Month: January 2014

Knotrice – Corona Ninety-Nine

Knotrice – Corona Ninety-Nine

magicalrecord:

Listen to Knotrice – Corona Ninety-Nine for free. Free mp3 download available! Corona Ninety-Nine appears on the album Knotrice. Knotrice is a musician from Perth, Western Australia. He plays violin, guitar, and makes electronic music. Knotrice first began releasing his music online in January 2010. His first released piece was a remix of Nine Inch Nails’ “Mr. Self Destruct”, which he made available on remix.nin.com. He continues to create NIN remixes, but now mainly concentrates on creating his own music. Knotrice’s music is an evolving kind, displayed in his first “album”, the last.fm exclusive EP Experiments in Music – the style of music changes greatly between the first and last tracks, although it still remains electronica. Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm.

My favorite meditation music. A ninety-nine minute remix of Corona Radiata by Nine Inch Nails. Give it a try.

sciencesoup:

The First Robot

This looks like a vaguely creepy doll you might find in your grandparents’ house, but it’s actually a self-operating, programmable machine—an ancestor of modern computers. Called “the Writer”, it was created 240 years ago by Swiss watchmaker and mathematician Pierre Jaquet-Droz, who was famous for building not only watches but also animated dolls, automata, and mechanical birds that fascinated kings and emperors across the world.

Astonishingly, the Writer is made up of 6,000 individual parts, perfectly miniaturised to fit fully within the automata. A stack of 40 “cams” (rotating or sliding pieces) is at the machine’s core, and as it moves, three cam followers read the shape of its edge and translates this into arm movements. These movements are controlled by a large wheel made up of letters that can be reordered or replaced—i.e., programmed. With its quill pen and ink, the machine can write messages up to 40 elegant letters long and across four lines.

But the Writer isn’t unique—it has two siblings. Jaquet-Droz and his family also made a “Musician” automata, who plays an organ, and a “Draughtsman” automata, who can draw four graphite pictures. All three were built as publicity to increase the value of Jaquet-Droz’s watches, and they were toured through Europe in the late eighteenth century. The little mechanical marvels were eventually bought for 75,00 francs by the museum of Art and History in Switzerland in 1906, where they remain today.

(Gif Credit)

What does Thoth mean to you?

That’s a complex question. Thoth is the chief god of my personal pantheon and I view him quite differently than Kemetics(1) would.

For me, Thoth is the god of the new aeon of information. Through the works of Alan Turing(2), Albert Einstein, Claude Shannon, and Archibald Wheeler, our new understanding of the universe is one based on information. Einstein taught us that matter and light are interchangeable. The only difference is how the particles are arranged. This makes the base unit of the universe information. “It from bit.”(3)

“The Word” is an apt metaphor for information used in many spiritual systems. Thoth is the god of The Word, in essence, the creator (though he needs to have particles to arrange), the keeper of all knowledge, and the god capable of seeing the universe as the vast computing device that it is.

Thoth is the patron of magicians, in that he teaches us that The Word is power, to change ourselves and to change our world. Thoth is also in some respects Maxwell’s Demon writ large. He has the ability to see and move all particles in the universe and bring them towards equilibrium, the ultimate state of unity.(4)

So I pray to Thoth every day to make me a better writer, a better magician, and to achieve a better understanding.

I would be more than happy to elaborate on any of these points.

(1)    I am not a Kemetic pagan.

(2)    The Alan Turing recently pardoned by the Queen. About fucking time. Maybe she could pardon all of the men prosecuted for being homosexuals.

(3)    Archibald Wheeler.

(4)    Of course, ultimate unity also means stagnation and death. No, problem, Babalon will come along and blow everything up again so we can reach an even higher state of understanding.