Comments & contemporary Greek artists: Everything popular is wrong...

Aphorisms & Greek artists, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Still Life - detail, oil on canvas

About humans, society, art...

Oscar Wilde
Aphorisms

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Everything popular is wrong.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

I am not young enough to know everything.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

I can resist everything except temptation.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Genius is born--not paid.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

I am not young enough to know everything.

I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Comments & modern Greek artists, painters: Whatever benefits the self-interested is propagandised by the naive...

Contemporary philosophy & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Greek Marine Landscape, oil on paper

About human nature, society, politics, history...

Panajotis Kondylis
A great social philosopher of our times

Panagiotis Kondylis (Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης, Panajotis Kondylis, Panagiotes Kondyles) (17 August 1943 – 11 July 1998), was a Greek writer, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek.

He can be placed in the tradition of thought best exemplified by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber. Other thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Kant, de Sade, Clausewitz, Marx, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Aron were amongst the important points of reference in his thinking, notwithstanding the significant differences he had with some of these writers.

Kondylis claimed to be "scientific" in the sense of writing "descriptively" and "explanatorily" rather than "prescriptively" or "normatively". He called his theoretical outlook "descriptive decisionism" and produced a body of work that referred directly to primary sources in no less than 6 languages (Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and English).

He had no time for what he considered intellectual fashions and bombastic language used to camouflage logical inconsistencies and lack of first-hand knowledge of primary sources.

His work sought to eliminate artificial academic boundaries between e.g. "philosophy", "anthropology", "economics", "history", "sociology" and "politics" by emphasising the interconnectedness of such disciplines from the point of view of "value-free" i.e. "power-claim"-free and non-normative scientific understanding. (Source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panagiotis_Kondylis )

Panajotis Kondylis

Some of his quotes
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panagiotis_Kondylis

• "The life of humans is given meaning only by their deeds."
• "Whatever benefits the self-interested is propagandised by the naive."
• "There is no final solution and there is no happiness that is not in danger."
• "Post-modern mash is easily digested but it does not constitute nutritious food."
• "Only intellectuals contend that intellectuals understand the world better than others."
• "The only thing that a world state could guarantee is the conversion of all wars into civil wars."
• "Pluralism is the ideology of satiated felicity – the hungry do not respect the values of the satiated."
• "Everyone has equal rights in delusions, since not everyone has equal ability or courage in attaining knowledge."
• "Whoever contends that History has ended might as well be certain that History awaits them around the next corner."
• "Most people consider it roughly unnatural for other opposing viewpoints to prevail. I, on the contrary, am surprised when someone agrees with me."
• "The key is to think historically – the answers to historical problems are not to be found in a constructed theory, but on the contrary, the answers to theoretical problems are to be found in history."
• "...the garrulous and lachrymose pseudo-humanism that characterises public discourse in the West does not mean any tangible disposition for drastic world-wide redistribution of material prosperity."
• "The proclamation of human rights today is connected with - and in the future it will be connected even more closely - with the once explicit desire that one's dear fellow man should sit in his own country and enjoy his human dignity over there."
• "...ideas, particularly those which have a normative loading, do not constitute a reflection [of reality (as in the case of vulgar Marxism),] but weapons, and their content is defined negatively by the conjectured belief of the enemy on each occasion."
• “[the philosophers'] position is in part tragic and in part comical because they themselves cannot transubstantiate… power into their own social domination and, correspondingly, they dream that masters will one day philosophise rather than philosophers prevail.”
• "Speaking in jest, I confess to friends that, since reading pleases me so much, I should have never made writing my profession, and Ι recollect with envy Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, who said that he likes reading so much that it does not give him any motive to write books himself."
• "Humans will be called "humans", precisely like lions are called lions and mice - mice, without any other ethnic, national or ideological differentiation. It might appear to be a paradox, but it is true that a human separated himself from all the other animal species precisely because he was not only a human without any other predicate."
• "If the same Western Powers, which in 1919 rejected Japan's demand and denied safeguarding the equality of races in the Treaty of Versailles, in the year 1998 officially bend over backwards for the sake of the understanding of foreign cultures, that does not definitely constitute the progress of understanding. However, it does constitute a sign of a dramatic about-face in the global correlation of forces."
• "The de-ideologisation and the merging of politics with the economy, in the final analysis, mean that in the hereafter conflicts will be conducted for tangible material goods, without notable ideological mediations. Thus, to be precise, we should characterise the end of ideologies as a partial return to the animal kingdom. If it is attractive and desirable for the farewelling of Utopia to reach up to there, remains a matter of taste."
• "Just as the philosopher [Kant] believed, it is exactly the "mixing" and "merging" of peoples which puts peace in danger. But even if the democratic peoples remained separate like good neighbours, as Kant preferred, again they would not be lacking in war-mongering arguments in the event they are needed. Nobody will deny the principle that "democracies do not wage war against each other" - only that he will add that the opponent is not a "genuine democrat.""
• "In order to avoid hysteria in the face of complete and irrevocable death, eschatological hysteria was legitimised world-theoretically. Whoever learns to live without spoken or unspoken eschatologies and without ethicisms as their substitutes, has to learn to die, completely and irrevocably, with psychic tranquility and drollness. This highest of lessons is learnt in classical ancient times, which ignored the straight line with the propitious end in order to fasten itself to the eternal cycle."
• "...a substantial contribution to knowledge of human affairs requires a total existential commitment, an unwinking observation of specific situations and living people, and a ceaseless refining of observations with implacable contemplation, which does not retreat before any prejudice and does not fear clashing with whomever and whatever. This stance can be called an ethic by someone (it is certainly a form of internal asceticism), but it has no relation with ethics as rules of social behaviour; on the contrary, it can militate head on against such ethics."
• "Of course, the garrulous and lachrymose pseudo-humanism that characterises public discourse in the West does not mean any tangible disposition for drastic world-wide redistribution of material prosperity. On the other hand, the extremely dangerous paradox of the planetary situation means that even “just” solutions such as self-denial without historical precedent would not offer a long-term way out. If the wealth e.g. of 800 million is divided amongst six billion, everyone will simply become a brother in poverty – conversely: if a Chinese, Indian and African were to consume per capita as much raw material and as much energy as a North American, that could entail ecological collapse."
• "The production of a historical theory and theory ignorant of history is deep down an easy matter, and that is why so many, famous and unknown, indulge in it, wanting to believe that the substitution of an arbitrary concept with another arbitrary concept or with a new combination of concepts is a significant contribution to thought. All of that comprises symptoms of a permanent intellectual adolescence. The intellect reaches a maturity when it is in a position to give a specific analysis of a specific situation. Only the clueless will call that narrow-mindedness and empiricism. It is exactly the specific analysis of specific situations which shows the true texture and usefulness of conceptual and methodological tools."

Comments & Greek artists: a paraller cosmos...

Science & Greek artists, Greek painting, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Boats - Sailors, oil on canvas

Next to us, inside our bodies, on our bodies, there is a cosmos of microbes - something like a paraller universe...

It is possible, that all the animals (including humans) of our planet might look like a population of microbes to some Extraterrestrial Aliens; a kind of microcosmos located in the organism of a huge macrocosmos which has its own history, big bangs etc...

Welcome to our microcosmos of microbes - for the time being...

The First Volume Of Microbial Encyclopedia
Source: Scientific Blogging, December 29, 2009


Despite the multitudes of microbes that reside on earth, our knowledge of them is quite limited. Of the estimated nonillion (10³⁰) that exist, scientists have or are in the process of decoding 2,000 microbial genomes, which means there is a vast unknown realm awaiting those researchers intent on exploring microorganisms that inhabit this planet.

In hopes of exploring that realm and expanding our understanding of microbes, a team from the the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) have released the first volume of the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA), an analysis of the first 56 genomes representing two of the three domains of the tree of life. The encyclopedia is detailed in the December 24 issue of Nature.

The researchers point out that most studies in microbiology have exploited a narrow subset of the evolutionary diversity of bacteria and archaea known to exist, and were selected more for convenience (and because they cause diseases) rather than the opportunity to advance discovery science. From the tree of microbial diversity the genomes from only a few branches have been sequenced. The DOE JGI is now exploring Earth’s microbial “dark matter” with a project to sequence little-studied microbial species that will inform other microbes and complex microbial communities.

“The main driver behind the GEBA project is that while the currently available sequenced genomes cover a wide range of biological and functional diversity, they have not covered a wide enough range of phylogenetic diversity,” said senior author Jonathan Eisen, DOE JGI Phylogenomics Program Head and University of California, Davis Professor. “What distinguishes GEBA is that it is less about the individual genomes and more about building a more balanced catalog of the diversity of genomes present on the planet which in turn should facilitate searches for novel functions and our understanding of the complex processes of the biosphere.”

Eisen says that there are many benefits to be gained from this phylogeny-driven approach. Information flowing from the project will shed light on the diversity of gene families and improve the understanding of how microbes acquire new functions. In addition, the newly sequenced organisms will provide urgently needed anchors for the improved annotation (assessment of biological function) of data emerging from the many ongoing projects that have expanded upon the idea of studying individual microbes by studying entire communities, deciphering specific microbial capabilities from complex environmental samples. A key outcome will be new gene products and enzymes previously unknown to biologists.

Already, several of the characterized microbes from the first GEBA volume are paying dividends. DOE JGI researchers Natalia Ivanova and Athanasios Lykidis discovered a novel set of cellulases—enzymes capable of breaking down plant material into sugars that can be rendered into transportation fuel—in a variety of GEBA organisms.

In partnership with the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute, researchers synthesized these genes and have begun to characterize them. These enzymes are of particular interest because they should be active in highly acidic environments, which could make them valuable for the liquid pretreatment of biomass feedstocks for biofuels.

“This is only the start,” said Eisen, reinforcing the magnitude of the project beyond the pilot phase. “The known phylogenetic diversity of bacteria and archaea is immense with hundreds of major lineages and probably millions if not hundreds of millions of species. This encyclopedia project is starting at the top – with the major phylogenetic groups – 100 genomes from across the tree. But we have barely scratched the surface of characterizing the diversity on the planet.” Eisen and his colleagues hope to extend GEBA beyond the pilot phase to sequence hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of genomes from additional unknown microbes.


Citation: Wu, D. et al., 'A phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopaedia of Bacteria and Archaea', Nature 2009, 462, 1056-1060; doi:10.1038/nature08656

Comments & Greek paintings, modern Greek artists: They are tears of unconcealable happiness...

Poerty & Greek paintings, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Winter in Attica, oil on canvas

Let's start our day with poetry...

Maybe the surroundings look better...

With the illusion of an aesthetic melancholy...


Andreas Embirikos

Insight of Morning Hours


Natural inclination
The dove of our heartbeat spreads it around
The tears of rivers flow always
They are tears of unconcealable happiness
They are lakes where snow-white storks lived long ago
No south-westerly settles in the sugar-canes
And even if at a gunshot the clouds lift
And rise into thinner layers
Where the corvettes spread the sails
Down on the earth a shadow searches for its lost body
The weather in the valley which stole it from her
Thickens the mists that hide it
The lake’s treasures are restless, their fur rises
Seaweed and elemental matter stir in the depths
A jellyfish weeps for yesterday’s transparency
Which will return with the first fishing-light
Before winter sets in
Before anyone thinks of lighting the beacon
Under which a blonde woman considers her future
The lighthouse-keeper bends to her lips and kisses them
As mariners kiss their symplegades.

Comments & modern Greek artists: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Artistic questions & Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? / oil on canvas

The 10 weirdest phenomenons of nature are described by cosmologist Marcus Chown in TELEGRAPH...

However, they have forgotten the weirdest of all: the existence of the particular life in the planet Earth - especially the existence of this greedy, bulimic and psychopathic animal that we call human being...

And the artist's question:
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

From the article:

The 10 weirdest physics facts...
TELEGRAPH, November 12, 2009

...We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users.

If the Sun were made of bananas, it would be just as hot

The Sun is hot, as the more astute of you will have noticed. It is hot because its enormous weight – about a billion billion billion tons – creates vast gravity, putting its core under colossal pressure. Just as a bicycle pump gets warm when you pump it, the pressure increases the temperature. Enormous pressure leads to enormous temperature.

If, instead of hydrogen, you got a billion billion billion tons of bananas and hung it in space, it would create just as much pressure, and therefore just as high a temperature. So it would make very little difference to the heat whether you made the Sun out of hydrogen, or bananas, or patio furniture.

Edit: this might be a little confusing. The heat caused by the internal pressure would be similar to that of our Sun. However, if it's not made of hydrogen, the fusion reaction that keeps it going wouldn't get under way: so a banana Sun would rapidly cool down from its initial heat rather than burning for billions of years. Thanks to people who pointed this out.

All the matter that makes up the human race could fit in a sugar cube

Atoms are 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space. As Tom Stoppard put it: "Make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of an atom, then the atom is as big as St Paul's, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom, then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in an empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar."

If you forced all the atoms together, removing the space between them, crushing them down so the all those vast empty cathedrals were compressed into the first-sized nuclei, a single teaspoon or sugar cube of the resulting mass would weigh five billion tons; about ten times the weight of all the humans who are currently alive.

Incidentally, that is exactly what has happened in a neutron star, the super-dense mass left over after a certain kind of supernova.

Events in the future can affect what happened in the past

The weirdness of the quantum world is well documented. The double slit experiment, showing that light behaves as both a wave and a particle, is odd enough – particularly when it is shown that observing it makes it one or the other.

But it gets stranger. According to an experiment proposed by the physicist John Wheeler in 1978 and carried out by researchers in 2007, observing a particle now can change what happened to another one – in the past.

According to the double slit experiment, if you observe which of two slits light passes through, you force it to behave like a particle. If you don’t, and observe where it lands on a screen behind the slits, it behaves like a wave.

But if you wait for it to pass through the slit, and then observe which way it came through, it will retroactively force it to have passed through one or the other. In other words, causality is working backwards: the present is affecting the past.

Of course in the lab this only has an effect over indescribably tiny fractions of a second. But Wheeler suggested that light from distant stars that has bent around a gravitational well in between could be observed in the same way: which could mean that observing something now and changing what happened thousands, or even millions, of years in the past.

Almost all of the Universe is missing

There are probably more than 100 billion galaxies in the cosmos. Each of those galaxies has between 10 million and a trillion stars in it. Our sun, a rather small and feeble star (a “yellow dwarf”, indeed), weighs around a billion billion billion tons, and most are much bigger. There is an awful lot of visible matter in the Universe.

But it only accounts for about two per cent of its mass.

We know there is more, because it has gravity. Despite the huge amount of visible matter, it is nowhere near enough to account for the gravitational pull we can see exerted on other galaxies. The other stuff is called “dark matter”, and there seems to be around six times as much as ordinary matter.

To make matters even more confusing, the rest is something else called “dark energy”, which is needed to explain the apparent expansion of the Universe. Nobody knows what dark matter or dark energy is.

Things can travel faster than light; and light doesn’t always travel very fast

The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant: 300,000km a second. However, light does not always travel through a vacuum. In water, for example, photons travel at around three-quarters that speed.

In nuclear reactors, some particles are forced up to very high speeds, often within a fraction of the speed of light. If they are passing through an insulating medium that slows light down, they can actually travel faster than the light around them.

When this happens, they cause a blue glow, known as “Cherenkov radiation ”, which is (sort of) comparable to a sonic boom but with light. This is why nuclear reactors glow in the dark.

Incidentally, the slowest light has ever been recorded travelling was 17 meters per second – about 38 miles an hour – through rubidium cooled to almost absolute zero, when it forms a strange state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Light has also been brought to a complete stop in the same fashion, but since that wasn't moving at all, we didn't feel we could describe that as "the slowest it has been recorded travelling".

There are an infinite number of mes writing this, and an infinite number of yous reading it

According to the current standard model of cosmology, the observable universe – containing all the billions of galaxies and trillions upon trillions of stars mentioned above – is just one of an infinite number of universes existing side-by-side, like soap bubbles in a foam.

Because they are infinite, every possible history must have played out. But more than that, the number of possible histories is finite, because there have been a finite number of events with a finite number of outcomes. The number is huge, but it is finite. So this exact event, where this author writes these words and you read them, must have happened an infinite number of times.

Even more amazingly, we can work out how far away our nearest doppelganger is. It is, to put it mildly, a large distance: 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 28 meters. That number, in case you were wondering, is one followed by 10 billion billion billion zeroes

Black holes aren’t black

They’re very dark, sure, but they aren’t black. They glow, slightly, giving off light across the whole spectrum, including visible light.

This radiation is called “Hawking radiation”, after the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University Stephen Hawking, who first proposed its existence. Because they are constantly giving this off, and therefore losing mass, black holes will eventually evaporate altogether if they don’t have another source of mass to sustain them; for example interstellar gas or light.

Smaller black holes are expected to emit radiation faster compared to their mass than larger ones, so if – as some theories predict – the Large Hadron Collider creates minuscule holes through particle collisions, they will evaporate almost immediately. Scientists would then be able to observe their decay through the radiation.

The fundamental description of the universe does not account for a past, present or future

According to the special theory of relativity, there is no such thing as a present, or a future, or a past. Time frames are relative: I have one, you have one, the third planet of Gliese 581 has one. Ours are similar because we are moving at similar speeds.

If we were moving at very different speeds, we would find that one of us aged quicker than the other. Similarly, if one of us was closer than the other to a major gravity well like the Earth, we would age slower than someone who wasn’t.

GPS satellites, of course, are both moving quickly and at significant distances from Earth. So their internal clocks show a different time to the receivers on the ground. A lot of computing power has to go into making your sat-nav work around the theory of special relativity.

A particle here can affect one on the other side of the universe, instantaneously

When an electron meets its antimatter twin, a positron, the two are annihilated in a tiny flash of energy. Two photons fly away from the blast.

Subatomic particles like photons and quarks have a quality known as “spin”. It’s not that they’re really spinning – it’s not clear that would even mean anything at that level – but they behave as if they do. When two are created simultaneously the direction of their spin has to cancel each other out: one doing the opposite of the other.

Due to the unpredictability of quantum behaviour, it is impossible to say in advance which will go “anticlockwise” and the other “clockwise”. More than that, until the spin of one is observed, they are both doing both.

It gets weirder, however. When you do observe one, it will suddenly be going clockwise or anticlockwise. And whichever way it is going, its twin will start spinning the other way, instantly, even if it is on the other side of the universe. This has actually been shown to happen in experiment (albeit on the other side of a laboratory, not a universe).

The faster you move, the heavier you get

If you run really fast, you gain weight. Not permanently, or it would make a mockery of diet and exercise plans, but momentarily, and only a tiny amount.

Light speed is the speed limit of the universe. So if something is travelling close to the speed of light, and you give it a push, it can’t go very much faster. But you’ve given it extra energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.

Where it goes is mass. According to relativity, mass and energy are equivalent. So the more energy you put in, the greater the mass becomes. This is negligible at human speeds – Usain Bolt is not noticeably heavier when running than when still – but once you reach an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, your mass starts to increase rapidly.