oddbill

My old physics book club is coming back to life, thanks to a referral to a new meeting place I got from one of the members. I’m really excited about getting this going again. Check out our club’s meetup page:

Reading Physics in LA

We’ll be reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe:

We’re going to be meeting this time (and hopefully for the foreseeable future) at the Echo Park gallery of Machine Project. If you don’t know what that is, from their website:

When we opened Machine Project, we liked the idea that a space could be a machine for producing culture. We feed in ideas, people, resources, and through the social and philosophical mechanism that is machine project we produce art, experiences, and ways to understand the world. We view what we do as an alternative to the traditional art space, which serves primarily as a container for art produced externally. But you know, we also teach electronics and computers and such so it’s not surprising that people get confused. Even we’re confused.

I really like that as a mission statement. A gallery not to contain art produced in the outside world, but to serve as an engine to produce art and experience that will spill out into the the outside world.

In earlier posts in this blog I talk a lot about the idea of empowered amateurs as an engine for wealth creation, and wealth in the wider sense of richness of lived experience more than in the limited sense of monetizable material objects. The Physics club has always been something in that vein, an attempt by amateurs with access to books and each other to bootstrap up a better understanding of the more complicated aspects of this science.

Machine Project as an organization has also always been something in that vein as well, and I think we’ll fit in well there.

If you live in the Los Angeles area, you should sign up for the meetup and come read. It’s free! If you don’t live in LA but are interested in reading along, sign up and participate in our discussion board.

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