The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

128 Edges
more astonishing idea than the old ‘soul.’ . . . It has never occurred to
anyone to regard his stomach as a strange or, say, a divine stomach.” 31
Perhaps networks are the site in which life - forms are continually
related to control, where control works through this continual relation
to life - forms.
Fork Bomb II
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(1){
if($x = not fork){
print $x;
} else {
print “ “;
}
exit if int rand(1.03);
}
The Paranormal and the Pathological I
In his book The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem illus -
trates how conceptions of health and illness historically changed during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Central to Canguilhem’s
analyses is the concept of “the norm” (and its attendant concepts,
normality and normativity), which tends to play two contradictory
roles. On the one hand, the norm is the average, that which a statistically
significant sector of the population exhibits—a kind of “majority
rules” of medicine. On the other hand, the norm is the ideal,
that which the body, the organism, or the patient strives for but may
never completely achieve—an optimization of health. Canguilhem
notes a shift from a quantitative conception of disease to a qualitative
one. The quantitative concept of disease (represented by the
work of Broussais and Bernard in physiology) states that illness is a
deviation from a normal state of balance. Biology is thus a spectrum
of identifiable states of balance or imbalance. An excess or deficiency
of heat, “sensitivity,” or “irritability” can lead to illness, and thus the