Apologies for the Delays
P.U. I’ve just noticed how sparse the entries have been here over the course of the last couple of weeks. Well, at least in the case of the last six or seven days I have a decent excuse: my sister just got married in South Carolina! I’ve also been spending a lot of time researching. Given the fact that there is no broadband (and by extension, no wireless) in the part of SC where my parents live, working on the Internet becomes a frustrating experience at best. Then there’s also the fact that I’m a reasonably social person and wanted to spend time with my sister, her new husband, my niece, mom, dad, brother, etc. etc.
On that same note there have been general delays also because of a large amount of reading an research I’ve been doing, not all of which I can write entries about since I haven’t quite figured out where I think certain pieces fit. I’ve been re-reading Marshal McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” as well as a few other tomes and the latest in amateur neurology from Oliver Sacks and National Geographic. All of it has basically added up to a fuzzy picture in my mind of mind, media and memes. In fact, a lively conversation with my father about the calculus models used in Economics and their general failure to describe things like advertising and corporations led me to start thinking about similarities between neural networks and economic markets.
If you consider McLuhan’s perspective that media are extensions of the human senses and body and that he considered money to be one of these extensions it seems almost obvious to say that the market economies of the world are extensions (albeit slower, clunkier ones) of collective human minds. Obvious but weird.
At any rate, I’ll be writing more on this as well as how concepts of information’s density play into these kinds of market models over the next few days.