Sunday, December 11, 2016

Disorder in Order



Where do I find, lost in the brightness of a sunlit day,
The happiness of an unhappy man
Fortunate only to be just one copy of himself.
Everything else stinks.

Like most modern “knowledge” workers, I spend my days in an open office. That means I also spend my days amid ringing phones, the inquisitive tones of co-workers conducting interviews, and—because we work in a somewhat old, infamous building—the pounding and drilling of seemingly endless renovations.
Even so, the #content must still be wrung from my distracted brain. And so, I join the characters of trend pieces everywhere in wearing headphones almost all day, every day. And what better to listen to with headphones than music? By now, I’ve worked my way through all the “Focus” playlists on Spotify—most of which sound like they were meant for a very old planetarium—and I’ve looped back around to a genre I like to call “soft, synthy pop songs whose lyrics don’t make much sense:” Think Miike Snow rather than Michael Jackson.
But lately I’ve been wondering, am I just replacing one distracting noise with another? Worse yet is the possibility that the constant soundtrack is poisoning my writing, with the lyrics somehow weaving into and scrambling my thoughts before they ever hit the keyboard. I try to tune it out, but after all, I’m still, I’m still an animal!
To find out, I retreated to my safe space, Google Scholar.
It contained bad news for anyone, like me, who believes background music is some sort of special hay that makes the writing horse trot. It turns out the best thing to listen to, for most office workers, is nothing.



Our search for rational explanations for our current political disorder is futile. To understand what's going on, we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility ... Anger of Meaningless Political Lives


The Rasputin problem. Hypnotist, rapist, cultist, charlatan, seer: What was the mad monk's actual role in the downfall of the the Romanovs? Royal Romanovs  


The left's war on research. By denying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, it has done real harm to the reputation of science... Little Knowledge in Genetics is Dangerous - Public Sector Management Evangelists and Reinventors of Wheels 


The accidental propagandist.One Hundred Years of Solitudemade Gabriel García Márquez famous. It also made him an unwitting operative of the CIA...KGB STASI etc  
Better than Cold River (exclusive for artificial Billionaires)Artificial intelligence meets Balzac. Computers can now detect sentiment, irony, and character type. How much longer until they're producing literature?... Hard Core Irony artificial intelligence is better than Jozef Imrich