Kevin Morby - "Harlem River"

Moody. Slow. Rhythmical.

Quantum Entanglement Drives the Arrow of Time, Scientists Say

    as particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time.


    Lloyd found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a "1" for clockwise spin and a "0" for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.


    Consequently, a tepid cup of coffee does not spontaneously warm up. In principle, as the pure state of the room evolves, the coffee could suddenly become unmixed from the air and enter a pure state of its own. But there are so many more mixed states than pure states available to the coffee that this practically never happens - one would have to outlive the universe to witness it. This statistical unlikelihood gives time's arrow the appearance of irreversibility. "Essentially entanglement opens a very large space for you," Popescu said. "It's like you are at the park and you start next to the gate, far from equilibrium. Then you enter and you have this enormous place and you get lost in it. And you never come back to the gate."


    The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei - "Say Yes"

    Derrida reminds us that yes also names language itself, not only in the sense of langue d'oil or language d'oc, the two main French dialect groups which derive their names from their respective ancient words for yes, but also because "the affirmation of a language through itself is untranslatable." And indeed names themselves are notoriously untranslatable, because they - especially the proper ones - hook into reality in a way that always suggests a more intimate relation between language and the world than linguists would want us to believe.


    The idea of a talk show, and by extension the majority of contemporary televised journalism, is founded on such globalization of testimony: It is determined to exploit the testimonial value of saying yes far beyond any affirmative value such a yes may carry.


    ... trauma can be experienced in at least two ways, both of which block normal channels of transmission: as a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others.

Lisa Guenther - "Why solitary confinement degrades us all"

    The prisoners might enter the SHU with good hearing, 20/20 eyesight, and stable mental health, but the longer they remain in isolation, the greater the chance that their sensory awareness, cognitive clarity, and emotional stability will erode. This is because, as relational beings in an individualist society, a good deal of what we take to be our own, intrinsic properties and capacities are in fact social practices that rely for their coherence and vibrancy upon interactive feedback loops with other social beings in a shared situation.

    But as a phenomenologist, my task is not to describe the teapot as if it were a totally separate entity from me, but rather to reflect on the way that the teapot appears to me.

    The other people with whom I share space give me an objective location in the world - they anchor me somewhere.

    In the words of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, my body "gears into" the things that draw my attention, my toes feel for the edge of the last step, my hands dig into a backpack searching for my keys. And likewise, the world gears into my body, warming my face with sunshine or moving me to tuck my nose into my scarf. But the main thing that my body gears into is not a thing at all; it is the body of another person, another "here", another starting-point for the experience of a world. My own sense of objective reality, and even my sense of myself as an objectively existing person rather than an abstract capacity for awareness, depends on the co-ordination of my here with your there, and vice versa.

    The prisoner who bashes his own body against the walls of a rec yard is both refusing and confirming the abyss of solitary confinement. 

Jessa Crispin - "The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries"

    Let's say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking they've chosen this city, they'll never know that the city chose them. Let's say, for a moment, that the literal situation of a city can leak out into the metaphorical realm. That the city is the vessel and we are all merely beings of differing viscosity, slowly taking on the shape of that into which we are poured.
    if that were the case, what to make of the fact that Berlin is built on sand? Situated on a plain with no natural defenses, no major river, no wealth of any particular resource, it's a city that should not exist. It can't be any wonder that Berlin has for hundreds of years, - no, longer than that, past Napoleon, past the medieval days when suspected witches were lined up at the city gates and molten metal was poured between their clenched teeth, past the whispers of the Romans that those who inhabited these lands were not quite human, back to the days of the people residing here who are now known to us only by some pottery shards and bronze tools - been a little unstable. It would explain the city's endless need to collapse and rebuild, even as the nation that engulfs it marches on confidently, linearly.


    That's when I took my William James essays off the shelf. I found in his works of philosophy a friend, a mentor, a professor, and some sort of idealized father. It was his works on the more mundane matters that I relied on - how to make changes in your life, how to believe you can make changes in your life, how to convince yourself to get out of bed in the morning, how not to be a worthless slug - rather than his more important pieces about war or whatever.


    As a philosopher, James is able to hold all of the sorrow and violence and pain of the world in his mind and remain somehow optimistic. It doesn't wipe out the goodness of the world, it just sits beside it. It's no wonder then that people get a little religious about this agnostic philosopher, this man who can restore your faith in the world without necessarily bringing god into it.


    It's been let go in the Berlin way, all of those straight German lines blurring a little into chaos.

8tracks - William Gibson

http://8tracks.com/screamingtemple/ths-ace-j

• iamx - "My Secret Friend"
  catchy
• LOLO - "Hit and run"
  one of those songs, slightly Marina and the Diamonds, that returns regularly in the playlists I find. It's not too bad. But I can never remember who or what.

8tracks: hunting

http://8tracks.com/l-howlinmad/wolfskin

• EELS - "Dead Reckoning" - strangely atmospheric, almost parlando and film noir
• 
  

Baxter - "I Can't See Why"

on SomaFM's "Lush"

Strings and female vocals (well duh). Sounds very familiar. God, so close, tip of my tongue.

Lawless (ft Britt Warner) - "Diminuendo"

http://8tracks.com/mirayuuki/where-i-end-you-begin

Bit over the top, but catchy and dark.

Also:

• Chelsea Wolfe - "After the fall"