augury

Proving that some market somewhere will find a value for anything, a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking "the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings" as a possible indicator for where the country's economy might be headed.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/just-in-case-informatics.htmlhttp://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/just-in-case-informatics.html

A Cyberneticist is a man who observes what might have happened but did not

Some say that a first requirement is that it shall weigh 45 ounces.

http://www.rossashby.info/

homeostasis ////With regard to any given life system an organism may be a conformer or a regulator.

characteristics of dumb cake

measuring of the ingredients in thimbles or egg-shells
made and baked by a group in silence
salt
intitials are scratched onto the cake
other initials appear left by a doppelganger


An egg-shell-full of salt,
An egg-shell-full of wheat meal.
An egg-shell-full of barley-meal.
Water.

garnish the lower edge with English walnuts and autumn leaves.

sometimes objects are included: a ring, a button, a coin 

eaten in silence

bird

a reading of the configuration of surfaces

To take the auguries is to believe in a world without man; to inaugurate means to give homage to the real as such.

Serres/ Rome / 12

spectral / automatic writing

crow

whitehall 26/3

athene noctua

(☉˛☉)




the owls are not what they seem

soft targets

Terminus: boundary stone

The new work was hardly begun, when, we are told, heaven itself was moved to give a sign of the future greatness of Rome's dominion: for when the auguries were taken, the birds allowed the secularization of all the places of worship except the shrine of Terminus. the fact that of all gods Terminus alone was not moved from his place or called to leave the ground which was consecrated to his worship, was taken to portend the stability and permanence of everything Roman. Hard upon this happy augury came another strange event, which seemed to foretell the grandeur of our empire: a man's head with the features intact was discovered by workmen who were digging the foundations of the temple. This meant without a doubt that on this spot would stand the imperial citadel of the capital city of the world. Nothing could be plainer.

Livy 1.55 (Tarquinus Superbus)

Nadja

… the Manoir d'Ango where I was offered the hospitality, when I wished to be undisturbed, of a hut artificially camouflaged by shrubbery, at the edge of the woods; here, while in other respects occupying myself with whatever I liked, I was able to hunt owls as well.

Nadja/ 23/ Breton

aggregate / aggregator

Site of Baynards castle from St Andrew le Wardrobe
British Telecommunications concrete

aggregate - coarse, particulate material, a component of a composite material

aggregator - a collector of messages from multiple sources

herald - A person who carries or proclaims important news; a messenger. One that gives a sign or indication of something to come; a harbinger. An official charged with making royal proclamations and bearing messages of state between sovereigns.

augur - One of a group of ancient Roman religious officials who foretold events by observing and interpreting signs and omens. A seer or prophet; a soothsayer.

On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense

Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”
Fragment, 1873: from the Nachlass.
Compiled from translations by Walter Kaufmann and Daniel Breazeale.
Text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel.

(downloaded from http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm)