This is the first post in a new series called ‘The Consequences of Modernity’. In this series we will try to shed light on several large-scale, comprehensive social engineering practices and the related key figures which lay at the foundation of modernist urban planning. We will further try to use this practices as windows for the analyses of the ongoing influence this practices have on urbanization processes today.

This first article is dedicated to Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891) who with his concern with the totality of urban space and the comprehensiveness and largeness of scale of plan and conception can be ranked as one of the founding figures of modernist urban planning. ‘Make no little plans’, as Daniel Burnham urged many years later was surely Haussmann’s way of thinking.

The moment Baron Haussmann (he called himself Baron) came into office as ‘Prefect of the Department of Seine’ in 1853, seven month after the declaration of the Second Empire, he immediately was given a mandate to remake Paris, according to plan.

At this time the city was still seething with the same social, economic and political problems which contributed substantially to the 1848 revolution. Economic recovery from one of the first full-fledged crises of capitalist overaccumulation was blocked by several barriers. Capital was not connecting to labor, strong tie artisan communities in the city still formed a strong political force and the fragmented, locally focused national market undermined the rationalization of national and urban space.

Paris was held down by a straitjacket of eighteenth century structure of social practices confined in a medieval frame of physical infrastructure. To alter this, Napoleon III and his advisers, implemented wide ranging measures. Most fundamental was probably the introduction of a modern credit system, breaking up with the conservative banking system incorporated by Rothschild, enabling small investors and developers to enter the market (credit mobilier). This state directed speculation strategy and state financed public works to absorb surpluses of capital and labor also enticed middle and large developers into the market and changed Paris into a landscape of permanent flux.

The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes
More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart);

I picture in my head the busy camp of huts,
And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,
The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddle-stain,
Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-à-brac.

Once nearby was displayed a great menagerie…

Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,
Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than stone.

Excerpts from The Swan by Charles Baudelaire.

During the eighteen years of the Second Empire (1852-1870) Frances’ national and urban space was entirely rationalized, with Paris as the beating heart. Under the lead of Haussmann railway tracks were built in a radial pattern, centered around the city, to facilitate transportation and to integrate the Parisian hinterland and rural France. The network was expanded from 1931 kilometers in 1950 to a web of some 17.400 kilometers in 1870. Equally, the installation of a national telegraph system and a network of roads throughout the country contributed to the ongoing rationalization of national and urban space.

via mtholyoke

Medieval Paris was thrown to the demolishers, undergoing probably the most drastic urban makeover in history. Slums were cleared around the city center, the ‘dangerous classes’ expulsed, to improve the capacity for the circulation of goods, military forces and people within the city. To interconnect rail stations, the city center and the periphery with places of recreation, industry and commerce, some ninety miles of grand boulevards where constructed and the flows of water and sewage were revolutionized under Haussmann.

via doorsofperception

via mtholyoke

Haussmann deployed a completely new conception urban space. Instead of implementing a collection of autonomous partial plans, he was concerned with the totality of urban space, paying extraordinary attention to details. He, for example, closely monitored the design of street furnishings such as gas lamps and kiosks.

via nytimes.com

Insalubrious neighborhoods were opened up for the free circulation of fresh air and light during the day. The newly installed gas lightning turned the boulevards at night into pumping veins were the public life of the city was taking place. Haussmann was also obsessed with details of alignments, creating local asymmetries to produce a symmetrical effect at a grander urban scale. The most bizarre probably being the displacement of a dome on the Tribunal of Commerce to place it into the sightline of the newly build Boulevard de Sebastopol.

To implement his general plan, he created a sophisticated hierarchical form of territorial administration, with himself positioned at the top and his close acquaintances spread over the different arrondisments. Also in terms of planning, building and engineering he employed a loyal network of different, talented people. Alphand to do the parks, Belgrand for water and sewers, Baltard to redo Les Halles, and so on.

This new scale of thinking, scale and form of extrovert urbanism is probably best exemplified in the transformation of the central market district of Les Halles by Baltard. Haussmann not only wanted to change individual buildings or the style of architecture, he wanted to create a whole new city texture. At Les Halles, the traditional, central market place of Paris, this amounted to the production and engineering of a whole quarter with a single, commercial function.

This gentrification strategy was in accordance with the rapidly growing demand for middle class housing and luxury space, leisure and spectacle. At the same the massive growth in numbers and socio-cultural diversity introduced new social and spatial divisions, with the creation of slums as a means to accommodate low income groups in the city.

In this article we followed to a certain extent the argumentation of David Harvey that urban planning is deployed, during the Haussmannization of Paris, but also in more recent urban restructuring practices, to solve large scale economic problems. Take for example the urban renewal offensive through the rescaling of big cities and widespread suburbanisation in the United States under the lead of Robert Moses as a means of lifting the country out of the Great Depression, or the ongoing building boom in China as the potential savior of the European and American economy.

see also

The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre

Charles Marvin, amongst others, documented the urban restructuring process in Paris through hundreds of photos.

Paris en images

In the 2. Didactic Design Discussion in the MIL course I’d chosen to focus on some of the central points from my own PhD-project since it also deals with analysis of SL as teaching and learning environment. Discussing some of my own ideas with the students naturally is very inspiring and rewarding for me personally, but I’m also hoping (and sensing) that the students benefit from seeing my approach to the problem, and judging from the vivid discussion I do believe, I managed to challenge some of their presumptions. I’m not able to reproduce all of it, but I will try to highlight a few issues.

Essentially my PhD-project is aimed at improving Blended Learning within Higher and Further Education through remediation and redidactization. Through a process of designing and redesigning two specific Blended Learning courses within 6 research cycles the aim is to enhance learner experience and learning outcome by using new immersive 3D media and a learner centered Problem Based pedagogical approach. In both cases the target group is adult teachers/ trainers from the educational and the private/industrial sector from different countries.

PhD-project overview – Fall 2009

The concept remediation (in relation to new media) was coined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), but there was no explicit value or quality identified with different ways of remediating in the original concept. However, Tringham, Mills and Ashley (2007) further developed the remediation concept in their Remediated Places Project and came up with two distinct strategies for remediation, respectively respectful and radical. In my point of view these two strategies can be extended to include pedagogical considerations and thus inform more general implementation strategies for blended teaching and learning using new media.

I first introduced the MIL students to the concepts of respectful and radical remediation in the course last fall and like this year’s students they immediately adopted the terminology. If you’ve ever been in SL you’d know why – it makes perfect sense to distinguish between the two both with regard to people, places and practices. The interesting question nonetheless is whether remediation changes anything in the way we think and practice teaching and learning …

Is a slide show presentation in SL an innovation?

According to Peter Denning an innovation can be defined as a transformation of practice in a group, community or culture – it is not enough just to come up with a brilliant idea or create a new artifact. Surely there are many different definitions of innovation, but I agree with Denning and it aligns very well with Wenger’s 1998 social theory on Communities of Practice, which is one of my core inspirations. Changing practice is easier said than done and Steven Warburton has identified 7 barriers to innovation in 3D environments like SL:

Technical – machine and human related [and standards related]

Identity – the tension between playfulness and professionalism

Culture - reading the codes and etiquette of SL

Collaboration – building trust

Time – even simple things take time 

Economic – nothing is for free

Design – perhaps this is a meta-barrier but SL does offer up very particular design challenges

Besides these I would add another meta-barrier, namely the inherent paradox between (re-)production and innovation that all participants in education are facing. This is what I call the didactic double bind. In general double bind is described as dilemmas in communication, and SL seems to be filled with conflicting messages. After the session one of the students posted this photo as her take on a in-world double bind:

The text for that photo could read: ”SL is an open environment. Join us if you can”. Naturally, the experienced SL resident would know that the dilemma in this particular situation is metaphorical – a shift in camera angle and you’d be there… the perspective on the situation would change and shifting perspective, looking at dilemmas at a higher level of abstraction is one way of solving double bind situations and would according to Bateson. 1972 mean learning at level III. And this is actually one of the reasons why I find SL so interesting – if we assume that the learner overcomes the initial difficulties and gets accustomed to the environment it provides rich opportunities for learning at higher levels, because SL inevitable challenges the learner both ontologically and epistemologically due to the whole meta-cognitive nature of the in-world experience.

After this we moved on to discuss the concepts of immersion and augmentation and what these two apparently conflicting ways of engaging in an environment like SL could mean – not least when it comes to teaching and learning practice. Again the students were eager to discuss and we covered a lot of important points on which I will return in a later posting. Suffice to say that we all agree with Tateru Nino on this:

It’s not all black and white.
The whole immersion versus augmentation debate is clouded by one trivial little detail. One is not the opposite of the other. The two aren’t even mutually exclusive.

We ended the session by trying out the Opinionater – it really is a very efficient and fun tool for stimulating discussions

/Mariis

Very cool!  I can’t wait for the results when they break the 3.5 TeV! To be able to see possibly what forces occurred at the beginning of time…  wow.

Hadron Collider: ‘Big Bang Machine’ Smashes World Record

The fact that consumerism assimilates resistance in order to move merchandise makes consumerism difficult to resist. Something similar is happening with social media: We are left twittering our paranoia about what Twitter is doing to us.

You can’t be what you were. The technological changes that allow you to read this (and us to publish it) have foisted upon us a new conception of identity, one more thoroughly suited to consumerism. In particular, what began as a new-found ability to broadcast what we consume culturally and to be recognized (if not paid) for consuming well are becoming compulsions. No one any longer presumes identity to be an essence we are born with and discover; such an idea is the preferred illusion of the modern era. Rather, the newfangled notion of identity is as capital stock that we are compelled to expand roughly along the same line as that of the logic which Marx argued drove capitalists to accumulate! accumulate!

Michel Foucault’s lectures “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (reprinted in Political Theory in 1993) has some bearing on this. In these lectures, he begins to explain his move away from his preoccupation with power toward what is usually referred to as governmentality.

It seems, according to some suggestions by Habermas, that one can distinguish three major types of techniques in human societies: the techniques which permit one to produce, to transform, to manipulate things; the techniques which permit one to use sign systems; and the techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit them to certain ends or objectives. That is to say, there are techniques of production, techniques of signification, and techniques of domination…. Since my project was concerned with the knowledge of the subject, I thought that the techniques of domination were the most important, without any exclusion of the rest. But, analyzing the experience of sexuality, I became more and more aware that there is in all societies another type of techniques: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a techniques or technology of the self.

In order to understand subjectivity we must “take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, the points where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of domination.” In other words, though we have some agency and autonomy, “subtle techniques of domination” co-create subjectivity. This effectively prevents us from recognizing how these techniques constrain us, how they constitute subjectivity in such a way as to guarantee obedience.

Foucault basically takes Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and  applies them to a theory of the self. “We must not understand the exercise of power as pure violence or strict coercion,” Foucault says. The relation may instead betoken collaboration. When, for example, we produce all sorts of useful information for producers by sharing the details of our consumption online in social networks, no one has to coerce us. We do it because we think it makes our identity more concrete and in so doing extends it further, broadening our influence. It is what Lazzarato calls immaterial labor — voluntary production in the symbolic order that manifests itself for the laborer as consumption. More and more, that consumption is identity-driven. We must consume to produce the self, producing as a by-product data that is valuable to information-economy firms. It would be all well and good to be paid in identity for labor we volunteer to perform, if that set of relations did not at the same time corrupt us with the compulsions of capital. We end up compelled to continue to expand it as identity becomes increasingly a cause for competition within the “attention economy.”

In his lectures Foucault contrasts a classical-era “truth procedure” with a medieval monastic one to highlight what changed as Christianity came to order Western society. I’m not entirely sold on his methodology, but I found this interesting: He’s talking about theologian John Cassian and the monastic requirements to search into the motivations of your thoughts to decide whether they should be accepted or rejected.

How is it possible to perform continuously this necessary self-examination, this necessary self-control of the tiniest movements in the thoughts? How is it possible to perform this necessary hermeneutics of our own thoughts? The answer given by Cassian and his inspirators is both obvious and surprising. The answer given by Cassian is, well, you interpret your thoughts by telling them to the master or to your spiritual father. You interpret your thoughts by confessing not of course your acts, not confessing your faults, but in confessing continuously the movement you can notice in your thought.

"I contain multitudes": social media and the monetized self.

This has an obvious application to the impulse to confess the minutiae of our lives in status updates and on Twitter — with the ominous implication that those Web 2.0 services now function as our “spiritual fathers” in the current self-production regime. Sharing is what permits us to understand ourselves, in a tradition that, if Foucault is right, has deep roots. He asserts that the process of confessing itself reveals in that moment of expression the purity or authenticity of them. Only in that moment can the self be separated from sin. Interpreting Cassian, he writes, “If one seeks to hide his own thoughts, if even quite simply one hesitates to tell his thoughts, that is proof that those thoughts are not good as they may appear.” Foucault notes that the Greek church fathers had a word for “this permanent verbalization of the thoughts”: exagoreusis. I guess “tweeting” is a bit catchier.

Foucault regards exagoreusis as an ascetic process, a paradoxical sacrifice of the self at the moment of its concrete realization as something that must be renounced.

We have to understand this sacrifice not only as a radical change in the way of life but as the consequences of a formula like this: you will become the subject of the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you destroy yourself as a real body or as a real existence.

This is arguably what happens when we realize our identity in social networking and consumerist modes of self-production. The moment at which we demonstrate our uniqueness we also reveal our dependence, our lack of autonomy, our constructedness in the code of consumerist symbols.

Foucault offers this speculation in conclusion: “Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies.”

If that is the problem, do we begin by turning off our computers, throwing our smartphones in the river? Or would the resulting isolation serve to neutralize us as thoroughly as participation in the new technologically mediated social system promises to? The technology itself, its propensity to capitalize on network effects, inevitably becomes coercive, reshaping the sphere in which identity can appear, in which vital recognition can occur. Our situation with social technologies is akin to that which we face with consumerism. It’s difficult to resist consumerism because the resistance itself can so easily be transformed by the very system it wants to reject into a signifying product to be consumed for identity purposes. Something similar is happening with social media: we are left Twittering our paranoia about what twitter is doing to us.

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Planned Spontaneity
by Bojana Vuksanović

Overview

1. Introduction
2. Planning
3. Spontaneity
4. The Issue of Complexity
5. Planned versus Spontaneous
6. Planned Spontaneity
7. Conclusion

“The unexpected has its own force, and there is a beauty in the spaces between dimensions, as can be seen in all art forms. Music is not only a question of time and pitch, but also intensity. Poetry is not only words and thoughts, but also heartbeats. Architecture is not only space and material, but also the special vibration of place and use.”

Gunnar Hoydal, Faroese Architect and Poet

1. Introduction

Ever since human consciousness evolved, the tendency was there to conquer the nature and put the natural processes under control. Today, we can predict with a very high level of certainty if the various things will or will not happen. These processes often follow a very predictable ‘path’ and it seems that the certain direction of movement and change does exist. The entire universe appears to be on a constant roll.

There are certain things in nature and society which require time to develop. They do not instantly happen. This especially concerns communities and the relationships between people. Urban plans, which, by their very essence, are concerned with these, often seem to ignore this. Most of the times they attempt to provide the solution in its finalized form, which is frequently shown not to work.

While in other fields, especially in the areas of the natural sciences, existing processes are employed on a much more complex level, in the design process, urban design in particular, problematic involved is still tackled as if city matter is something static and certain. Time is often completely disregarded and everything is fixed and known before it has even happened.

Our society is becoming increasingly complex every day. Identifying the ‘problem’ is becoming less and less possible. Is it likely that, if the right conditions were created, the ‘solution’ would consequently present itself, representing, by the very nature of its emergence, the ‘right answer’? Do conditions themselves require time to ‘evolve’ in order for the right questions to be asked?

2. Planning

plan /plæn/ n.&v. – n. 1 a a formulated and especially detailed method by which a thing is to be done; a design or scheme. b an intention or proposed proceeding (my plan was to distract them/ plan of campaign). 23 a large scale detailed map of a town or district. 4a a table etc. indicating times, places, etc, of intended proceedings. b a scheme or arrangement (prepared the seating plan). 5 an imaginary plane perpendicular to the line of vision and containing the objects shown in a picture. – v. (planned, planning) 1 tr. (often foll. by that + clause or to + infin.) arrange (a procedure etc.) beforehand; form a plan (planned to catch the evening ferry). 2 tr. a design (a building new town, etc.) b. make a plan of (an existing building, an area, etc.). 3 tr. (as planned adj.) in accordance with a plan (his planned arrival; planned parenthood) 4 intr. make plans. □ planning permission Brit. formal permission for building development etc. esp. from a local authority. plan on colloq. aim at doing; intend. □□ planning n. (F f. earlier plant, f. It. pianta plan of building: cf. plant) a drawing or diagram made by projection on a horizontal plane, esp. showing a building or one floor of a building

In today’s society, planning involves groups of urban designers producing their vision in its final form: through the media of models and drawings, the finalized design is delivered to the client.

Excluding the medieval period, during which cities were not planned as such, this kind of planning has sustained until today. What is shown through the drawings and models is what is expected to became the reality once the proposal is built. In this form planning existed ever since the ancient times. Town planning of the Ancient Roman Republic illustrates this very well.

It was during the Renaissance times that the planning task was again assigned to the group of experts. They would on paper produce the plan of the city, which was than built accordingly. Important revision of planning occurred during functionalist movement in 1930s – the issues of health and equality between people suddenly became of the utmost importance, but, although there were changes in ideology and motives, the actual design methods stayed very much the same – the urban plan was envisaged, finalised and decided right to its end stage by the team of experts long before work on the site was to begin.

3. Spontaneity

spontaneous /spon’teiniəs/ adj. 1 acting or done or occurring without external cause. 2 voluntary, without external incitement (made a spontaneous offer of his services). 3 Biol. (of structural changes in plants and muscular activity esp. in young animals) instinctive, automatic, prompted by no motive 4 (of bodily movement, literary style, etc.) gracefully natural and unconstrained 5 (of sudden movement etc.) involuntary, not due to conscious volition. 6 growing naturally without cultivation □ spontaneous combustion the ignition of a mineral or vegetable substance (e.g. a heap of rags soaked with oil, a mass of wet coal) from heat engendered within itself, usu. by rapid oxidation. spontaneous generation the supposed production of living from non/living matter as inferred from the appearance of life (due in fact to bacteria etc.) in some infusions; a biogenesis. spontaneous suggestion suggestion from association of ideas without conscious volition. □□ spontaneity /,spontə’ni:iti,-‘neiiti/ n. spontaneously adv. spontaneousness n. (LL spontaneous f. sponte of one’s own accord)

There is a certain flow in the Universe and we are part of it. There are things which are not planned – they happen. These are the processes which exist all around us and it is what the Nature’s essence seems to be. Movement and change appear to be fundamental forces in the Cosmos. We are also continuously evolving. There seems to be a continuous adaptation of everything on existing conditions at any particular moment in time.

During the period roughly between AD 500 and AD 1500, the cities were not planned in a real sense. They would appear where there was a need for them, and their form and ‘plan’ was the result of a processes which took sometimes several hundreds of years. The changes which happened during the city history often seem to be ‘engraved’ in these plans. The history of these cities can be ‘decoded’ from them. They show a sort of a time map of events that happened during their past. These cities evolved as a result of current needs of the society and its inhabitants. As a result, their ‘plans’ often work very well. The scale and usage of spaces seems to be very appropriate to the people, and it is evident that a great number of visitors of inhabitants enjoy these cities very much.

Cities behave in a similar manner as organisms do. They are not dead, static places. They are continuously changing and adapting. These changes are not always a result of some fixed preconceived plan. More often these changes are the result of spontaneous processes, which happen as a reaction to current conditions.

If a city is perceived as an alive, dynamic organism, would the design of the initial conditions, which would act as triggers to a process, rather than its final form be more appropriate? Is it possible to ‘direct’ processes which would then start to happen, rather than try to force the final stage ourselves?

4. The Issue of the Complexity

An increase in complexity of society as the time progresses is evident. In some ways, our society is evolving in an almost identical way to that of individual organisms. What starts as a small number of identical cells, splits into more and more units and their function becomes more and more specialized. What starts of as a single cell, develops over time into an immensely complex, but nevertheless extremely well coordinated organism.

It is recognized that the more complex the systems are, as the number of variables to consider increases, the more difficult it becomes to identify the requirements and specify the problems. The cities and the large urban areas are examples of these complex systems. The complexity makes their resulting programs more and more indeterminate. The rules which govern the process became more and more difficult to isolate.

In the Roman times, the city planners had a comparatively limited number of issues to consider. The Roman society was split into a relatively small number of classes which were very clearly defined. Somehow, it was appropriate for a city planner in Ancient Rome to design a city in its finalized form – the problem was identified, and there was the solution to it – the plan.

Since Roman times, the society has greatly changed. People are much freer in their choices and their options and have a great variety of different lifestyles. They move and travel much faster than they used to. The information exchange between them is so much faster and it is done over much larger distances. We are living in times of accelerated change. The complexity of the society increased so much that even defining a problems is a problem in itself. It is hard to tell any more what the requirements are or might be. Although rapid change in the structure of the society’s complexity is evident, nothing has radically changed since the times of Romans as far as the urban design strategy is concerned.

5. Planned versus Spontaneous

While organic architecture involves no or very little planning, the ability to predict situations with a high degree of certainty requires the skills which are much greater than what the ‘instantaneous’ planning requires. In this respect, being able to take the control of spontaneous and living processes in the Universe seems more of a step ahead and it is not to be seen in any case as something in-between planned and organic.

During the sixties, a rare attempt to deal with the issue of ‘growth’ and development over time happened. In 1966. Arup Associates produced the Master Plan for Loughborough University.

The client was neither able to predict the development in teaching disciplines nor to specify with certainty the future requirements of the University complex. It was impossible for them to give any sort of determined brief of their needs. Arup Associates found that the only way to tackle the design of such unspecified Master Plan was to work with indeterminate growth of variable functions and their interrelationships.

The design became a distribution of interrelationships between various parts in the form of a grid, which may or may not happen as a future development. The interrelationships of the individual parts were considered, as well as how the individual parts related to the whole. They were designed with a determined structural space unit (which was possible to identify), with and by the requirement of the vertical circulation and services. The initial ‘entity’ was able to ‘grow’ and expand in a predictable and planned manner, but the extent and the rate of expansion of ‘growth’ itself was left to clarify itself as the time advances.

In the design of larger urban areas, where complexity and indeterminacy becomes even more of an issue, this design approach seems even more appropriate. The grid ‘shape’ of the plan illustrates how the actual ‘shape’ of the plan, i.e. whether the plan is in a form of a grid or whether it has more ‘organic’, ‘fluid’ shape is not the indicator of its deterministic or non-deterministic nature.

6. Planned Spontaneity

“The complex and vibrant ideal: to create an order from which
accidental occurrences can arise” Gunar Hoydal

One of greatest abilities of human beings is inventing/producing things which ‘by their very nature’ are not part of the Nature. We have the ability to imagine things which do not exist yet and are subsequently able to realise them/make them happen.

Simultaneously, there are processes in nature which somehow happen by themselves. There is nothing that we are doing which makes this happen. When ‘triggered’ these processes happen with a great deal of certainty: for a seed planted under optimal condition, it is fairly certain that it will start to grow. Similarly, this process can be prevented if the same seed is kept in the drawer for years. There are uncountable examples of this in the organic as well as the non-organic world. But what is essential to note is that, although we can ‘trigger’ and control these processes, the process of the actual growth itself still happen ‘on its own’.

It can be seen from the nature that the higher the degree of order within the system, the less chance of accidental occurrences taking place and the less chance for spontaneity to happen The more static the systems, the less change is possible. The things that are showing the greatest ability for adaptation and change are in their dynamic states. Liquids and gases (fluids) are the states which are the most flexible. They are able to take a ‘shape’ of what it is that contains them. They are able to ‘mould’ around things. The solids are not.

It is as if the more fixed our designs are, the more resistance they exert on the natural dynamic of things. There is a difference between trying to force things into the shape/state, and allowing something to happen. A lot about human mind is still about control. There is a clear fixation with ‘final and defined’.

There is a certain beauty in uncertainty, this is something which makes our lives amazing to us. If everything was always known in advance to its last detail what would it be to live that life? Love and friendship can only spontaneously happen.

Spontaneity creates a space for things to unfold in the direction that creates a natural balance; the one that would be assumed if not prevented by the fixity of the human mind. Regardless, despite of the rational control imposed, the spontaneity is resumed as soon as the control is released. This is an imminent process and can be seen on every single level of existence.

7. Conclusion

There is no conclusion.

In the Universe which is a mixture of infinitely complex and changeable variables, in the place where everything is constantly changing and moving, apart as a mere Utopian abstraction, can something as final ever exist.

written May 2003

Jon’s blog tipped me to this great archive of materials by G.H. Mead and the “Meadians “. The archive includes primary sources by folks such as: Floyd Allport, L. L. Bernard, Herbert Blumer, Emory S. Bogardus, Ellsworth Faris, Jacob Kantor, W. I. Thomas, Louis Thurstone and Kimball Young. It’s a nice resource for anyone teaching theory.

3011718    ทฤษฎีการตรวจถ่ายภาพระดับโมเลกุล    Molecular Imaging Theory

หลักการ ข้อบ่งชี้ ข้อจำกัด วิธีการในการศึกษาด้านคุณลักษณะและการศึกษาเชิงปริมาณเกี่ยวกับกระบวนการทางชีวภาพระดับเซลล์และระดับโมเลกุลในร่างกายมนุษย์ โดยใช้วิธีการต่างๆ ในการถ่ายภาพ ได้แก่ การตรวจด้วยคลื่นสะท้อนในสนามแม่เหล็ก เอกซเรย์คอมพิวเตอร์ โพสิตรอนอีมิชชั้นโทโมกราฟี การถ่ายภาพรังสีแกมม่าชนิดหัววัดหมุนได้รอบตัว การตรวจด้วยคลื่นเสียงความถี่ และการถ่ายภาพแบบออปติคัลที่จะเกิดขึ้นในอนาคต

(Principles, indications, limitations, methods in the in vivo characterization and measurement of biologic processes at cellular and molecular levels in human body by imaging methods : magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, single-photon emission computed tomography, and ultrasound with the important addition of optical imaging.)

(3011718 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

Freelance Graphic Designer

£12.00 per hour

NASES( National Association of Student Employment Service ) is seeking to recruit a freelance graphic designer to help prepare membership packs and application materials, these are word documents which need to be converted to more professional looking PDF files which can be emailed and uploaded onto our web site. Candidates will be expected to use their own software and have previous design experience.

Approx 8 hours work on the Membership materials.

Please can you direct any interested students to The Jobshop or www.jobshop.glyndwr.ac.uk

3011727    ทฤษฎีการตรวจวินิฉัยและการรักษาทางเวชศาสตร์นิวเคลียร์    Nuclear Medicine Imaging and Therapy Theory

พยาธิสรีรวิทยา กลการการจัดของสารเภสัชรังสี ข้อบ่งชี้และข้อห้าม วิธีการตรวจ การแปลผล ลักษณะปกติและผิดปกติจากการตรวจอวัยวะของระบบต่าง ๆ ของร่างกายด้วยวิธีการถ่ายภาพทางเวชศาสตร์นิวเคลียร์ ข้อบ่งชี้และข้อห้ามในการบำบัดรักษาด้วยวิธีทางเวชศาสตร์นิวเคลียร์ การเตรียมสถานที่และผู้ป่วย การคำนวณปริมาณ และวิธีการบริหารสารเภสัชรังสี ข้อควรระวัง ผลข้างเคียงที่อาจพบได้ทั้งในระยะแรกและระยะหลัง

(Pathophysiology, mechanism of radiopharmaceutical localization, indications and contraindications, procedures, interpretation, normal and abnormal findings from nuclear medicine imaging study of all systems of the body indication, and contraindications for radionuclide therapy, space and patient preparation, dose calculation, administration techniques, precaution, early and late complications, radiation dosimetry.)

(3011727 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

Back in the Motown days, we used to wear tailored suits. That was the thing to do in Philly. Even in the Ghetto, you’d buy the best suits or have them tailor-made. We was broke as hell, but that was the thing. It was like the clean, pimp style. But seeing how fictitious that was, we welcomed a change. So when kids started wearing hole-y jeans and T-shirts, we’d grab a towel and wear it like a diaper. When it changed again and it had to be clean again, we bought $10,000 leather-winged outfits, spacemen costumes and a half a million dollar Mothership. If it had glitter, we had to make it glitter to the point that nobody had ever done it before.

Then that was getting old after we’d been on tour for ever, so we got the camouflage stuff. We pretty much started that on the One Nation Under a Groove album. We went into the army/navy surplus stores and stuff was like three dollars for a pair of pants. $3.50, $2.50 for shirts. We loaded everything outta there. In a good six months, that shit was up to $30 or $40. Now it’s a couple of hundred dollars to get a good army suit.

The history of Funkadelic begins where Hendrix left of: distorted guitars, orange-purple soundscapes, black cosmology, LSD-weltschmertz, burning american flags, bombed out city centers – but with one forward-looking, crucial difference; they added the Funk, the continuous groove, the steady heartbeat of the Mothership.

The easiest way to break down P-funk? Psychedelic Rock crossed with Funk. This gives Funkadelic their unique flavour, that is why they appeal to both dirtbag rockers and californian gangbangers, that is why their music has met success both amongst American college-nerds and party-goers in the Brazilian favelas. While the original funk was developed under the disciplinary regime of James Brown, the Detroit bastard child was generally to fucked on acid when they were in the studio to accomplish something substantial. Skippable experiments drenched in bad acid and bad hippie wisdom is one of the weaknesses of the p-funk-catalouge. They also had the bad habit of including ballads on their releases, an area which they unlike James Brown did not master. Clinton’s half-baked Frank Zappa-imitations (Jimmy’s Got A Little Bit Of Bitch In Him) are also misplaced, since Clinton’s own sense of humour transcends Zappa by lightyears. To bow down to an inferior is not a good look.

The bitches’ brew that Funkadelic initially served their followers had ingredients echoing both the immanent theology of the likes of Meister Eckhart and Thomas Müntzer and the darker side of that took over after The Summe Of Love. “The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Within” is howled repeatedly on the intro to their first LP. On America Eats It’s Young they even include a text from The Church Of The Process, a congregation founded by ex-Scientologists that worshipped both God and Satan and believed the world would end any minute now. A.S. Van Dorston writes in his brilliant The Afro-Alien Diaspora, that it “seems unlikely that George Clinton took the Process Church seriously for long. Everything he did showed that his songs were meant to benefit everyone in a positive way.” The iconoclastic imagery of Clinton was larger than one church, it was an all rebellious, playful mythology that was riding on the bad acid-vibes of Hendrix and fellow noise-bringers. Dorston continues that

there’s no mistake that the early music was hard. In stark contrast to their later cartoonish space-freak image, the band looked and sounded as earthy as the dirt on the cover art for Maggot Brain. Funkadelic were bad motherfuckers. They shared management and stages with the other ‘bad boys of Detroit’ – Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes, MC5, and The Stooges. Their management even cooked up a marriage between George and Iggy Pop as a publicity stunt. Iggy was probably relieved that it was never followed through. ‘He could have been my wife’, tittered Clinton. (…) Funkadelic’s unique relationship with white rock ‘n’ roll started when they had borrowed amps from Vanilla Fudge. They were so pleased with the high volume that they immediately got their own. Like Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, they reclaimed rock music as their own. (…) By 1970’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, Funkadelic sounded as if they had absorbed some of MC5’s aggression and The Stooges’ decadent nihilism. They continued their critiques of capitalism and booty-liberation theology, but instead of the blues, Free Your Mind’s title track showcased lysergic-drenched noise, with Bernie Worrell’s slavering, distorted three-note organ riff similar to Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray.

With time, the hard-work funk ethics of James Brown came more and more into play, and the psychedelic distortion and acid noise of the first albums took the back seat as the line between Funkadelic’s and Parliament’s identities blurred. The albums got more concentrated and funkier, and funkier, reaching a pinnacle with One Nation Under A Groove in 1978. As the album name suggests, the lyrics and concepts had moved closer to black nationalism (a course that took a later generation of black musicians a lot further. It is also interesting to note that the evangelic SF imagery is a central element not just in the Parliament’s completely masterful Mothership Connection, but also in the mythology of Nation Of Islam – and The Church Of Scientology).

As the eghties drew nearer, the P-Funk-army got more involved in the war against disco, which shows up in both confrontative song titles and in the music itself (it was getting polished). Funk was becoming more and more difficult to play. The times were changing. Cocaine replaced acid, and the quality of music declined. In the disco-era, what else could you do but sell your soul to the placebo syndrome and start smoking death instead of sweating away death under the powerful groove from A Fully Operational Mothership.

The pioneering work of the funk-tribes had however been accomplished. With Uncle Jam Wants You they passed the legacy onto the next generation. Not long after, Uncle Jam’s Army of pioneering hip hop-DJs was formed in Los Angeles, with Egyptian Lover sent out on a mission to once again reclaim the pyramids. On his solo release Computer Games from 1982 Clinton passes the torch to Afrika Bambaataa with the chant “like Planet Rock, we just don’t stop“: Planet Rock was released the same year, and a new world of music was born. Another generation took over. Once again black music was taken out of the clubs, into the urban landscape. Once again the sound in the parks was rough and raw, not smooth and polished. A rich foundation had been layed for the future of funk, and hiphop-producers gathered the ammunition needed for the oncoming battle. The apocalyptic Bring-The-Noise-eclecticism of Funkadelic was essential in The Bomb Squad’s revolutionary Wall Of Sound-technique, while the beautifully bouncing booty-bass and slick arrangemnets of Parliament lives on in the productions of Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Organized Noize, and many others.

Ever since the mothership of Parliament-Funkadelic went under the radar in the disguise of The P-Funk All-Stars, Clinton hasn’t been the same, and releases bearing his name have mostly been thrown together without class. Atomic Dog was, of course, the shit, but besides that he has rarely shined like in the seventies. Two moments are worth the mention, though.

Just out of jail, and with both Dr. Dre and George Clinton on his side, U Cant C Me is as relentless and triumphant as we ever saw Tupac Shakur. This is one of his hottest tracks, much owing to Clinton’s idiosyncratic adlibs and Dre’s gloriously perfected p-funk (the beat is so large that it doesn’t matter that its skeleton is identical to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Who Am I). When the Clinton spaces the funk out on Synthesizer from Outkast’s critically-hugged-to-death Stankonia it’s another beautiful moment. But in recent years, solid contributions have been missing, and you would suspect that Mr. Clinton have been paying more attention to the crack-pipe than to the microphone. A friend even had the nerve to inform me of his demise some years ago, a piece of bad news that a quick googling could refute; in fact, he had a new album out. And he put in his input on that Wu-Tang Clan-album.

How does he do it? Perhaps George Clinton is a perpeteum mobile, an alien, cyborg machine that “just don’t stop“, defying physics and AA meetings. In a way the essence of Funk: bodies defying the laws of gravity, shaking, getting it on, grooving for hours and hours and years and years. It’s mind-blowing to see sixty-year-olds like James Brown blasting the same shit on stage as forty years ago. Funk aint slack. You gotta sweat if you wanna have fun. If you want your spot in the sun, you gotta be on some hot shit. On the other hand, if you got funk, you got style.

At the very least one A3 sheet documenting one of your negotiated study projects. I let everybody know last week. (See below, link to last mondays post)

http://nwsadcollective.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/level-6-where-are-you/

Image by Wikipedia

Supposed that this is the most famous question among physicists, astronomer and any other kind of field that relates to the universe, why? Because they’d work around the clock and make ends meet just to answer this simple yet incomprehensible question. Perhaps that right now you’re brainstorming for a reliable answer that suits your pleasure, putative that those answers might speak costly as they frequently do.

Image by Aiwaz

There are quite a number of theories and assumption that had been made ever since mankind started kicking and screaming in this very world, relatively religion creationism such as *Adam & Eve* and I’m certain of this fact that there’re many of you still believe that we are the offspring of “Adam & Eve*. Not only that but also that we were created by the name of “God” in the last day of the “7 Day Creation* of which *Da Bible* spoke of it and yet some people still do, bestseller too. Why would people believe such an outlandish tale from the bible? Perhaps that’s what people wants.

Image by MIT

Besides those science-fictional books, we’ll head onto science which does have evidences to support their findings. That would be *Human Evolution* that scientists considered the great apes to be the closest relatives of human beings due to morphological and anatomical similarities. The possibility of linking humans with earlier apes by descent only became clear after 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This argued for the idea of the evolution of new species from earlier ones. Darwin’s book did not address the question of human evolution, saying only that “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”.

Apart from that, we’d focus on those * Extraterrestrial Being*, why? Because there’re certain people who also believe that we are a experimental subject who is genetically engineered by those small-little-green-men or *Aliens* if you may. This idea was made by Raelian as in his *Raelian Theory* and can be called *Panspermia* which means that there was life exist beyond our observation and gives our earth the *Seeds of Life*.

]]> http://brytburken.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/allt-ar-matematik/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:28:00 +0000 brytburken http://brytburken.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/allt-ar-matematik/

Allt är matematik. Allt är nummer, och nummer är inte något abstrakt. Enligt Pythagoras är tingen en manifestation av den numeriska strukturen inneboende i dem. Han talar om ett “levande universums andning”. Det finns en systematisk ordning som våra två ögon inte kan se, men som vi möjligen kan känna. Enligt honom och hans efterföljare är universums ordning matematisk och musikalisk, avståndet i naturen mellan de jordiska och himmelska sfärerna är ordnade likt perfekta ackordföljder. När skapelsens kroppar rör sig i samklang hörs en musik i naturen som vi uppfattar som tystnad.

(Harmoni är dock inte enbart tystnad, men även balanserat ljud, på så sätt som minimal techno väger upp oväsen från gatan, och lämnar sinnet klarare och mer rörligt.)

Nietzsche hade svårt för matematiken, och odugligförklarade den då naturen uppenbarligen inte följer någon slags decimal exakthet. För övrigt älskar naturen att gömma sig för oss, som Herakleitos sade (?) i ett av sina fragment.

Pythagoras hämtade mycket inspiration från sina resor i Indien, Persien, Babylonien, osv, vilket får en att revidera bilden av Grekland som den västerländska civilisationens vagga. Visserligen sammanställde de gamla grekerna grunden för vår vetenskap, men mycket hämtades uppenbarligen från andra högstående kulturer.

Back to basics today.

“When you live in an information age, culture becomes big business…and the cultural explosion becomes itself culture, it knocks down all the walls between culture and business” – Marshal McLuhan

3014858    การจัดการข้อมูล : ทฤษฎีและปฏิบัติ    Data Management : Theory and Practice

ทฤษฎีและการฝึกปฏิบัติในการบริหารข้อมูลและฐานข้อมูลที่ได้จากการศึกษาวิจัย เพื่อการวิเคราะห์เชิงสถิติ ทั้งสถิติพื้นฐาน และการวิเคราะห์โดยแบบจำลองทางสถิติ และการใช้โปรแกรมสำเร็จรูปทางสถิติ

(Theories and practice in managing data databases from research studies for statistical analysis, including both basic statistics and statistical modeling, and the use of statistical softwares.)

(3014858 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

My dad had sent this a while back and thought that this would be perfect for S.A.F.E. Animals! The Fun Theory is an initive of Volkswagen, and it is pretty creative. “We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.” This video is of people going up piano stairs, and there are other videos on their website like the Water Bottle Arcade, and the talking trashcan. Check out their website and maybe you will be inspired yourself to do some fun theories!

We have added a new category to our site. It is our Big Bang Theory t-shirts section.

Big Bang Theory T-Shirt

This tee shirt features the popular Big Bang Theory tv show in which this tee has the friends algorithm.

AAAAANNNNNDDDDD BLAST OFF!!!

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen! THE NaNoWriMo! Hello, novelling, goodbye social life!

I’m a day ahead of myself on word count, which I must say is quite a feat this month. I expect a crash next week, so I’m preparing my word count today. But I have confidence in this idea, because I believe in it, unlike last year. This time it created itself, rather than me creating something just to write. And besides, my characters like to take the reins more often than not, so I trust their judgment.

At this minute, my word count equals 6,852. In twenty minutes, it will probably equal 7,000. But who’s to say, really?

I don’t have much time for this post. Must NaNo or I will explode. Jackie just stepped on me and ripped a hole in my shirt…I’m going to murder that little spaz…AFTER I eat my enchilada.

Anderson, Benedict. “The Origins of National Consciousness”, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1991.

Page 58: – “Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by three paradigms. (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender – vs the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis. (3) The ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.”

Page 59: – “It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ and ‘fascism’. In an anthropological spirit, then I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovreign.”

Nations are (59-60):

- [Imagined] “[...] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. [...] With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’. The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages [...] are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”
- [Limited] “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”
- [Sovereign] “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.”
- [Community] “[...] it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

Inspired by my previous posts about character building in AD&D and 4E, I made a Google spreadsheet tracking how many decisions it takes to create a character in three different editions. Since the number varies depending on character type, I chose to focus on the human cleric I was making as a pregenerated character for my Anonycon AD&D and 4E games. I didn’t include choices like a characters’ name which have no mechanical effect on the game, and didn’t consider decisions about equipping a character.

To make a 1st level cleric in OD&D, you make decisions about your class (3 options), race (4 options), alignment (3 options),  and languages spoken (no specific options  given beyond “all other creatures and monsters which can speak have their own language”), for a total of 4 choices from among 10 options.

In AD&D, that same 1st level cleric requires 7 choices: class, race, gender (which has mechanical effects in AD&D, unlike any other edition), alignment, languages, and spells (1 because AD&D clerics have a spell at 1st level, and 2 more because this cleric has bonus spells from 18 Wisdom). Counting each multiclass possibility as a separate option, these selections are made from among 60 unique options (you choose 3 times from among the same set of 12 spells; this counts as a dozen unique options, not 36.) I didn’t include deity both because it has no mechanical effects and because the AD&D PHB says nothing about this choice for clerics or any other class, as far as I can tell!

In 4E, you make 23 separate decisions in the course of building a 1st level cleric: class; race; alignment; languages; class build; deity; point buy decisions for Strength, Constitution, Intelligence, Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma; four trained skills; two feats; a bonus ritual; three at-will powers, one encounter, and one daily.  If you’re just using the 4E PHB , you make these selections from among approximately 165 different options.

To make my 4E cleric I used the Character Builder, which includes all currently published material for 4E, and made a total of 27 decisions from among 780 options to choose from. It might be interesting to make a similar comparison against all AD&D material, including the roll-swap decisions from the DMG Appendix P and the non-weapon proficiencies from Unearthed Arcana. My suspicion would be that this would probably bring up the number of choices into the 4E range, but provide nowhere near as many options to select from.

The differences between editions are reduced when making a higher-level character is the focus of comparison. In OD&D, creating a 10th level cleric requires a total of 19 more selections (picking spells) from among 36 unique options. In AD&D, it’s 27 decisions from among 106 options.  In 4E, it’s 34 choices from among 193 new options. (Note, too, that these choices will stay more or less fixed, while the older-edition clerics could re-choose their spells each day).

What are these data good for?

One thing we can do is to quantify the oft-repeated maxim that in 4E, making a fighter is like making a spellcaster in older editions. In AD&D, making a fighter of any level only requires five choices (as long as you’re rolling stats in order and not using non-weapon proficiencies). We can now say definitively that making a first-level fighter in 4E requires about as many choices as it’d take to build a 8th level cleric in AD&D.

More generally, this confirms my intuition that 4E character creation requires making many more decisions and considering more options than in previous editions.  It also allows us to make conceptually dodgy but numerically-supported statements like “one character creation choice in OD&D is worth six in 4E” (if we accept the premise that, as with randomness, making fewer decisions gives each one a proportionally greater significance) or “4E’s character creation process is seventy-eight times deeper than OD&D’s” (if we accept that the fundamental unit of a game’s depth is the number of meaningful options it presents to the players).

Le dicotomie alterano le facoltà cognitive dell’essere umano. Qui si rifugge in particolar modo, ma non solo, dall’opposizione reale/virtuale. Il virtuale, si dice, è altro dal reale; è un territorio diverso da quello che abitiamo di solito, perché è informazione pura (per i fans dell’Illuminismo). Allora vediamo cos’è l’informazione. Ecco, io parto da qui:

What we used to call ‘media messages’ no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms. Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyperconnected planet.

Terranova 2004: 2

Hey lovely readers. I’ve got a theory and I could use some help. If you’re able to, can you please answer these questions? Also let me know if I can quote you or if you’d want your name changed. Comments are screened before being posted.

1) Do you feel like you have a destiny? If so why or why not?

2) When you’ve tried to get to your destiny or if you’ve gotten there already, what sort of obstacles and things have you encountered on the way. Can you point out any specific moments where you felt you were hitting a crisis or a crossing the threshold moment? Please explain.

3) Do you think of yourself as a spiritual being? Regardless of religion. Is there any kind of sense of spiritual or non-physical world that you are aware of? Do you think this world effect your destiny or lack of…?

4) Do you believe in symbols? Can you see any patterns in your life?