“We cannot simply be ‘open to contingency’, because our openness, and consequently our modes of interaction, are determined by our capacities. We can only be open to contingency within certain specific limits that we can afford. If the contingent expression of materiality replaces these given affordable possibilities with other possibilities or ceases such possibilities altogether, our so-called sensible openness will begin to negatively deteriorate. Accordingly, what we need is a twisted type of interaction with contingent materials (whether in art or writing) that is built on the formidable ascesis of closure. In this case, rather than seeking openness toward the contingent outside through affordable modes of interaction, the work of art strives to embrace the twisted logic of capacity and rigorous closure itself as precisely the playground of contingency.”
Rule 53
Saturn's moon Daphnis up close
Orders of magnitude →
Impact on the comet's surface occurred 14.5 hours after its descent manoeuvre; the final data packet from Rosetta was transmitted at 10:39:28.895 UTC (SCET) by the OSIRIS instrument and was received at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, at 11:19:36.541 UTC. The spacecraft's estimated speed at the time of impact was 3.2 km/h (2.0 mph; 89 cm/s), and its touchdown location, named Sais by the operations team after the Rosetta Stone's original temple home, is believed to be only 40 m (130 ft) off-target. The final image transmitted by the spacecraft of the comet was taken by its OSIRIS instrument at an altitude of 20 m (66 ft) about 10 seconds before impact, showing an area 0.96 m (3.1 ft) across. Rosetta's computer included commands to send it into safe mode upon detecting that it had hit the comet's surface, turning off its radio transmitter and rendering it inert in accordance with International Telecommunication Union rules.
“Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. It is in this direction that we must look for the conditions, not of possible experience, but of real experience (selection, repetition, etc.). It is here that we find the lived reality of a sub-representative domain. If it is true that representation has identity as its element and similarity as its unit of measure, then pure presence such as it appears in the simulacrum has the ‘disparate’ as its unit of measure - in other words, always a difference of difference as its immediate element.”
The People Who Collect Strangers' Memories →
“What I look for most of all is an unsolvable problem,” he concluded. “The answer is lost in the past.”
Rosetta's final image before impact on Comet 67P
This Long Century: Tom McCarthy →
A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy
I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine had made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them into it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.
