gigabytes…

I don’t really have any conclusions to make, this is all just an observation, but on an intuitive level it feels to be on to something.  The vastness of the world has been parred down by our technology and, so it seems, has our perceptions of some of our must fundamental concepts been parred down as well.  What is the end goal?  Where is the end goal? What does it look like?  Maybe our idea of reality is changing for the ultimate realization of this end goal….  Who the hell knows!  But I wouldn’t have my being here to see it any other way.  Bring it.

***Quick Update***

Found this article this morning on a possible breakthrough in data storage, very interesting:

Scientists claim big leap in nanoscale storage

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I finally started posting my creative writing pieces to my site.  I decided that I will not be posting any of them here on Allspace in Notshall, but will leave the blog as just my method of writing what I’m currently feeling is important.

Please head on over and give the pieces a quick read and let me know what you think.  I appreciate it.

As always, send me a link to your own site and I’d love to see what you’re doing and writing about.

I’m a James Joyce nut and an amateur Wakean–a reader of Finnegans Wake.  I’ve been reading the book for a few years now and have not made it very far.  I’m comfortable with that.  It’s too much for me to take on seriously at this moment but that does not stop me from opening the book and reading passages from it.  Here, here’s a random part from the book, no meaning attached to it at all:

Arrest thee, scaldbrother! came the evangelion, sabre accusant, from all Saint Joan’s Wood to kill or maim him, and be dumm but ill s’arrested. Et would proffer to his delected one the his trifle from the grass.

And no, I did not make any mistakes typing that out. That is how the Wake is. Puns aplenty with portmanteaus abundant.

What does this have to with anything?  Well, nothing really, but sort of riding-in-the-same-train-car as my last post, Finnegans Wake has always been synchronistic for me.  Many times I have been wondering something or pondering life’s questions and I’ll open up the book to a random page and read it.  Little did I know that there was actually a term for what I was doing.

Bibliomancy: the act of using a book as a divination tool.

And speaking again of synchronicity, it was only a few weeks ago that I picked up Lon Milo DuQuette‘s “The Book of Ordinary Oracles”, which mentions bibliomancy, as well as a more specific form of Mark Twain bibliomancy.  Please checkout the book, it’s great, as is everything DuQuette writes.

So, I thought I’d pose a question to the universe, nothing specifically regarding myself, but one that would affect others as well.  And then I’d use Finnegans Wake to try to get an answer to the question.  Recently, on the front page of my website, I posed the question in poll-form, “Will the new stimulus package actually stimulate anything?”  My answers I provided in the poll were humorous, but the events responsible for it are not, obviously, but I wanted to keep the answer from Finnegans Wake humorous.  And this is what I got, I take no responsibilities for the answer:

Well, he was ever himself for the presentation of crudities to animals for he had put his own nickelname on every road, duck and herring before the climber clomb aloft, doing the midhill of the park, flattering his bitter hoolft with her conconundrums. He would let us have three barrels. Such was a bitte to thikke for the Muster of the hoose so as he called down on the Grand Precurser who coiled him a crawler of the dupest dye and thundered at him to flatch down off the erection and be aslimed of himself for the bellance of hissch leif.

Is that an answer? Depends on how much work you’re willing to put in to find out, but as DuQuette says in his oracle book, the oracle is always right.

Thoughts?

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I think I may be living in a sense of extreme Déjà vu or synchronicity.  It’s hard to explain what I mean by this, but that’s the reason for this post: to explain it.

Bill Hicks

Bill Hicks used to close his performances with the infamous “Young Man on Acid” bit, where he would say:

“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration — that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

And lately this thought will fire in to my brain and weird things immediately follow.  The first time, as I sat in my German class, the thought, “We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively”, struck my brain and I could no longer focus on the words that came from the Professor’s mouth.  I could only look around the room at the other students’ faces.  I think I even faintly remember the sound of the room became muted.  I could not get the thought out of my head that I knew these people.  I knew the color and style of the their clothing was exactly the colors and styles they should be wearing; that I had seen every one of their faces before; that they were supposed to be here, and at this very particular and peculiar moment, everything, to my completely subjective perspective was exactly as it should be.

Now this overall thought isn’t always accompanied by those pleasant and life-affirming thoughts of “as it should be” but there seems to be a slight melancholy mood that looks and peers and spies out beneath the surface of the pleasant thoughts, waiting for a specific time in order to make itself known. It’s almost like the magic of a movie that you get utterly involved in: the plots, the characters, the rise and fall of action along with your emotions, but eventually comes to end with that final fade-to-black and first credit: “Directed By…”.  I used to always hate that part and it’s how I’ve become to dread those moments.  Because for those scant few times that everything does actually seem to be in place and as it should be, they only last a few moments and only more questions are the result after they fade from memory, like every movie that only goes on for a few hours.

That’s how I felt as I sat there looking at every face I know that I knew.  And I knew that this moment would quickly follow with that melancholy mood.  When it comes, the lighting of the room looks as if it changes its hue to the strange mixture of magenta and dark green–somehow as my association of sadness. The regular thoughts of the day then come cascading down against my head and I remember global world affairs, the state of the economy, the people struggling with the changing collective consciousness—the shedding of current modes of belief for other ones (I hate to use the term ‘enlightenment’).  The sound returns to normal, I remember that I’ve German to learn, as well as other classes and that I’ve got things at home that need taken care of.

I’m not sure what’s been causing this current mode of thinking but I know that I’ve been noticing the increase in these kinds of experiences.  I will catch myself reading a book that seems I should be reading, that I will then read about on the internets and that people I know outside of school and work also are reading it and talking about it.  I will mention something to a friend at work and he will be experience the exact same thing I just did.

I don’t know how to explain it other than by what Terence McKenna called the “Transcendental Object at the End of Time”, which seems to be pulling us towards itself.  There’s something out there that threatens the horizon and we’re racing rapidly towards it as our connections to it accelerate in perfect synchronization.

It’s the only thing that even slightly makes sense in my mind that could help explain everything I’m going through.  Everything is connecting to everything else,  as all the while, forces on the opposite try their best to stop or break these connections.

Too bad for them because it’s bigger than them.  Good luck, I say, and I’ll see you at the end.

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Was listening to some music tonight and a song began playing called Scilly Automatic, by the artist “Ott”.  It’s a great song and you can listen to it for free here.

It’s got a great bassline, good beats and some killer melodica melodies.  But it’s not until the song hits the sample does the track get really interesting, for me anyway.  I’m almost positive the speaker at the 4:09 mark is Alan Watts: the great western teacher of Zen Buddhism and psychedelic explorer, with some nasty Soundwave-from-Transformers effects on it.

The words are as follows:

They took animals apart. They took flowers apart. They took rocks apart. And then when they cut everything to its tiniest pieces, they tried to find methods of taking those apart too, so that we could eventually discover what the very smallest small things were, and hoping that that would lead us to an understanding of how life works.

Man himself in all his puzzle looked upon as a creation. Something made. Lonely. If you believe in the world in accordance with the fully automatic model, you’ve really got to admit that man too is fully automatic. In other words, he is a machine rather than a person. ‘How do you do, I am a perso, I am alive, I am sensible, I talk, I have feelings.’ But you wonder, do you really? Or are you just… an automaton?

And then at the end of the song:

Looking out on the world is strange, and that is not me (??). I am the most likely to meet into the worlds of consciousness, between the darkness and the darkness. And that isn’t too happy, I would like to be able to believe that it was more than that. If I could, like so many of us say, if I could only still believe that there is an intelligent and eternal god, in whose eyes I am important, and who has the power to enable me to live forever, that would be very nice. But for many people, that’s an extrordinarily difficult thing to believe.

And since I was in the correct frame of mind at the time, the words really got to me and made me start thinking about people and who and what they really are; just general life-type questions.  I began writing some of my thoughts down, which I’ll post later when I feel they’re finished, but I wanted to quickly share some cool stuff regarding the speaker, Alan Watts.

Now, I’ve been listening to Alan Watts’ lectures for a few good years now and I’m a huge fan of his. I’ve also got a few books of his, but I haven’t really read them as there is a lot of information in his lectures that I have still to devour. But I’ve always loved listening to him speak because has a beautiful gift of explaining the absurd in an hilarious and mind-splitting way–much like Terence McKenna.  Watts has the greatest laugh too which is really infectious.  It seems as if he knows a lot more about the secret of life than most did and it’s trying to escape, but he’s holding in it because he’s enjoying himself too much.

So I spent a few minutes searching for some great Alan Watts clips to post here and I found my way here, which has some amazing short videos of South Park-stype animation with recordings of Alan Watts talking about various subjects.  Be sure to checkout “Life and Music”.  I think it’s got really good message.  Ponder it for a second…or longer.

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