The Library

AS some of you know, earlier, I made reference to a new blogging place that I was working on that I may be moving too. The idea here is that the current blogging place called, "Dialogos of Eide" only reflects the work to materializing ideas that I have had about "information and the back ground" that it supplies for a philosophy that was developing from very "ancient ideas" in regard to not only to Plato, but of the thoughts about the Pythagoreans that has stayed with me throughout as well.

How unscientific it may seem that I have taken a long journey through many science blogging sites to learn of what makes a scientist, to see the behaviour throughout that industry, to have it reflect more the general population, then to say that it sits alone, as a 5% representative of what most do not look at or even concern themself from a general societal point of view.

It is well known the procedural methods adopted to say that herein then, I move forward with the developmental artistic valuation I have assign this new endeavour to illustrate what some may say is subjective in regard to only what scientists can offer in an essay, to say that Einstein's thoughts actually carried some weight with me.

New Technological Freedoms in the Libraries.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trinity College Library, Dublin. (Photo: Candida Höfer.) See:In today's Media, Has the Soul taken a Hiatus

Don't worry Mr. Chimpanzee, I wasn't invited either to Science's World View.:) Identifying niche markets? Oh, google will love you?:) I have nothing against Google either, even when I was not invited there too. I do like to play with the technologies to provide a service when using this medium. A creative outlet for sure when one gets to know different aspects of those same services.

I made a comment here that one might like to consider when we come to think of the future of our libraries and how they will serve the populations of the future.

At 10:39 AM, September 09, 2008:

Still no answer on attaching to libraries severs through the laptop(wifi)? I know there are hot zones that people use, I just wanted to know what people thought about attaching themselves to the "freedom of knowledge and speed" through such a outlet.

I contend with all sorts of difficulties in terms of the money I pay and what I actually get for service when I open the door to the internet(time usage and speed of large transfers of information) how to gather information, and yet, there are many books about all sorts of subjects that I can go freely and get, to accomplish certain tasks that are attempted in life.

I am not discriminated upon, given my distant locations from the libraries of Universities, when knowledge is accessible to the public, and what profit does the library seek, but to continue to provide for the service of those same populations, while that book and resource privileges are free? Only as a student then?

The Nefarious Organization that will Tumble Science?

Will it be to produce a blackhole in the LHC? Most certainly not. To gather information about the sciences involved, most certainly so, and to point out any discrepancies that are becoming known. Most certainly, as well.

This isn't to create illusive dominions of information, but to get to the essence of the information, and to meet "new walls being put up." These will only serve to bring down any hopes of the future of our societies, and the information they would like to gain assess too. An equality that must be inherent, pertains to all it's peoples, and the dissolution of the institutions that would profit from the likes of those with less then others.

So a poor man with a laptop. How strange? Yes I see this point and know that there is a service that is provided that allows those with a library card, punch time on this computer internet access. So why should this service not be open to those with laptops as they sit at the library desks, and take in the peacefulness of these halls of higher learning? Does a book discriminate between it' holders?

In today's Media, Has the Soul taken a Hiatus

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness.”

"On Classic Literature" from Ideas and Opinions – Crown Publishing (1954)-Albert Einstein (page 64) originally published in the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication of the “Schweizerischer Kaufmaennischer Verein, Jugendbund" (Feb, 29, 1952)(Thanks Phil)

Some ideas are being past around that have got me thinking. Media had always been a concern to me, because of what one could assume without taking a clear stand on what is proposed or presented.

Statistical valuations on the trends of reading habits amongst countries and their population. Internet accessibility and information overload.

The question to my mind has to do with how we are numbing ourselves by adopting a unresponsiveness to information and acceptance as a value toward truth. If one did not have this introspection how is it that one could endeavour to realize the state in which they themself have been placed. It requires "no thinking and acquiescences" to powers beyond us. We are then in essence, sleeping?

To Remember: Eskesthai

Trinity College Library, Dublin. (Photo: Candida Höfer.)

It is sometimes with reverence that we can walk through the old buildings whose architecture breathes. We are transported somehow. All that knowledge, and here it resides. As written word read, can resonate deeply, so too an affinity with places can bring some deeper connection not really understood.

So you go into the library with a purpose in mind. You are looking for something in particular. All these books. It's as if, that what ever you hold in mind becomes the link between what awaits to be remembered, waits, until it was asked.

So you are setting the stage then and you may not have realized it.

Quote from Scienceblogs,"Shifting Literature by Jennifer L. Jacquet?

Ursula Le Guin

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

So you are most likely setting the stage yourself whether you like to think so or not. Sometimes books will come into view that might never had, had you not gone for one in particular.

Whose who, in the School of Athens

I was over visiting Clifford's blog called Asymptotia this morning and notice a blog entry called, Heretics of Alexandria. Of course, what first came to mind is the "Library of Alexandria."



Clifford writes and paraphrases:

This full length drama, set in Alexandria Egypt, 415 A.D. features the infamous Philosopher Hypatia, who has come into possession of a document that threatens the very basis of the new religion called Christianity; a document that some would do anything to destroy. Hypatia and a powerful Christian Bishop wage a fierce struggle for the soul of a young priest and for a document which tells a very different version of the life — and death — of Jesus. A true story.

The writing was excellent as was the cast, and Bastian should be extremely proud of himself. (It is a mistake to call it “a true story”, though. It is a story based around historical events, which should absolutely not be confused with being a “true story”. Writers of synopses should not encouarge people to mix up the two.

So I started to do some research on the link offered by Clifford. All of a sudden I could see the many connections bringing "Hypatia of Alexandria" into the fold.


Hypatia of Alexandria (Greek: Υπατία; c. 370–415) was an ancient philosopher, who taught in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and astrology. She lived in Alexandria, in Hellenistic Egypt.

Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was also her teacher and the last fellow of the Musaeum of Alexandria. Hypatia did not teach in the Musaeum, but received her pupils in her own home. Hypatia became head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in about 400. There she lectured on mathematics and philosophy, and counted many prominent Christians among her pupils. No images of her exist, but nineteenth century writers and artists envisioned her as an Athene-like beauty.

Many of you who visit here know how much the "School of Athens" picture means to me?

That there was only one woman here named "Hypatia of Alexandria" of course sent me off to have a look. AS well, "more of the meaning" with regards to the Library of Alexandria.


9.Francesco Maria I della Rovere or Hypatia of Alexandria and Parmenides


The frescoe of the "School of Athens" has been a haunting reminder of the many things that Raphael "enclosed in meaning."


School of Athens by Raphael

That I could then give numbers and names to person's within the picture was equally exciting. I started to dissect parts of this picture quite a while back, opening of course with the "very centre of that painting." The labels supplied on this post entry should give links to farther posts about this.


1: Zeno of Citium or Zeno of Elea? – 2: Epicurus – 3: Frederik II of Mantua? – 4: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius or Anaximander or Empedocles? – 5: Averroes – 6: Pythagoras – 7: Alcibiades or Alexander the Great? – 8: Antisthenes or Xenophon? – 9: Hypatia or the young Francesco Maria della Rovere? – 10: Aeschines or Xenophon? – 11: Parmenides? – 12: Socrates – 13: Heraclitus (painted as Michelangelo) – 14: Plato holding the Timaeus (painted as Leonardo da Vinci) – 15: Aristotle holding the Ethics – 16: Diogenes of Sinope – 17: Plotinus? – 18: Euclid or Archimedes with students (painted as Bramante)? – 19: Strabo or Zoroaster? – 20: Ptolemy – R: Raphael as Apelles – 21: Il Sodoma as Protogenes

I now realize that with one comment entry gone( maybe both) that I really was not so out of tune. What was Plato's influence on Hypatia of Alexandria?

Letters written to Hypatia by her pupil Synesius give an idea of her intellectual milieu. She was of the Platonic school, although her adherence to the writings of Plotinus, the 3rd century follower of Plato and principal of the neo-Platonic school, is merely assumed.

See also:

No Royal Road to Geometry?

Euclid belonged to the persuasion of Plato and was at home in this philosophy; and this is why he thought the goal of the Elements as a whole to be the construction of the so-called Platonic figures. (Proclus, ed. Friedlein, p. 68, tr. Morrow)

Universal Library

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is perhaps the oldest university in the world."

Can you imagine if one might have been restricted from the museums of history, based on what another might have thought of the person? To encourage such ideas to blossom, that it is understood the garden has to provide a source from which things can grow. Why not circumvent all views other then one's own, and you shall own those person's too.

If we are to keep one in "ignorance of life" then why not circumvent them to what the world is for them in "their sections and houses on earth? Keep them, to the culture, and not allow for the greater dialogue between these cultures?

While the historical blend here is being extolled, I of course have current thoughts about this in todays world of the internet.


Reconstruction of one of the storage rooms of the Library of Alexandria. From Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980),

The Royal Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was once the largest library in the world. It is generally thought to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II of Egypt. It was likely created after his father had built what would become the first part of the library complex, the temple of the Muses — the Musaion (from which is derived the modern English word museum).

It has been reasonably established that the library, or parts of the collection, were destroyed by fire on a number of occasions (library fires were common enough and replacement of handwritten manuscripts was very difficult, expensive and time-consuming). To this day the details of the destruction (or destructions) remain a lively source of controversy. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in 2003 near the site of the old library.

Now you know that I believe that the resource for such potentials is very capable in anyone's hands. That if they would like to draw from such a resource, that maybe it has to be physical for them. So, they may go to the library.Yet there is the "sublty of the intangile" that is not accepted by those who are "deeply physical" about what they can accept, so they can accept such libraries.

Then again one might think twice about what is in the library of the internet? Yet, it is not without the "subtleness of the intangible" that we see where the "good thoughts/ideas can issue from the expert and the lay person alike. That such things become part of the library of the internet.

How do we know in our heart when such information is true? That we can rest assure that such dangers of misleading do not take us into their world? Do they some how control you by what they like to hear?

Innatism is a philosophical doctrine introduced by Plato in the socratic dialogue Meno which holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a tabula rasa at birth. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses. Innatism is the opposite of empiricism.

Plato claimed that humans are born with ideas/forms in the mind that are in a dormant state. He claimed that we have acquired these ideas prior to our birth when we existed as souls in the world of Forms. To access these, humans need to be reminded of them through proper education and experience.

Or are we gifted with this innatism about what is good in all people, while there are those who would become rich by such restrictions of a "software selection."

The French librarian Gabriel Naudé wrote:

And therefore I shall ever think it extreamly necessary, to collect for this purpose all sorts of books, (under such precautions, yet, as I shall establish) seeing a Library which is erected for the public benefit, ought to be universal; but which it can never be, unlesse it comprehend all the principal authors, that have written upon the great diversity of particular subjects, and chiefly upon all the arts and sciences; [...] For certainly there is nothing which renders a Library more recommendable, then when every man findes in it that which he is in search of

I mean, if we were restricted to the ability to retrieve from the massive amounts of data being presented, do you think it a good thing to restrict people from being able to develope their intellect? Learn more?