The uninitiated are the most rigid and doctrinaire, the most unyielding in their strictures, practices, beliefs, habits, expectations, etc. Barring the occasional bout of beginner's luck, the seeker of wisdom paradoxically arrives at the gate with every answer already known, every problem already neatly solved and packed away. They often seek not so much to learn what might be true, but merely to confirm what a person already believes. It turns out, perhaps, that having a "beginner's mind" is a lot trickier than they anticipated.  

The most adept, on the other hand, are almost by definition an unholy mess. Uneven corners abut unexpected diversions into intricacy piled on top of intricacy spilling out at odd angles amid the most lurid juxtapositions, fantastic propositions, implications, possibilities, etc. Aware of every nuance or potential complication that may arise to upset the pattern, thereby possessing some of the least settled opinions on almost any matter, the truly learned can appear slovenly, sometimes even to the point of immorality, to observers casual and otherwise, sympathetic and unsympathetic, similar or distinct, real or imagined, etc.

Spotlight: Zakir Hussain

Multisyllabic musical mastery permeates this career retrospective Zakir Hussain mix from NTS, showcasing one of the most important and influential musicians of the past century whose diverse collaborations spanned a multitude of styles and genres while maintaining links to the rich musical traditions of the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

For fans, musicians and collectors, be sure not to overlook the Tabla Beat Science 2-DVD set released in 2003 by Palm Pictures entitled "Talamanam Sound Clash: Further Adventures in Hypercussion" with Karsh Kale, Ustad Sultan Khan, Bill Laswell and "Gigi" Shibabaw joining Hussain on stage for a fiery and uplifting live set recorded at the Fillmore in San Francisco in June 2002 (presented in both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 Surround), along with a generous selection of bonus material. The quality of the performances, sound and video are all excellent, making this essential viewing for the inititated as much as new musical explorers.

"If you can't generalize from data there's nothing else you can do with it either... Imagine someone telling Einstein, 'You can't say E=mc². It's too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory.' ... Data without generalization is just gossip."

            - Robert Pirsig

Counterpoint: Then why not ask, almost sneeringly, "do thoughts, then, take the shape of their container? Might they be in perpetual danger of spilling out?" But then thoughts, it is generally thought, do spill out frequently enough, and if they are actually contained by anything it wouldn't be the roughly 1,350 cc or so (on average, give or take a few hundred cubic centimeters) of space inside the human skull. 

Moreover a much more plausible candidate would be the kilometers and kilometers of nerve fibers branching out in all directions like a vast electric grid, forming the tree-like network of interconnections between trillions of nodes constantly sending and receiving impulses from all parts of nervous system(s) and the entire body at (nearly) the speed of light. 

Of course, genuine knowledge must ultimately be based upon fact, or else it isn't genuine. Facts are the links holding together the picture of reality. But facts by themselves, without some kind of theory, don't amount to anything worth having. They are the untold clattery mountains of unassembled lego sets that, even when the last piece is pressed into place, will only ever approximate the total gravity of the thing assembled. 

The essential point of what I'm saying is that we need to start treating knowledge - genuine knowledge - as the natural outgrowth of living systems, not just a somewhat accidental repository for something called 'data', the content (or allegedly universal "meaning") of which can be manipulated with equal facility by man or machine.

Roscoe plays a cover

Thoughts crystallize (if they really are physical things) into their peculiar geometry, analogous to phase changes and sudden precipitations from solution of a solid form. 

The flux of fresh impulses redissolves them, only for a new configuration to reemerge. Subsequent patterns contain permutations, simple or complex, of previous states embedded within them. A certain "stickiness" prevails: some notions become more deeply embedded than others.  

It is just possible then, that, like snowflakes, no two thoughts are exactly alike. 

(Note that the crystal growth of a snowflake is a route to crystallization distinct from, e.g., gas deposition or precipitation from solution).

Only the lonely

Only the truly ignorant and the truly mad believe they truly understand.

"Data" is not knowledge: it is neither conoscere (noscere, connaître, kennen...) nor sapere (scire, savoir, wissen...). 

The English language lacks this distinction. 

Knowledge in whatever form requires a knower to be known, the full reality of which is a fact in turn; an event that may itself become known by the knowers, so that "they know that I know that I don't know" does in fact become a distinct possibility. 

(This is certainly a curious result).

If one wishes to make a country "great", one presumably must first possess an adequate idea of greatness. 

For a start, we could admit that no aspect of buying, selling, or owning a motorized vehicle is truly "great", and that sending living beings into space lacks any practical utility. 

A team of alien astrobiologists someday probing our derelict world might easily conclude, observing the empty husks of our computer-enhanced vehicles, that they were really a nascent form of semi-autonomous life that briefly flourished, dominated, then destroyed what remained of the Earth's delicate balance of life along with their diseased and thoroughly anesthetized, zombie-like inhabitants.

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And then what will they do with their billions, once the radioactive miasma has settled on a charred and mutilated planet where nothing grows, when all simply rots where it stands or crumbles away into dust?

What would being "rich" actually mean?