“I heard something recently by Richard Feynman, and he said that understanding the way the universe works is like extrapolating a huge checkers game from a regular game of checkers. Checkers is an easy game to play, but if the board were huge and you had many, many checkers, it wouldn’t be easy to play anymore. While you can understand the universe somewhat while examining a small component, when it’s right in front of you, when you think about the extent of it and how it all works together, it completely escapes you. Trying to think about the moral universe, the political universe, the nature of consciousness, the question of what consciousness is—all that stuff is easy to do if you create a small system that’s got tight borders and contains a limited sphere of action. That’s what the Unifactor is for me—a little thought laboratory, with just a few characters in it and a limited number of forces, and those forces have a limited range. Even though they all correspond to things that I see existing in the real world, they’ve been reduced to a size that allows me to play with them and think about them and mix them up and see how they react with each other.”
– Jim Woodring
The picks of the week from around the web.
Recovering from the long weekend, I have a quick bunch of comics links. Some of them are old news, but so good that I still want to call attention to them:
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Radio Rackham: Frank
I den seneste episode vender vi tilbage til en gammel Rackham-favorit: Jim Woodring, der er aktuel med sin store, vanskelige syntese om forfatterskabets nøglefigur Frank, One Beautiful Spring Day. Det er en opsamling af Woodrings tre seneste bæger om Frank tilføjet 100 nye sider, der fundamentalt ændrer fortællingen. Han har selv beskrevet det som et forsøg på at genfinde sin forbindelse til den bevidsthed, der dikterer ham hans historier om Frank, efter han havde forbrudt sig mod den ved at lave om på sin figur Frank i netop de opsamlede bøger. Vi forsøger at vurdere og jeg synes det er blevet et af vores bedste afsnit. Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.