This object comes from the Hall of Emptiness in the Land of Illusion.  It was fashioned by the fairy Disenchantment as an antidote to the ill effects of impure mental activity.

The only way we can survive in a world in which machines do all work is if we return to unconsciousness - which, of course, is what sex, drugs and rock ‘b’ rock is all about.

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, for instance, are not Elvish, but Elvish yes-people who have been promised immortality by Elves in exchange for their treachery.

Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches – daintily quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. “Too radical for me”, I confess after one nibble. Rich’s eyes light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.

Is there a metaphysical journey to an alternate plane of reality? (Sort of: the alternate reality is Finland.)

Scientists played it to 40 women and found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay.

Today’s impulsive book check-out was Correction by Thomas Bernhard, which some of you may know as “the book about the Cone”

It’s pretty enjoyable so far!  It’s just … a bunch of giant run-on sentences about this weird guy building a cone in the forest for his sister to live in.

Entirely representative extract:

Nobody, in fact, had even believed that Roithamer could possibly succeed in acquiring the plot of land for the Cone in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, and certainly not for such a crazy purpose, everyone and the experts especially thought it was completely crazy to build such a structure as the Cone and they still do and always will think it completely crazy, anyway the land on which Roithamer built the Cone had become government property after the aristocrat who previously owned it, a Habsburg, had been dispossessed, and the very idea of getting such a piece of state property in the middle of the Kobernausser forest back from the government into private hands, no matter whose, was in itself an absurd and actually an utterly crazy idea, to say nothing of getting back all the land for the road leading to the Cone, buying it all back from the government to be privately held, by whomever, yet Roithamer had managed to reacquire from the government, in the shortest possible time and in absolute, prearranged secrecy, all the land needed for the road he wanted to build and also, immediately thereafter, the large plot of land in the middle of the Kobernausser forest on which he wanted to build the Cone for his sister, then, shortly after acquiring the land and not without having completely settled all the formalities, he began laying out the road and building the road and building the Cone, at which point everyone was horrified, to begin with it was a rude shock especially to Roithamer’s brothers who had never dreamt that their brother’s crazy scheme could become a reality, but they had to accept the fact of the valid deeds of purchase, and take note that the road was beginning to be built and, finally, that the Cone was under construction, even at this late date, they had tried to have Roithamer declared incompetent, they instituted a proceeding to have him placed under guardianship, but he was declared completely sane by a team of doctors, in any case the experts who testified against Roithamer’s mental condition and who had been hired and paid by Roithamer’s brothers remained in the minority against the experts who testified that Roithamer was sane.

But Marshall failed to make much of these modern ideas, and as the century progressed, his insightful but frumpy Victorian economics was supplanted by a more elegant and thoroughly continental Walrasian model that dropped them altogether,

Do not be seduced by the lotus-eaters into infatuation with untethered abstraction.

Insofar as conscious or unconscious computations are nonpolynomial-hard, we do not do them, or do them only in easy cases.