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Utter Bilge

Daniel — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:46:09 +0000

All this writing about going to the moon is utter bilge.

Richard Woolley, UK Astronomer Royal, 1956

Africa In The Machine

Daniel — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 01:27:40 +0000

Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers is that there isn’t enough Africa in them. I kind of think that its the opposite: they’re bringing the ideals of Africa: after all, computers are about connectivity, shareware, a sense of global discussion about topics and issues, the relentless density of info overload, and above all the willingness to engage and discuss it all - that’s something you could find on any street corner in Africa.

Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Greek style

Daniel — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:39:29 +0000

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?

Plato, Symposium — inspired the formation of the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military force created in 4th Century BCE Greece composed of gay couples

Fantasy

Daniel — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:42:09 +0000

“A recent ABC poll ranked threesomes as the most popular fantasy in America.” (Outside of America the most popular fantasy begins with the engines falling off of Air Force One.)

Dan Savage, Savage Love

Conversation vs Being Told

Daniel — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:25:29 +0000

The press still reflects what the press cares about, competing with other press. But the blogs, who aren’t trying to climb the top 100 lists, are doing something else. We’re just trying to share information with each other so we can learn, so we can use stuff better, make better choices, improve the products, and eventually create new products.

You can see this philosophy reflected in exciting new products from companies like Chumby and Bug Labs. Create open platforms with widely available development tools and let the blogs take over. Google came close with Android, and there’s still plenty of time, but they don’t really trust blogs at Google, like most big tech companies they trust other big companies first.

Dave Winer, Creating a maintainable and thriving web

The Meaning of Life

Daniel — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:54:23 +0000

Instead of trying to formulate a definition of life… we need to develop a theory of life—an overarching explanation of nature that joins together a myriad of seemingly random phenomena. Biologists have discovered a number of theories–the germ theory of disease and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, for example—yet they have no full-fledged theory of life itself. The underlying uniformity of life is one of the great discoveries of modern biology, but it’s also an obstacle. It represents only a single data point, and blinds us to the possibilities of “weird life.” We have no idea exactly which features of life as we know it are essential to life as we don’t know it.

Seed Magazine

Wandering Is Dangerous… Brace For Impact

Daniel — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:13:32 +0000

Modern science has imposed upon humanity the necessity for
wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive
technology make the transition through time, from generation
to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of
adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is
dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect,
therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is
the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is
among the merits of science that it equips the future for
its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the
nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the
placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities
for social reform imposed by the new industrial system,
and they are now refusing to face the necessities for
intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The
middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes
from a confusion between civilization and security. In the
immediate future there will be less security than in the
immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that
there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with
civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have
been unstable ages.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

William Gibson Interview

Daniel — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:58:07 +0000

Every hair is being numbered — eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement…

This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn’t used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world’s premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does.

William Gibson, interviewed in the Washington Post

Your Everywhere Moment of Zen

Daniel — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:19:54 +0000

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

Steven Wright

Blemish of Conquest

Daniel — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:50:50 +0000

The third of Dayan’s observations, and the most relevant to a comparison with the current war in Iraq, is that the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position of beating down the weak. As Dayan wrote, “Any comparison between the two armies was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops], who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate.”That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down a five-year-old—even one who had originally attacked him with a knife—will be accused of committing a crime; he will lose the support of bystanders and end up being arrested, tried, and convicted. On the world stage, an armed force that keeps beating down a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the character of the forces (whether they are draftees or professionals), the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on, this outcome may come about more or less quickly. But it is always the same. He who does not understand this does not understand anything about war—or, indeed, about human nature.

In other words, he who fights against the weak—note, in this connection, that the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed—and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins, also loses. To kill a much weaker opponent is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force, however rich, however powerful, however advanced, or however well motivated, is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if American troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did—with the last American troops fleeing the country while hanging onto their helicopters’ skids.

Martin van Creveld, The Blemish of Conquest (via Binary Bonsai)

Claws to the Weak

Daniel — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 22:30:49 +0000

A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950

Groundlessness

Daniel — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 22:27:30 +0000

The disenchanted investigation of empirical and psychological phenomena, the canny co-creation of an evolving world, the death of (our conceptions about) God - all of these are stations, or rather nodes, of the path. The network path only blossoms when we accept that we will not transcend the sometimes agonizing disjunctions between our various structures of belief and practice. We will not simply sew up the conflicts between faith and skepticism, the stones and the stories, the incandescence of the absolute and the mundane absurdity of an everyday life growing more bizarre and frightful by the minute. Instead, these tensions and conflicts become dynamic and creative forces, calling us to face others with an openness that does not seek to control or assimilate them to whatever point of view we happen to hold. By replacing the need for a common ground with an acceptance and even celebration of our common groundlessness, the network path might creatively integrate these gaps and lacunae without always trying to fill them in. You can no more banish the noise on this network than you can banish the void from a cup - nor would you want to. You just attend to the chaos that comes until something unexpected blossoms: a dilation in the mind, a dawning in the heart, and a shared breathing with beings so deep it reaches down to sinew.

Erik Davis, Techgnosis

Glass Bead Game

Daniel — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:24:19 +0000

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on a organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Rhizomes

Daniel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:20:08 +0000

Grasses, orchids, lilies, and bamboos have no roots, but rhizomes, creeping underground stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal networks of swollen or slender filaments and produce aerial shoots along their length and surface as distribution of plants. They defy categorization as individual entities.

Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones

Regeneration

Daniel — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:16:33 +0000

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of *all together*, in a direction in which *all together* can join and find completion in a spiritual regeneration of the earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

Thinking Henry

Daniel — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:10:35 +0000

Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t, are both right.

Henry Ford

Mechanism

Daniel — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:28:05 +0000

As far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious… it becomes possible to introduce faith, courage, love of truth, goodness - in a word moral purpose - into evolution. It becomes possible, but the possibility has been and is often unrealized.

Julian Huxley

Skeptical

Daniel — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 05:36:49 +0000

…this is what bothers me about many of the so called skeptics… what they are doing is defending the status quo which doesn’t take a whole lot of guts. They are about as skeptical as Pat Robertson or Billy Graham. They too have a congregation behind them. They all agree; they’re skeptical of other religions, they’re skeptical of materialism, and so forth. I just don’t see much difference in the skepticism of a religious fundamentalist and a hard-core, committed, scientific materialist.

B. Alan Wallace, [Listen/Download MP3] Interview — Skeptiko

(((Swapping out a ‘God of the Gaps’ for a ‘Physics of the Gaps’ to explain away our ignorance is not progress… an incredible range of ideas is covered in this interview with the Buddhist scholar)))

Uncertainty

Daniel — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:45:24 +0000

Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales… To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing.

Bertrand Russell

Integrity

Daniel — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:39:57 +0000

I do not want an award from an organization that sanctions its members’ participation in the enhanced interrogations at CIA Black Sites and at Guantanamo. The presence of psychologists has both educated the interrogation teams in more skillful methods of breaking people down and legitimized the process of torture in defiance of the Geneva Conventions.

Dr. Mary Pipher, Why I’ve Returned My Award to the American Psychological Association– Because it Sanctions Torture

In the lives of emperors

Daniel — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:48:45 +0000

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities