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Art

Martins Dogo

art exploration people

An ongoing computational exploration of art.

An ongoing computational exploration of art

Ben Enwonwu

Martins Dogo

art people

I recently discovered Ben Enwonwu. Many of his paintings fascniate me and I'm trying to learn more about him, and other Nigerian artists. This notebook contains an ongoing exploration of his biography and art.

Ben Enwonwu

Covid-19 Exploration

Martins Dogo

data

The following notebook contains an exploration I did during the summer of 2020 on Covid-19. It's also available on Github.

Dynamic

Martins Dogo

exploration programming

import React from "react"; import { LiveProvider, LiveEditor, LiveError, LivePreview } from 'react-live'; import theme from 'prism-react-renderer/themes/nightOwlLight';

This is a collection of different types/sources of dynamic objects, i.e., computational artefacts that are interactive and responsive. What distinguishes these from other kinds of embedded objects is that these allow you some degree of freedom, whereas others simply render a playback.

Beyond interaction, they also facilitate creativity—possibilities that are to some extent boundless. However, they're restrained by the bounds of this medium, the web browser, which is itself restrained by the medium of the computer.

Wolfram Notebook

I've previously written about Wolfram Notebooks. This is a blank one. Here are some things to try: N[Pi,50], Now, {Sunrise[],Sunset[]} WikipediaData["Computer","SummaryPlaintext"], GeoGraphics[GeoMarker[]].

React Live

Dynamically updated code/preview using React Live. Edit the code to update the text in real-time.

Hello world!

`}>

Hello there!
Edit the code to update this text.

`}>

Observable

Phyllotaxis arrangement by Dunstan Orchard on Observable. Play around, create patterns.

OpenStreetMap

A map from OpenStreetMap. Find a river.

E.F. Schumacher

Martins Dogo

people

Life of Schumacher

The following notebook contains an exploration of Schumacher's biography.

E.F. Schumacher — exploration of biography

Books

This notebook contains an exploration of Schumacher's books and other books written about his life and work.

E.F. Schumacher — exploration of books

Explanations

Martins Dogo

philosophy science

In The Structure of Science (subtitled The Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation), the philosopher Ernest Nagel outlined four kinds of explanations that are common in scientific works. They are the following, each briefly explained [1, 2]:

Deductive explanations: in these, the thing being explained (explicandum) is a valid logical conclusion of an argument that must have more than one premise. Having established good reasons for them to be true, these premises should: have some initial conditions; a general law; and, entail the conclusion, but not be entailed by it.
Probabilistic explanations: in these, the premises for explanation do not lead to a logical conclusion of the explicandum, but they make it probable.
Functional or teleological explanations: whereby the explicandum is explained in terms of its function in a larger system or in causing something.
Genetic explanations: in this case, a sequence of real events constitute the premises for an explanation. It is impossible to explain a thing without following its complete history of occurrences.

[1] Ayer, A. J., and Ernest Nagel. Scientific American 204, no. 6 (1961): 197-203. Accessed April 13, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24937499.

[2] Hendriks-Jansen, H. (1996). In Praise of Interactive Emergence or why Explanations Don't Have to Wait for Implementations. In Boden, Margaret A. (ed.) (1996). The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Oxford University Press.

A sense of historical perspective

Martins Dogo

exploration history

I recently read Arundhati Roy's the god of small things for the first time, which I enjoyed and reckon I might reread in the future. It inspirited me to muse on the past — places, cultures, histories — and on the present, too. What's changed, and what hasn't, where and why(?).

One of my favourite parts of the book is where Chacko narrates a brief history of planet Earth to the twins:

Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of Historical Perspective [...], he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old woman—as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was 11 years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jelly fish, appeared only when she was forty, She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

“The whole of human civilization as we know it [...] began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin. [...] the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.”

— Arundhati Roy, the god of small things (pp. 52-53)

This made me curious: about the accuracy of Chacko's figures, and especially about oceans and mountains. So I decided to indulge an exploration of this, in a wolfram-notebook.

Age of the earth

The earth, according to Chacko was four thousand six hundred million years old (which is 4.6 billion years, and approximately correct).

And Earth Woman's age is ten-billionth of earth's age.

Oceans

“We're Prisoners of War,” Chacko said. “Our dreams have been doctored. We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”

— p. 52

Definitions, first. Here are the (relevant) definitions of words related to oceans. I'm selecting only definitions which contain at least one of the other words in the word list.

One can use OceanData to retrieve a dataset of world oceans and other water bodies that flow from them. Note that this isn't a complete list of all water bodies around the world, but it's an extensive one nonetheless.

I now have a dataset of 247 water bodies and 16 properties for each one. Of course, there are some missing values, but there's still enough for an interesting exploration. Here are the top ten rankings by some of the columns.

What do all these numbers mean? Let's turn them into figures — this may give us a better perspective. This map shows the coverage of the oceans and seas:

This map shows the elevation of the world, and it shows that earth is more or less as high as it is deep:

The map has a resolution of 20 contours, so it can be more detailed than it currently is. But you can see Mount Everest. This map shows the salinity of some of the water bodies (some values are missing in the dataset):

For each ocean, we can get its bordering bodies of water and basins (bights, seas, straits, etc.). And for each sea or whatever, we can get its basins and major rivers. So we can create a graph of the connectivity/adjacency between water bodies:

The orange edges show connections between oceans and seas. the purple ones connect oceans/seas to basins, while the blue edges link oceans to their major rivers.

We have precise centre geo-coordinates for the oceans and seas, but not for rivers. We can plot this graph on a map to show the relative positions of the vertices:

In the map above, an arrow points from A to B, if B is a bordering waterbody, or a basin, of A. Remember that this does not include rivers, but I'll return to those later on.

The motive for all this is to better understand how the water bodies on earth relate to one another. What flows into what; where and how quickly? Those kinds of questions. Luckily, we've got some data on rivers that's useful, e.g., information on discharge, drainage, source, outflow, etc. Again, there are some missing data points, but hopefully, there's enough to learn something new and interesting from.

TBC.

Information Disorder

Martins Dogo

data research

I'm currently researching misinformation and disinformation using machine learning. These are kinds of deceptive information commonly called fake news, though I prefer the term Information Disorder. I recently published an exploratory paper on the current direction of my research. If you're interested, I'm curating information and tools for researching and learning about fake news in this Github repository. I'm compiling some of them in this note.

Resources

Information disorder research: resources for research on various kinds of information disorder, such as fake news, rumours and satire.
News and media literacy: resources for teaching and learning news and media literacy.
Podcasts and talks: if you prefer listening to reading, here are some interesting talks and conversations on the matter.

Publications

I'm continuously analysing research papers (mainly from arXiv) and other publications on 'fake news'. The following notebook contains what I've gathered so far.

James Baldwin

Martins Dogo

people

Jazz

Martins Dogo

art music people

An ongoing computational exploration of Jazz music.

An ongoing computational exploration of Jazz music

John Berger

Martins Dogo

people

Jupyter Notebooks

Martins Dogo

notebooks programming

In addition to wolfram-notebooks, I can now render Jupyter Notebooks on this site! This note briefly explores one.

Knowledge maps

Martins Dogo

exploration history

An exploration of knowledge maps, from various fields of study.

Système Figuré des Connaissances Humaines (c. 1783) (Figurative System of Organisation of Human Knowledge) — Jean le Rond d'Alembert & Denis Diderot, from Encyclopédie. [Original] [English]

Listening

Martins Dogo

The following are quotes on listening and silence, in different contexts.

Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season [...] Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was—into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets—to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. [...] Estha occupied very little space in the world.

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (p. 12)

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

— Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
(Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Translated by C.K. Ogden)

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud with subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

— Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry

Living

Martins Dogo

The following are quotes on living, in different contexts.

Audré Lorde, in A Burst of Light:

Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition.

I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a furm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity.

Maya Angelou

Martins Dogo

people

Meta Note

Martins Dogo

import nightwind from "nightwind/helper";

Inspiration

I discovered the idea of the Digital Garden while roaming Maggie Appleton's site. This was around the end of summer 2020. I had just created my blog and was looking for a way to add Tuftesque sidenotes to posts.

Further reading led me to Andy Matuschak's site, which I believe is the origin of this theme, and eventually to Aravind Balla's notes. I'd been thinking of taking computable notes using Wolfram Notebooks, and Aravind's layout seemed ideal for what I had in mind. I like the idea of computational notebooks and I use them for note taking. With this medium, I'm exploring new ways of extending Wolfram Notebooks.

Wolfram notebooks would make such a great computable notes app.
— @m_arti, February 7, 2020

I like how plain and simple the layout is, and the seamless linking and transitions between notes. I also like that I can do my note-taking inside a Wolfram Notebook and publish it straight away. Notebooks are versatile and dynamic. A Wolfram Notebook can take the form of a formal document or a computational essay. Cells can be hidden automatically and only revealed when hovered over. One can set a background of any colour. Youtube videos, Soundcloud tracks and Bing maps can be embedded. These are just a few things one can do with them on the web.

It's possible to create a notebook-centric version of this theme. Pages will essentially be embedded notebooks (Julia, Jupyter, Wolfram, etc.). For Wolfram Notebooks, docked cells can hold tags and other meta information on each note. There's a potentially more serious issue: should Wolfram Cloud—for instance, which hosts Wolfram Notebooks—someday collapse, so shall the entire theme. Wolfram Notebooks aren't currently so widely used as to be hosted by third-party organisations.

How it works

Framework: This site is built with Gatsby, which claims to be "the fastest frontend for the modern web." It's hosted on Netlify. There is an RSS feed and a sitemap.
Design/Style: The original theme is here; my version has some edits. Styling is done with Tailwind CSS—speed and simplicity.

For dark mode, I use a Tailwind plugin called Nightwind. It simplifies the handling of colours that change when switching between light ⇄ dark modes. I give your device's dark mode setting precedence—changing it on your device will override that of this site. Click/tap this button to toggle: <button class="text-2xl align-middle" onClick={() => nightwind.toggle()}>◑. I use use-sound, to play a short audio clip whenever the buttons are clicked.

To match the style of embedded Wolfram Notebooks to that of notes, I use a stylesheet. The matching isn't quite exact—e.g., this site uses the font 'SF Pro', while notebooks use 'Source Sans Pro'. To stylise a notebook, I run the following from within that notebook:
```
SetOptions[EvaluationNotebook[],
StyleDefinitions -> Import["https://wolfr.am/U7U6ZSd2"]]
```
Notes: This thing you're currently reading is a note. Notes are .mdx files. MDX combines the strengths of Markdown and JSX (an extension of Javascript for creating React elements). Here's a brief demo (from within this note) of how both can be used:

— Markdown:
*Italic text in Markdown. Default background.*
Italic text in Markdown. Default background.

— JSX:
```
<div style={{fontStyle:'italic', backgroundColor:'seagreen'}}>
<p>Italic text in JSX. Sea green background.</p>
</div>
```
Italic text in JSX. Sea green background.

— JSX + Tailwind:
```
<div class="italic text-white bg-indigo-500">
<p>Italic text in JSX. Indigo background.</p>
</div>
```
Italic text in JSX. Indigo background.

Images are rendered with gatsby-plugin-image, and thanks to Lauren Ashpole's react-inner-image-zoom, you can click on an image in a note to zoom.

Banana tree (Martins Dogo, 2020)
Watecolour and goauche on paper.

One of the cool things about this is that you can zoom multiple images in multiple notes, at the same time.
Notes graph and search: Clicking on the ⁘ button shows a graph of all notes; credit to Mathieu Dutour for creating this very useful component. Thanks to Algolia, you can search for notes by clicking the ⊹ button.
Definitions/Jargon: You may have noticed that some words (with a ? aloft) have an attached definition that pops up when you hover over them, e.g. tesseract and Hypercubegraph. These are created using a Gatsby plugin rather appropriately called jargon.
Math: MDX makes documents easily customisable. You can render mathematical text and symbols using ${\KaTeX}$— $9 × 8$ becomes $9 × 8$, for example.
Embeddings: I embed Wolfram Notebooks and other items from various sites such as Soundcloud and Vimeo using iframe.

Why this way

Learning: Life-long learning. The goal of this site is to learn from/about the things I write and through the process of doing so. Additionally, I'm learning some skills—web development/design, Javascript, etc.—through the process of adding features to the site and maintaining it.
Curation: Of interlinked notes, ideas, knowledge, questions, etc. that I find interesting. But also of computational artefacts which evolve.
Simplicity: At least, by way of presentation and interaction. Notes are intended to be short and simple. If a note matures into some lengthy disquisition, it ideally should be moved to my blog. There are several features here but each one has a purpose. I'd like to think that this is the least simple note you'll come across, as it demos all the features. Embeds, for instance, are one source of complexity, because the embedded object introduces its own interface, etc. However, within notes, I may need to link dynamic information.

Aspirations

Automate refreshing of meta notebook.
Make internal links in embedded notebooks open as a stacked page, and not as a new page in the same/new browser tab.
Create a Wolfram Notebook version of this theme as I described above.

Meta notebook

This is a notebook which analyses the contents of site. For now I'll be updating its contents manually. Though in the future I might make it auto-update say, once every week, or whenever I add new note.

Meta Notebook

Note-taking

Martins Dogo

notebooks

Note-taking is an essential activity even beyond a formal learning environment. In notebooks, we save ideas, stories, photos, lists, sketches, and other pieces of information we'd rather not lose. And each time we return to them, the contents give us a somewhat—or at times, markedly—different impression. We return to our notes with new knowledge and tested perspectives, so it's no surprise that one might be astounded by what one wrote the previous year.

But should notes be stagnant? Certain kinds of information are immutable (and we'd like to maintain that constancy), and other kinds change all the time. The sort of notes I aim to gather is the mix. For example, I hope to curate poems, as well as biographical information on their authors. Also, wouldn't it be great if mutable information contained in a note updated itself?

For this reason, it makes sense to me for notes on this medium to be computable, wherever necessary. I've used Wolfram and Jupyter Notebooks extensively. I think both are great, especially for scientific endeavours, but my preference is the former. I've written about Wolfram Notebooks, and on this site I use the symbol to highlight them.

Other poems

Martins Dogo

people poetry

Some other poems I like.

blessing the boats — Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Kindness — Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead [1] by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Love After Love — Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Phase One — Dilruba Ahmed

For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions
after childbirth, brought on by loss
of sleep. And when the baby woke
repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, “What’s your beef?”
I forgive your letting vines
overtake the garden. For fearing
your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag
en route from San Francisco;
for the equally heedless drive back
on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns
your voice. For so admiring
the drummer you failed to hear
the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling
in gutters. Gushing from pipes.
A great steady rain of olives
from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness.
With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen
gray pigeons. Ointment reserved
for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.

Notes

[1] Sadly, this was based on a real event, which Shihab Nye narrates here:

Paintings and Drawings

Martins Dogo

art

Some of my art.

2020

Banana tree
Watecolour and goauche on paper.

Untitled
Watecolour and goauche on paper.

2021

Untitled
Watecolour and goauche on paper.

Favourite poems by Adrienne Rich

Martins Dogo

people poetry

These are some of my favourite poems by Adrienne Rich.

Atlas of the Difficult World, XIII (Dedications)

From An Atlas of the Difficult World.

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour.      I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.      I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
                          up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age.      I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing
else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

1990–1991

Cartographies of Silence

From The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977.

A conversation begins
with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature

A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.

The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone

the syllables uttering
the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word

The technology of science
The rituals, the etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

The silence that strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn

The scream
of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
This is useless to you and perhaps to others

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything–

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew

It if could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, these conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green

Diving into the Wreck

From Diving into the Wreck - Poems 1971-1972.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

For a Friend in Travail

From An Atlas of the Difficult World.

Waking from violence: the surgeon’s probe left in the foot
paralyzing the body from the waist down.
Dark before dawn: wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house
the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,
half-slice of moon to the south
through dark panes. A time to speak to you.

What are you going through? she said, is the great question.
Philosopher of oppression, theorist
of the victories of force.

We write from the marrow of our bones. What she did not
ask, or tell: how victims save their own lives.

That crawl along the ledge, then the ravelling span of fibre
strung
from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.
Waking, not sure we made it. Relief, appallment, of waking.
Consciousness. O, no. To sleep again.
O to sleep without dreaming.

How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon
melting into moon-colored air
moist and sweet, here on the western edge.
Love for the world, and we are part of it.

How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes
she did not tell.
What are you going through, there on the other edge?

1990

For the Record

From Your Native Land, Your Life.

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions

and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

From Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth : Poems 2004-2006.

It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die

walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something

more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary

but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time

into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous

beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction

—beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room

These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens

they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle's snout
right inthe woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument,
each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!

Knowing themselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn...
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.

When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine--
is this fertillisante douleur? Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?

"To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence."
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were--fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition--
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes, think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time's precious chronic invalid,--
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us--
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.
For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.

Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.

See other notes on poems and books.

Favourite poems by Rita Dove

Martins Dogo

people poetry

These are some of my favourite poems by Rita Dove.

Some people's minds run from point A to point B with the linear determination of an express bus roaring from stop to distant stop. Theirs are minds trained to avoid detours, to cut a path past the alleys and side streets of distraction. Rita's mind is more like the water of a stream swirling randomly, chaotically and unpredictably over the stones below as it still flows resolutely downstream... Rita is not like those who see tangential thoughts as distracting digressions: "I'm interested in the sidetracking."

— Walt Harrington, The Shape of Her Dreaming — Rita Dove Writes a Poem (1995, The Washington Post)

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

The Fish in the Stone

The fish in the stone
would like to fall
back into the sea.

He is weary
of analysis, the small
predictable truths.
He is weary of waiting
in the open,
his profile stamped
by a white light.

In the ocean the silence
moves and moves

and so much is unncessary!
Patient, he drifts
until the moment comes
to cast his
skeletal blossom.

The fish in the stone
knows to fail is
to do the living
a favor

He knows why the ant
engineers a gangster's
funeral, garish
and perfectly amber.
He knows why the scientist
in secret delight
strokes the fern's
voluptuous braille.

Mother Love

Who can forget the attitude of mothering?
Toss me a baby and without bothering
To blink I'll catch her, sling him on a hip.
Any woman knows the remedy for grief
is being needed: duty bugles and we'll
climb out of exhaustion every time,

bare the nipple or tuck in the sheet,
heat milk and hum at bedside until
they can dress themselves and rise, primed
for Love or Glory—those one-way mirrors
girls peer into as their fledging heroes slip
through, storming the smoky battlefield.

So when this kind woman approached at the urging
of her bouquet of daughters
(one for each of the world's corners,
one for each of the winds to scatter!)
and offered up her only male child for nursing
(a smattering of flesh, noisy and ordinary),
I put aside the lavish trousseau of the mourner
for the daintier comfort of pity:
I decided to save him. Each night
I laid him on the smoldering embers,
sealing his juices in slowly so he might
be cured to perfection. Oh, I know it
looked damning: at the hearth a muttering crone
bent over a baby sizzling on a spit
as neat as a Virginia ham. Poor human—
to scream like that, to make me remember.

November for Beginners

Snow would be the easy
way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won't give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!

Poems from 'Twelve Chairs'

First Juror

Proof casts a shadow;
doubt is to walk
onto a field
at high noon
one tendril
held to
the
wind.

Second Juror

A stone to throw
A curse to hurl
A silence to break
A page to write
A day to live
A blank
To fill

Third Juror

between the lip
and the kiss
between the hand
and the fist
between rumor
and prayer
between dungeon
and tower
between fear
and liberty
always
between

Tenth Juror

Tragedy
involves
one.
History
involves many
toppling
one
after
another.

Twelfth Juror

why is the rose
how is the sun
where is first
when is last
who will
love us
what
will
save
us

The Alternate

—And who are you?
—Nobody.
—What do you do?
—I am alive.
But who'll vouch
for you?
—Listen closely,
you'll hear
the
wind.

Pithos

Climb
into a jar
and live
for a while.

Chill earth.
No stars
in this stone
sky.

You have ceased
to ache.

Your spine is
a flower.

On the Road to Damascus

And it came to pass, that, as I made my
journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus
about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven
a great light round about me. And I fell to the
ground . . .

ACTS 22:6–7

They say I was struck down by the voice of an angel:
flames poured through the radiant fabric of heaven
as I cried out and fell on my knees.

My fist recollection was of Unbroken Blue—
but two of the guards have already sworn by
the tip of my tongue set ablaze. As an official,

I recognize the lure of a good story:
useless to suggest that my mount
had stumbled, that I was pitched into a clump

of wild chamomile, its familiar stink
soothing even as my plans sprang blisters
under the nicked leaves. I heard shouts,

the horse pissing in terror—but my eyes
had dropped to my knees, and I saw nothing.
I was a Roman and had my business

among the clouded towers of Damascus.
I had not counted on earth rearing,
honey streaming down a parched sky,

a spear skewering me to the dust of the road
on the way to the city I would never
enter now, her markets steaming with vendors

and compatriots in careless armor lifting a hand
in greeting as they call out my name,
only to find no one home.

Straw Hat

In the city, under the saw-toothed leaves of an oak
overlooking the tracks, he sits out
the last minutes before dawn, lucky
to sleep third shift. Years before
he was anything, he lay on
so many kinds of grass, under stars,
the moon's bald eye opposing.

He used to sleep like a glass of water
held up in the hand of a very young girl.
Then he learned he wasn't perfect, that
no one was perfect. So he made his way
North under the bland roof of a tent
too small for even his lean body.

The mattress ticking he shares in the work barracks
is brown and smells
from the sweat of two other men.
One of them chews snuff:
he's never met either.
To him, work is a narrow grief
and the music afterwards
is like a woman
reaching into his chest
to spread it around. When he sings

he closes his eyes.
He never knows when she'll be coming
but when she leaves, he always
tips his hat.

Under the Viaduct, 1932

He avoided the empty millyards,
the households towering
next to the curb. It was dark
where he walked, although above him
the traffic was hissing.

he poked a trail in the mud
with his tin-capped stick.
If he had a son this time
he would teach him how to step

between his family and the police,
the mob bellowing
as a kettle of communal soup
spilled over a gray bank of clothes. . . .

The pavement wobbled, loosened by rain.
he liked it down here
where the luck of the mighty
had tumbled,

black suit and collarbone.
He could smell the worms stirring in their holes.
He could watch the white sheet settle
while all across the North Hill Viaduct

tires slithered to a halt.

Variation on Guilt

Count it anyway he wants—
by the waiting room clock,
by the lengthening hangnail,
by his buttons, the cigars crackling
in cellophane—

no explosion. No latch clangs
home. Perfect bystander, high
and dry with a scream caught
in his throat, he looks down

the row of faces coddled
in anxious pride. Wretched
little difference, he thinks,
between enduring pain and
waiting for pain
to work on others.

The doors fly apart—no,
he wouldn't run away!
It's a girl, he can tell by that smirk, that strut of a mountebank!

But he doesn't feel a thing.
Weak with rage,
Thomas deals the cigars,
spits out the bitter tip in tears.

See other notes on poems and books.

Rita Dove

Martins Dogo

people poetry

Scientists

Martins Dogo

data people

I am curating dataset of popular scientists from all over the world, based on Eric Weisstein's World of Science. In the notebook below I show how I've curated the data and how I'm dealing with real-world entities.

My goal is to eventually submit this dataset to the Wolfram Data Repository, and do an Exploratory Data Analysis (see explorations) on it.

Scientists dataset curation

Seeing

Martins Dogo

The following are quotes on seeing, in different contexts.

James Baldwin, in a 1984 interview with Jordan Elgrably at the Paris Review:

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.
Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer...

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise...

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
René Magritte, in a 1965 radio interview with Jean Neyens, regarding his 1964 painting The Son of Man:

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Silence

Martins Dogo

silence /ˈsʌɪləns/

NOUN
1. Complete absence of sound.
1.1 The fact or state of abstaining from speech.
1.2 The avoidance of mentioning or discussing something.
1.3 A short appointed period of time during which people stand still and do not speak as a sign of respect for a dead person or group of people.

— Lexico

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
(Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Translated by C.K. Ogden)

In Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry, Paul Goodman wrote: “not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each.” He then enumerated nine kinds of silence:

— the dumb silence of slumber or apathy;
— the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face;
— the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts;
— the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”;
— the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity;
— the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear;
— the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud with subvocal speech but sullen to say it;
— baffled silence;
— the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Boston's NPR News Station (WBUR) made a wonderful programme on sound, music, and listening. The first episode of the series opens with a reading of Goodman's list:

In this collection of stories and reflections on silence, a lady called Amanda narrates her experience, as she regains her ability to hear. Her story reminds me of Gwen, in the short film This is Normal. In it, “Gwen risks her friends, culture, and identity to discover the answer to the question, 'Is it worth giving up who you've been for the 'maybe' you could become?'”.

Hearing—or being able to listen, to pay attention to someone or something—is precious. Thankfully, people are still able to communicate with their loved ones, in spite of the lockdowns. Though, being absorbed in a constant stream of voices can be overwhelming. The voices in the TV; on the phone, on Zoom, or Teams; the flux of voices on one's timeline, imagined and actual; the voices in music... All these can easily amass into a perpetual clamour.

Occasional retreat into silence is important. This is not the same as doing or listening to nothing. The episode rounds off with the sagacious words and voice of Pico Iyer who reminds us that,

We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.

Silence makes room, for us to become aware of—even familiar with—parts of ourselves, yet hidden to us. It makes room for the dear ones in our lives. “In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.”

In her journal, the poet Rita Dove wrote that what she loved about her writing cabin “is the absolute quiet”. Dove emphasises what sort of silence it is she wallows in whilst writing:

Oh, not the dead silence of a studio, a silence so physical that you begin to gasp for air; and it's not the allegorical silence of an empty apartment, with its creaks and sniffles and traffic a dull roar below, and the neighbors' muffled treading overhead. No, this is the silence of the world: birds shifting weight on branches, the branches squeaking against other twigs, the deer hooosching through the woods... It's a silence where you can hear your blood in your chest, if you choose to listen.

* * *

silence /ˈsʌɪləns/

VERB [with object]
1. Prohibit or prevent from speaking.
1.1 Stop or suppress (a sound or noise); cause to become silent.

— Lexico

If only we'd listen, and bear its weight. Because silence isn't just some benign companion, one whom we can call up or turn to at a whim. It isn't merely a subtraction. “Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence”, Adrienne Rich cautions, in Cartographies of Silence. Because silence “is a presence / it has a history [and] a form”. Iyer's piece echoes this: to him, we ought “to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion.” Not only something we observe but something we do.

TBC.

Simone Weil

Martins Dogo

people

Design, Simply.

Martins Dogo

design people

Timeless guides for good design and simplicity.

Principles for good design

According to Dieter Rams, good design has these qualities:

Innovative
Makes a product useful
Aesthetic
Makes a product understandable
Unobtrusive
Honest
Long-lasting
Thorough down to the last detail
Environmentally-friendly
As little design as possible

Laws of simplicity

According to John Maeda.

Reduce. The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Organize. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Time. Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Learn. Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Differences. Simplicity and complexity need each other.
Context. What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Emotion. More emotions are better than less.
Trust. In simplicity we trust.
Failure. Some things can never be made simple.
The one. Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Is small still beautiful?

Martins Dogo

books people

A couple of years ago I read EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful. It's one of the most enlightening books I've ever read and I'm returning to it now because I've forgotten a lot of the information it contained. And it contained a lot of information, which I consider somewhat perspicacious of today's world, as I imagined it also would've been of the 1970s when it was first published.

This is probably Schumacher's magnum opus. The full title of the book is Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered and in it, Schumacher makes arguments for a more sensible, sustainable attitude towards consumption. He is asking us to rethink how we use resources and to be mindful of the environmental impact of our habits.

If you'd like to hear a summary of the book and an insightful discussion of it, then I'd recommend the following episode of the Maxim Institute Podcast:

Instead of re-reading the book, I would like to do something different. I think that books such as this contain practical ideas and numerals, which one ought to explore beyond the book to truly understand, appreciate and apply. Besides, I'll probably forget most of the content, yet again, even after re-reading it. Needless to say, this is a good way of crystallizing knowledge and insights from books—putting them into use, even if that means simply curating creating associations between them. I'll continue to experiment with using Wolfram Notebooks as a medium for exploration. I expect that it'll be particularly useful in this case, given that there are lots of real-world data, conceptual models and facts to explore. Additionally, it'd be nice to be able to pull congruent pieces of information from different sources and seamlessly blend them.

I would like to explore the book—gather my annotations, run some of Schumacher's calculations and estimations, and so on. I'm not necessarily interested in critiquing the ideas in the book or commenting on philosophical and economical themes. Rather, I would like to better understand the ideas, especially from a historical perspective. It's about half a century since this book was first published, and I'm curious: is small (not) still beautiful?

Stephen Wolfram

Martins Dogo

people

Susan Sontag

Martins Dogo

people

Understanding a Photograph

Martins Dogo

art photography

Quotations from John Berger's Understanding a Photograph.

[p. 32] On the contrast between moments—that which is captured in a photograph, and the present moment in one's life, during which one looks at the photograph:

As we emerge from the photographed moment [of agony] back into our lives, we do not realize this; we assume that the discontinuity is our responsibility. The truth is that any response to that photographed moment is bound to be felt as inadequate. Those who are there in the situation being photographed, those who hold the hand of the dying or staunch a wound, are not seeing the moment as we have and their responses are of an altogether different order. It is not possible for anyone to look pensively at such a moment and to emerge stronger.

[pp. 41-42] Suits:

The suit, as we know it today, developed in Europe as a professional ruling-class costume in the last third of the nineteenth century. Almost anonymous as a uniform, it was the first ruling-class costume to idealize purely sedentary power. The power of the administrator and conference table. Essentially the suit was made for the gestures of talking and calculating abstractly. (As distinct, compared to previous upper-class costumes, from the gestures of riding, hunting, dancing, duelling.)

The working classes — but peasants were simpler and more naïve about it than workers — came to accept as their own certain standards of the class that ruled over them — in this case standards of the chic and sartorial worthiness. At the same time their very acceptance of these standards, their very conforming to these norms which had nothing to do with either their own inheritance or their daily experience, condemned them, within the system of those standards, to being always, and recognizably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive. That indeed is to succumb to a cultural hegemony.

[pp. 49-50] On photography and the camera (having read—and in response to—Susan Sontag's On Photography):

The camera was invented by Fox Talbot in 1839. Within a mere thirty years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralizing, inquisitive probing (the wrongly named 'candid camera'), aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.

In the first period of its existence photography offered a new technical opportunity; it was an implement. Now, instead of offering new choices, its usage and its 'reading' were becoming habitual, an unexamined part of modern perception itself. Many developments contributed to this transformation. The new film industry. The invention of the lightweight camera — so that the taking of a photograph ceased to be a ritual and became a 'reflex'. The discovery of photojournalism — whereby the text follows the pictures instead of vice versa. The emergence of advertising as a crucial economic force.

[p. 50] Quoting Sontag here:

Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.

[pp. 54-55] Effects of the insatiable yearning we now have for (creating and experiencing) images:

Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned. If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgement, into a rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered and condemnation is close to being forgotten. Such a presentiment, extracted from man's long, painful experience of time, is to be found in varying forms in almost every culture and religion, and, very clearly, in Christianity.

The industrialized, 'developed' world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility. Such opportunism turns everything — nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics — into spectacle. And the implement used to do this — until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone — is the camera.

[p. 55] Quoting Sontag:

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's intervention. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself — so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

The preceding three statements nudge me to mull over the role and symbolism of the camera, during particular events that occurred in 2020. Berger said that the camera "which isolates a moment of agony isolates no more violently than the experience of that moment isolates itself" (p. 32). That is, an experience is always sharper than the effect its photograph can evoke. Under what conditions and to what extent does the presence of the camera—its unflinching gaze and propensity for immediate broadcast—deter or subdue acts of violence?

Berger adds, "[t]he word trigger, applied to rifle and camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical." Notwithstanding that it can, itself, be a tool for violating others, it can be said that the camera, beyond being a companion or a witness, now also acts as a shield. That is, a trigger that requites violence with evidence. Whilst we contend with the awfully frequent denial and utter disregard for this evidence in administering justice, an equally worrying issue is brewing: the untrustworthy trigger. "Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions." It may be crafted by it too if we're not careful.

[p. 62] Regarding a photograph of a man and a horse, shown to Berger by a friend:

The photograph offers irrefutable evidence that his man, this horse and this bridle existed. Yes it tells us nothing of the significance of their existence.

Well, it isn't necessarily true anymore that the subjects and contents of a photograph ever existed. But everything comes from something. Therefore, something about—contained in—every photograph must have existed at some point. Although a photograph needn't necessarily contain things that exist, it must contain a derivative of such a thing.

[p. 64] On meaning:

And in life meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning[...] Certainty may be instantaneous: doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photograph can only acquire meaning in so far as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.

[p. 72]:

What was achieved was unprecedented scientific and technical progress and, eventually, the subordination of all other values to those of a world market which treats everything, including people and their labour and their lives and their deaths, as a commodity.

[p. 128]:

In the winter of this century, children, women and men protect one another with imagination, with violence, with rage, with incomprehension, with ingenuity. The green heart is their capacity to love: their refusal of the principle of indifference.

[p. 131]:

Countless photographs violate the intimate simply by placing it in the public context of a book, a newspaper, a TV slot. Yet others — like most wedding photographs — make the intimate formal and thus empty of its content.

[p. 173] Quoting Simone Weil:

There are only two services which images can offer the afflicted. One is to find the story which expresses the truth of their affliction. The second is to find the words which can give resonance, through the crust of external circumstances, to the cry which is always inaudible: "Why am I being hurt?"

[p. 180] Quoting Weil (p. 180 'Human Personality' in Simone Weil: An Anthology):

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.
Just as a vagrant accused of stealling a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

[p. 180] Quoting Weil (from 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God' in Waiting on God)

To love one's neighbour is a question of being able to ask simply: what is your torment? Of knowing affliction exists, not a statistic, not as an example from a social category labelled 'underprivileged', but as something which happens to a human being, exactly comparable with us, who one day was struck and marked down with a mark that is like no other, by affliction. And to know that it is sufficient — but indispensable — to be able to look at this person with recognition and attention.

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Wolfram Notebooks

Martins Dogo

notebooks programming

I've expanded on this note on my blog, though I'll retain it here for reference in/to other notes.

Coding

Think of a Wolfram Notebook, firstly, simply as a tool for writing and executing code. Now, how does one write code? You would normally type it, and often copy and paste it.

You type something in, you get something out: 9 * 8 gives 72. Depending on the environment you're coding in, you may receive prompts whenever a result is returned or an error is raised, and nudges if the environment has a suggestion for you, this could be an annotation to a printed result, or a heads-up to prevent you from making an error.

We encode or program computations following specific rules, and each programming language has its own. You probably would write $9 × 8$ if doing so on a piece of paper. But with most languages, you need the asterisk. And that's one of the simplest differences between how one might think on paper, as compared to in an IDE.

But is writing, enumerating, listing, sketching—and all those other things we use the paper medium for—the same as thinking? Not quite, they are expressions of thoughts. I'm inclined to think it is though I don't know.

Another way of looking at the Wolfram Notebook is as an intelligent, digital version of the good old notebook. It is intelligent, in that, it is "able to vary its state or action in response to varying situations." (See definition.) And this sets it apart from most other programming languages. I will explain why I think so, starting with $9 × 8$.

Multiple ways to multiply

When you type 9 and 8 separated with a space, it's automatically converted to a ×. It only does this for numbers, though it still multiplies things that are separated by whitespace. Free-form input creates room for improvisation, thereby extending one's imagination. This is how it works: you type in anything—anything at all—and it tries to make sense of it, and give a response. It doesn't always conjure up the expected interpretation. It sometimes fails to interpret what would seem obvious to a child. However, it encourages creativity, especially in children. And it amuses them. I will tell you more about that later.

Here are other ways to input code or more generally, expressions, in a Wolfram Notebook:

Types of inputs

Writing

From the notebook above, it is immediately clear that inputs can be versatile, interpretable and systematic. Notebooks also serve as documents, and they can be used for formal writing. For example, this is a monograph-styled notebook template.

Monograph notebook template

But is all this the same as writing? Well, yes, in the digital sense—just like one would use a Word or Markdown document to write. But not in the traditional sense—pencil on paper. Digital and analogue forms of writing both have their advantages and limitations, though they are increasingly becoming dissimilar in act. Think Apple Pencil. Certainly, it is of immense creative benefit. But what influence, if any, does this dynamic form of writing have on the way we think?

Drawing

How about drawing? I prefer the analogue form of drawing, but which is better is a matter of opinion. One artist might say that drawing with a stylus on a glass pane doesn't feel as natural or as dynamic, as compared to using a pencil on paper. Another might appreciate its fluidity and the ease of correcting mistakes. Nonetheless, both the iPad and the drawing paper provide a medium for boundless artistic expression.

The Wolfram Notebook allows you to draw on a graphics object called Canvas. Clicking the canvas displays a variety of drawing tools. You can draw lines, arrows, polygons and so on. It allows you to draw freehand too. You can add preset shapes, and text and equation boxes onto the canvas. There are options for editing and styling each object to your liking.

Draw anything and compute with it

You can select graphical elements from a canvas and compute other things with them. In the notebook above, I picked the red triangle and added a hatch filling to it. I then replaced the hatch pattern with the "hello" I'd drawn.

Seeing and hearing

Amongst programming languages, the Wolfram Language has some of the most advanced plotting and visualisation functionalities, and the Wolfram Notebook takes full advantage of this. It enables one to see things with great insight and clarity. By "things," I mean data, mathematical functions, pictures and videos, colours, cities and countries, the human anatomy, and many more. Abstract concepts are easier to navigate and understand inside of a Wolfram Notebook because they can be made visible, and interactive. You can play an animated image (GIF) or a video inside a notebook.

Let's consider a simple but practical example. Fọláṣadé resides in Lagos, Nigeria. That bustling city! It's Friday, the fifth of June, and she's out with a friend. Let's say they're at a park. She's lying on the grass, gazing at the vast blue sky. Lagos is very warm for most of the year and that day was a tad sultry. She spots a plane heading eastwards and follows it until it vanishes into a big cloud. Fọláṣadé then begins to wonder, about the planets, stars and constellations.

Let's step back into the notebook for a moment. One can visualise the sky and see where celestial objects are whether it's night or daytime. Maybe, like Fọláṣadé, you are curious to know where the planets are in relation to one another. Using inbuilt functions and external ones created by a growing community of Wolfram Language users, you can also see the solar system and even the Milky Way galaxy. People use notebooks to keep track of rare events such as eclipses or travel back in time to learn a bit of history about manned space missions.

Now, back to Lagos. You can see below what the Lagos sky looked like at midday on that day. (Can you spot Sirius?) The sun was up and nearly aligned with Venus, Mercury and Mars (at the right edge; barely visible in the image). Although Ṣadé most probably could not see the planets that afternoon. Besides, the glare of the sun is best avoided.

What could the park have sounded like? We could imagine that it was lively and people were having a good time. The first audio simulates what the park might have sounded like—indistinct chatter of residents and tourists, the flapping wings of pigeons, leaves rustling against themselves, the laughter of children and perhaps distant music, or the fading roar of an airplane. That airplane. Using actual weather data of Lagos on that very day, we could model the attenuated sound that could have been audible, say, 10 meters away from the source of the first audio. This is a practical example of how one could see and hear more of the world around them in a Wolfram Notebook.

Seeing and hearing

Of course, visualisations and computationally modelled sounds are no substitutes for—and are incomparable to—the rawness of reality. But for a young and inquisitive girl or boy, these are invaluable tools for gaining deeper insight into the world around her or him. And what a fun way to do it. To be able to see and hear and speak and ask and touch and drag and drop and slide... and chat and share the fun with others.

Exploring, ideating and imagining

The unique coding, writing and drawing capabilities of the Wolfram Notebook—combined with its audiovisual interactivity and receptivity to input of human and machine expressions—makes it apt for exploring ideas. The variety of ideas that one could explore (see explorations) in a notebook is so vast, that the notebook becomes a sort of encyclopaedia. Apart from making software, Wolfram Research is also into the business of curating information and making it computable. Thus far, the areas of knowledge they've covered range from food and nutrition, to art and design, to weather and meteorology.

Wolfram Knowledgebase (See curated examples here)

Being able to compute things on a whim with so much meaningful up to date data about the world, gives fluidity to the process of creating and exploring ideas in a Wolfram Notebook. As you've seen in previous examples, you can retrieve appropriately quantified data on your surroundings, with some degree of precision as regards space and time. With Entities, the world and everyday life become even more computationally explorable.

So what, if so many things can be computed (with)? Why should you care, and how useful is any of this? I'll give you three reasons:

Because you can solve real-life problems in ways that make the path from problem to solution less abstract and clearer. For first, you have near real-time data readily available. Whether the nature of the data is transient (as in weather and financial data), long-lasting (as in socioeconomic and demographic data), or immutable (as in mathematical, chemistry and physics data). But it doesn't end with the data, you can use it in meaningful ways too.
Apart from problem-solving, we are sometimes simply curious to figure out interesting facts and relations about the world. Whether it's a book you're reading or a tender plant you're looking after, knowing about the world at your fingertips accelerates the fulfilment of curiosity and learning.
The world and how we interact with it and one another, is increasingly becoming computational.

So, I think you should care, because here is a tool that can facilitate and enhance your modi operandi for exploring, ideating and imagining. You can see examples of exploratory data analyses I have used notebooks for here, here and here.

While the predictive interface as a whole allows you to write and iterate through code quicker, the Suggestions Bar encourages asking "what if" questions—it invites you to see what more you can do with—or learn from—a result, be it a number, word, colour, entity, date or a more complex object. Try evaluating each of these in the notebook below and see the suggestions that come up: Pi, "Sunset", ColorData["SunsetColors"], Entity["Star", "Sun"], Sunset[]. Click on the ⊕ icon to see additional input options.

｜ Live Wolfram notebook (Press SHIFT + ENTER to run your code)

There are thousands of functions—querying the number of all functions (Length@WolframLanguageData[]) gives $5,826$, but there are certainly many more functions that are undocumented. How does one remember them all?! One simply can't, but as with any language, over time, one builds memory of the names of things, and intuition for guessing the name of a thing that one doesn't know or can't recall. There are two attributes which make the names of Wolfram Language functions easier to recall or correctly suppose: using natural language, and consistent naming and documentation.

First, you code using natural language—in English, or with code captions for other languages. This means using everyday words to do and create things. Here's a basic example: you have a list, called things, and you want the first and last items in it; you simply say First[things] and Last[things]. Similary, Today means today, . There are countless such cases whereby a word really, unambiguously does or renders the thing it means. And the computation, or the result, needn't necessarily be trivial, even if the input looks so simple. Here's another example, this time of Integrate integrating $\mathrm {sech(\mathnormal{x})}$ Integrate[Sech[x],x], which gives $2 \arctan \Bigl( \tanh \Bigl( \cfrac x 2 \Bigr) \Bigr)$.

Not all functions are single-worded, there are many functions whose names contain two or more words adjoined. This brings me to the second attribute: consistency. For what it's worth, the Wolfram Language has one of the most consistent naming and documentation systems amongst programming languages. Take a look for yourself, it spans decades—Version 1 code from 1988 still works in Version 12.2 (released December 2020). Here's Stephen Wolfram doing a demo of V1 and V12.2, three decades apart.

Let's consider making plots and charts. There are various kinds of plots and charts, and a function for each kind. But they all end with Plot/Chart, or Plot3D/Chart3D for the three-dimensional variants. There are exceptions such as Histogram, but this is perfectly reasonable because that's what it's commonly called. The same thing applies to many other groupings of functions, such as those for geo-computation, which have the prefix Geo; or functions for getting data, which are suffixed with Data.

A combination of such exceptional consistency and using natural language makes it easier to guess what a function might be called, even though there are thousands of functions.

Learning and teaching

I have the privilege of teaching kids and adults programming, using Jupyter Notebooks for Python and the object of interest for Wolfram Language. In my two and half years of doing this, I have realised the extent to which the framework provided for thinking about an activity or problem—and engaging in it, or attempting to solve it—can influence the way one approaches the problem.

For instance, consider geometry as taught in primary and secondary schools. Textbooks try, but I think a better way of teaching geometry (and many other topics) is by using a computational notebook. Possibly true for other topics, but particularly for learning geometry, the traditional textbook is limited in many ways. Firstly, can present and visualise only a single instance of a problem at a time. The issue with this isn't that copious space is needed to show an ample variety of possible scenarios to better the learner's understanding. Rather, the issue is that each explanation, each example, each exercise, is static and therefore, potentially limiting. By this, I mean that the static setting puts a ceiling on the knowledge and intuition the student gains from the process of following an example or solving an exercise. By contrast, a dynamic/interactive setting allows the student to view the scenario from different vantage points. Apart from visualisation and feedback, another benefit to this is that the student begins to ask "what if...?"; the Suggestions Bar encourages asking such questions. The second point is more of a personal opinion: it is often uninspiring.

I believe what learners of topics such as geometry (and indeed the subject of mathematics itself) need, is a medium in which the learner can see how angles, dimensions, shapes, volumes—objects and entire scenarios—morph as they interact with the geometric elements. Be it by writing, typing, drawing, clicking or dragging, immediate feedback of the learner's actions and ideas will greatly enhance learning and the development of the learner's intuition of the underlying principles which those scenarios aim to elucidate. It may also allow the student to learn underlying principles and build intuition quicker.

Let's take a look at one such scenario. In the notebook below we have a 2-dimensional geometric setting (GeometricScene). It contains the following geometric objects and assertions:

there are two similar triangles ($\textcolor{#9ca5a6}{\triangle abc}$ and $\textcolor{#f29494}{\triangle bcd}$) enclosed by a $\textcolor{#50b050}{circle}$
$\measuredangle bac = 90 \degree$ and $\measuredangle bcd = 45 \degree$
an $\textcolor{#fd7400}{infinite~line}$ passes through points $\textcolor{#1c69ee}{\bold a}$ and $\textcolor{#1c69ee}{\bold d}$, and another $\textcolor{#6b1fb1}{infinite~line}$ passes through point $\textcolor{#1c69ee}{\bold c}$ and a point $\textcolor{#1c69ee}{\bold e}$ on the $\textcolor{#50b050}{circle}$

The scene is interactive and updates (within the established constraints) as you click and move the points around and points can be pinned to specific positions. I believe this is a more interesting way of presenting a geometry problem to a student. I do not think that the interactivity might be a distraction. Rather, it allows the learner to take a deeper look into the problem. For example, we can ask for geometric conjectures that can be derived from this particular scene, and highlight them. The second scene highlights $\angle bac = \angle cbd = \angle dca = 90 \degree$, but there are many others as you can see in the table.

Geometric scenes

The geometric scene not only helps the learner with insight, but it can also help students learn geometric construction. For example, a teacher can put together a sequence of steps for students to follow. While this is unlike using a ruler and a pair of compasses, it is still apt for teaching. Besides, the digital medium has its benefits. For instance, when explaining a theorem such as Kosnita's Theorem, which consists of many geometric objects, the paper medium is not as apt as an interactive one.

Kosnitas Theorem

Interactivity is particularly advantageous here. Plus, being able to pin a point and move the diagram around it is also very useful when trying to understand how the theorem works. Compare that to the static diagram sourced from Wikipedia. The diagram is neat, but the learner cannot use it to see how the blue lines remain concurrent as points move about. Here's another excellent interactive example of the theorem.

To further demonstrate the efficacy of Wolfram Notebooks for learning and teaching, I refer you to two sets of resources:

Wolfram Demonstrations: these are interactive interfaces that explain how things work—from maths to creative arts to everyday life. Whatever you're curious about, there's probably a demonstration on it or related to it. You will find many interesting things on there and you can interact with demos in a cloud notebook.
Notebook Archive: this is a collection of books, computational essays, courses and many more, all written in Wolfram Notebooks This video shows how to create a lecture notebook.
Documentation: contains detailed explanations of all functions including examples, how-to's, workflows, etc. Here's a summary of previous releases.

Shortcomings

Accessibility: the Wolfram Notebook is most accessible online, though it is (understandably) limited in its functionality compared to the desktop version. This means that some important capabilities such as canvas and geometric scene are either not (yet) functional, while some others are limited. I hope that notebooks will continue to be accessible long-term, that is, without requiring signing up.
Performance: even on the desktop, the frontend often lags when handling more complex tasks. This occurs especially when dealing with graphics objects. Sometimes, the only solution is to quit and relaunch the application.
Correctness and validation: besides bugs, which are inevitable in any worthwhile software product, there's a history of complaints regarding the incorrectness of some results of Wolfram code. Follow, for example, Richard Fateman's lecture. He gave that lecture back in 1993. Incorrectness is still an issue today. Although I've seen some examples in plotting/graphics, it seems that most of the incorrectness complaints come from people who do numerical computations a lot.

Because the core of Wolfram Notebooks is proprietary technology, it isn't open to inspection by the public. This has frustrated many researchers (including Economics Nobel laureate, Paul Romer), though others continue to forbear deserting Wolfram Language for open-source alternatives.

Perhaps this issue particularly irks staunch (or those who once were) users of Wolfram notebooks, because they enjoy using the product and have formed an affinity with it. They want it to be better—being more open is one way of achieving that. Wolfram Research Inc. (WRI), on the other hand, has other ideas. Business ideas. WRI has taken great pains to explain—in speech and writing—why Wolfram technology isn't open source.

They have some good reasons. I find a few flimsy though. Here's one:
1. They claim that "open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market."
2. But build the machine learning backend of the Wolfram Language using the open-source deep learning framework Apache MXNet.
3. Then they say that "Wolfram has pioneered highly automated machine learning—and deeply integrated it into the Wolfram Language...".
That sounds like open-source (MXNet) bringing major tech innovation (ML automation) to market. Open-source software and tools power many of the amazing tech we enjoy today but often do so quietly. Wolfram has a page full of open materials. The Function Repository allows anyone to add to the thousands of pre-existing functions in the Wolfram Language, or even provide alternatives to them. Maybe in the long-term, this will lead to not just an equilibrium between WRI and avid users of its software, but a symbiosis.

You can read the Cloud release notes here, as well as additional implementation notes here. If you're looking to use the Wolfram Cloud long-term, you may find it useful to refer to these notes from time to time.

Interesting users/uses

In addition to the resources I've mentioned, the following are some other interesting uses and users (at least, to me) of Wolfram notebooks:

Emerald Cloud Labs allows you to create, run, explore and analyse experiments remotely using Wolfram Notebooks. The lab is mostly run by robots. This is one of a large number of organizations—small and large (from universities to NASA and CERN)—that use it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses Mathematica extensively. Here's an example. He was awarded a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2018. (Needless to say, other recipients of the award have used Wolfram Notebooks in fascinating ways.)
Stephen Wolfram, creator of the Wolfram Language, uses it for pretty much everything, unsurprisingly.

Thanks to Stephen Dogo and Udeme Udoyen for reading a draft of this note.

Hello!

Martins Dogo

import { LinkToStacked } from 'react-stacked-pages-hook'; import { Link } from 'gatsby';

Hi, I'm Martins.
I do AI research and design.

This site is an atlas of my musings. I use it to iterate through ideas on topics such as computation, art, and literature, which presently are my most fond interests.

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The House of the LORD

Some Psalms on the House of the LORD

Wolfram Notebooks

Notes on programming/thinking in/with Wolfram Notebooks

Poems by Adrienne Rich

My favourite poems by Adrienne Rich

Silence

Reflections on silence

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A collection of some types/sources of dynamic objects

Explanations

What's an explanation? How can one be made (better)?

The meta note narrates how this idea came about, and in it, you'll find an in-depth walk-through of this site. These notes are all WIP, always.

The House of the LORD

Martins Dogo

Psalms 23:6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Psalms 26:8 O LORD, I love the habitation of your house and the place where your glory dwells.
Psalms 27:4 One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.
Psalms 52:8 But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of the Lord. (Psalms 1:3 —— He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.)
Psalms 65:4 Blessed is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple!
Psalms 84:1-4; 10 1 How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! 2 My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. 3 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God. 4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah 10 For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
Psalms 92:12-15 12 The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. 13 They are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God. 14 They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, 15 to declare that the LORD is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
Psalms 116:18-19 18 I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people, 19 in the courts of the house of the LORD, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the LORD!
Psalms 118:26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD! We bless you from the house of the LORD.
Psalms 122:1; 9 1 I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD!” 9 For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your good.
Psalms 134:1 Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
Psalms 135:1-2 1 Praise the name of the LORD, give praise, O servants of the LORD, 2 who stand in the house of the LORD, in the courts of the house of our God!

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blessing the boats — Lucille Clifton

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Favourite poems by Adrienne Rich

Atlas of the Difficult World, XIII (Dedications)

Cartographies of Silence

Diving into the Wreck

For a Friend in Travail

For the Record

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Favourite poems by Rita Dove

Dawn Revisited

The Fish in the Stone

Mother Love

November for Beginners

Poems from 'Twelve Chairs'

First Juror

Second Juror

Third Juror

Tenth Juror

Twelfth Juror

The Alternate

Pithos

On the Road to Damascus

Straw Hat

Under the Viaduct, 1932

Variation on Guilt

Rita Dove

Scientists

Seeing

Silence

Simone Weil

Design, Simply.

Principles for good design

Laws of simplicity

Is small still beautiful?

Stephen Wolfram

Hello there!
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Hi, I'm Martins.
I do AI research and design.