La Monte Young, The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119.
(The piece is “a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer”, playing non-stop here).
Isaac Beekman, whom Jacob identifies as “the first mechanical philosopher of the Scientific Revolution”, was confident that “God had so constructed the whole of nature that our understanding … may thoroughly penetrate all the things on earth” (Jacob 1988, p. 52). Similar theses are propounded with the same confidence today, notably by people who describe themselves as hard-headed scientific naturalists and who typically rephrase Beekman’s formula, replacing “God” by “natural selection”—with even less justification, because the deus ex machina is better defined in this case, so it is easy to see why the arguments fail.
(Noam Chomsky, “Language and Nature”, in Mind, Vol. 104, No. 413, January 1995, pp. 1–61. The reference is to Jacob, Margaret. 1988. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, Temple University Press, Philadelphia).
Maartje M. L. de Win, Gerry Jager, Jan Booij, Liesbeth Reneman, Thelma Schilt, Cristina Lavini, Sílvia D. Olabarriaga, Gerard J. den Heeten and Wim van den Brink, “Sustained effects of ecstasy on the human brain: a prospective neuroimaging study in novel users“, in Brain, Vol. 131, No. 11, November 2008, pp. 2936–2945.
Although we do not know yet whether these effects are reversible or not, we cannot exclude that ecstasy even in low doses is neurotoxic to the brain.
