Went to an art show by a friend of mine tonight at Baltimore’s Metro gallery. Many of the paintings featured the stylized image of a compass rose. Apparently, the artist’s father is or was involved in cartography.
Sitting there, it occurred to me that the compass rose is a classic Western mandala image: and it has a most appropriate meaning for our purposes: pointing towards something. Allowing you to figure out where you are, and help point you in the direction of where you want to be. Imagine if your computer could sense what you were going to do next, what you would be interested in, what pages you’d want to visit. What friends it was time to call. A computer that was one step ahead of you, could you trust it? I bet I would constantly try to outwit it, to throw it off the True Course….
Makes me think this could be a most useful sigil for our project.
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12 Comments
would pair nicely with mozilla ubiquity. the rose points the way, ubiquity is your always on right-click transmission menu
One of the top three contenders for my second tattoo has always been a good, old fashioned compass rose from some old map. Maybe with a sea monster off to the side or some waves. I’ve never found the right design, extra money or what the compass should be pointing to.
One of my favorite symbols.
The compass rose is both the center-that-is-everywhere, representative of our perceiving center, and also the reminder that this center is useless unless it’s correctly oriented to what’s outside of it.
Because unless you turn the N of the compass to where the arrow’s pointing, the compass’s directions have no meaning.
Yeah, I’m really into this as a symbol!
“God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.”
http://dialinf.wordpress.com/2008/04/0.../a-circle-with-the-center-everywhere/
Fits in especially well with:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-c...2009/01/compass-rose-06-mandalaos.jpg
And with the “world spheres” which are the access keys to people’s reality systems in my novel, REPERMANENT
We should start developing logos based on the compass rose, maybe put together some kind of formal design contest…
We could start an open-access flickr account where people can upload their designs.
And maybe set up an similarly open-access gmail account to go along with it?
I like it! I think it’s perfect.
Good idea, @ian! Feel like setting it up?
yeah, sure. Any particular email address you’d like to use? Maybe the one that’s associated with that gmail document on the Mandala OS?
I guess we need to figure out precisely what we even use an email address for. Would it be so you could send the Mandala OS system itself a question or comment? That would be pretty cool. And then anybody could login and answer it, assuming the “voice” of that oracle or whatever it is.
What about just MandalaOS@gmail.com?
-Richard Wilhelm’s I Ching translation, via some website, hexagram 25
Done and done. Check your inbox…
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