Carthage layout. Salammbo‘s description of the harbor at Carthage:

His eyes rose higher still into the great pure sky; in a harsh voice he called out an order to his sailors; the trireme leaped forward; it grazed the idol put up on the corner of the mole to prevent storms; and in the commercial harbor, full of refuse, chips of wood, and fruit peel, it overran and split open the other ships moored to stakes and with crocodile jaws at their ends. The people ran up, some of them plunged in to swim. Already the ship was at the far end, before the gate bristling with nails. The gate was raised, and the trireme disappeared beneath the deep vault.

The Military Harbour was completely separated from the city; when ambassadors arrived, they had to pass between two walls, into a corridor which came out on the left, in front of Khamon’s temple. This large basin, round as a cup, was lined with quays on which were built shelters for the boats. In front of each of them rose two columns, with the horns of Ammon on their capitals, making a continuous range of porticoes all round the basin. In the middle, on an island, stood a house for the Marine Suffette.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17// Daily Beast (7/17):

Until the launcher nears a launch location it is carried on a truck, in this case Buk 332, covered in camouflage netting, was placed on a red low-loader hauled by a Volvo truck, accompanied by three civilian support vehicles.

On the morning of June 17 the convoy was spotted on various highways and rural roads weaving its way through Donetsk until it came to a town named Snizhne. There the caterpillar-tracked launcher was removed from the low-loader. Several residents of the town recorded shots of it moving out into the country looking like a top-heavy tank and by then on its own. With the help of satellite imagery, Bellingcat established the final launch site as the corner of a field near Red October.

Two eye-witness videos, one shot from north of the launch site and one from the south, show a trail of smoke as the missile soared up into the blue where Flight MH17 was cruising in an international air lane at 33,000 feet. The Dutch investigators verified the authenticity of the videos.

I pick up with my wet hands the dirty stack and I clean the dirty stack… Haruspicator of Sinks and Plates

Days as Paper Towel Roll… Day as a giant paper towel that covers the spill of substances and carries them away as appearances into the night. (The new Greek myth: each day a new sheet is torn from the dowel. Solar eclipses equal that Titan must quest to the marketplace of the gods, carrying his reusable Bag of the Universe.)

The idea of calling the human race Gender. The idea that the human race is comprised of just one gender. The question of, if that’s a sort of gender neutral way of saying that we’re all ‘brothers and sisters’? The question of, if humans were indeed understood to be of one gender, what would be the fate of sexual attraction. The idea I was walking around yesterday, in the unnatural warmth, and periodically a cool breeze would hit one like an intimation of how the weather had once been, pockets of the past floating about, the old nature, the old winter, with its old scents. (We are often stuck in the Sargasso Sea of the new nature, it will seem.)

Meanwhile, frantic activity in the afternoon of the suburban neighborhood, hammers, leafblowers, ladders, saws, trucks, the ripped out interiors of perfectly liveable, perfectly nice dwellings on the curbsides, as if a recently destroyed area were being rebuilt, as if the war, the category 5 hurricane, had only recently been declared over. However, this was an area perfectly intact; indeed, an impartial observer might see very little need for any construction or maintenance at all at this time.

… The idea that Climate Change is not a “Man against Nature” issue but a person against person issue — (an “income inequality” issue.)

“I had recourse to the expedient of letting myself go completely in order to live in the world of my choice.” Spring and All, William Carlos Williams.

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“Already it has moved us, toward and away from each other, farther than we expected: the everyday glamour of a ‘personal life,,’ keeping a diary and so forth, is the outward sign of this progression that is built into us like the chain of breathing.” (John Ashbery, New Spirit.)

These are some mostly off-the-wall ideas occasioned by Kevin Drum’s article in Mother Jones last October, here. He has a more recent post on this topic here.

— Technology arises out of spiritual failure –our failure to concentrate– and must grow more complicated as our distractedness increases. (It also increases our distractedness.)

— “To be dominated by artificial intelligence is the same as to be dominated by thoughts of the future.” (Artificial intelligence is an embodied incapacity to live without forethought. Prometheus not only unbound, but boundless.)

— Question. If “being in the moment” is in some sense the spiritual goal (or anyway, a desirable state) which is a greater impediment to its attainment: dissipation or technology?

— True or false: “If we were all good Christians and Muslims and Buddhists there would be a steady decline in the use of technology.” (If we were all good scientists…?) (If we were all bad Muslims and Buddhists and Christians?)

— Robots are the Ideal It’s said that we can’t arrest technology’s advance because we’re “all human” (we can’t help wanting the convenience and advantage technology provides so we couldn’t go backward in that respect if we tried). But perhaps it’s actually because we’re all, in our essence, robots that we’re really so drawn to technology? That robots are for us, not a necessity, but an ideal?

(To say it otherwise, human beings are the first robots, the first artificial intelligences, and are now in the process, as it were, of spinning these attributes off.)

— The arts. Even if a computer could create Sly Stone (or his music) would it ever have an incentive to do so? One can certainly imagine a computer having both the capacity and incentive to create a Jar-Jar Binks. But (as it seems to me) there is no demand for Sly Stone until he has happened — one wouldn’t know to make him.

(This is to say: maybe artificial technology will have the same constraints as commercial radio, being without the incentive to create anything very lasting or unique. Supposing it could make a Sly Stone, would it have the incentive to make his music widely available?)

–Although I suppose artists to be as replaceable as anyone else by A.I., if not more so, I wonder if there would be a shift noticeable between pre-and post AI music that might be found, in the long run, to be undesirable; and that this too could extend toward other occupations.

Artificial intelligence, artificial knowledge? In reflecting on the possibility of a computer which is, from our point of view, all intelligent, all knowledgeable, it might be constructive to reconsider the limits of knowledge and intelligence. What do these do and not do for existence? Perhaps in some sense humanity’s lack of intelligence that is responsible for its evolutionary success? Perhaps un-intelligence makes existence seem worthwhile?

–How will A.I control human understanding of human history? Will the story of human history become — how it came to develop A.I?

Videogame idea: combining several video games “worlds” into one protean everchanging game. Mario Brother plus Missile Command plus Asteroid. SuperMario climbs up one of the missile attacks, as if it were rope, begins tumbling in space, fits into the Asteroids space ship then comes out, knocks his head against the asteroids, gradually turns into a ball, then we’re in Pong, then the Pong ball is a missile attack with a Mario face trying to hit one of the cities… trying to “win” at a game which never remains the same. Now we’re in Frogger but which way do we go when approaching us from the other side of the highway is this terrible centipede whom the cars cause to change direction? (How do we win at Centipede when we’re Frogger? How do we win at Galaga when we’re Mario?)

“In this White House […] Truthful and transparent is great, but we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate.” [Post]