December 2010
15 posts
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A Q&A with Author Jaron Lanier
From an Amazon.com interview for his book “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto”
Question: As one of the first visionaries in Silicon Valley, you saw the initial promise the internet held. Two decades later, how has the internet transformed our lives for the better?
Jaron Lanier: The answer is different in different parts of the world. In the industrialized world, the rise of the Web...
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Study maps chemical residues in European... →
In a single day, a 10-year-old child in Europe may be exposed throughfood to 128 chemical residues of 81 different substances. Forty-two of these substances are classified as “possibly or probably carcinogens”, and five as “certainly carcinogens”. No fewer than 37 substances are endocrine disruptors (ED).
What is harmful is not the intensity of the dose but the...
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Select Quotes by Robert M. Pirisg
Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928) is an American writer and philosopher, and author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974) and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991).
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.
It’s paradoxical that where...
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“‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuff your...”
– Fahrenheit 451
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Power Check
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal, which is literally translated as ”Who will guard the guards themselves?” Also sometimes rendered as ”Who watches the watchmen?”, the phrase has other idiomatic translations and adaptations such as “Who will guard the guards?”
…As long as the...
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“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an...”
– A passage from Paul Bowles’ book The Sheltering Sky
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Reflections on a Mote of Dust
Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996 by Carl Sagan
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions,...
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American exceptionalism, American hypocrisy →
Just as many other strong emotions tend to do, American exceptionalism blinds us to reality. It’s time for us to close the gap between what we conceive our Country to be, and what it actually is. Objectivity is hard to swallow in this case because of how entwined it is with national identity and our own identity as Americans; but it’s better to take the truth medicine sooner than...
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Ex-CIA group supports Assange and WikiLeaks →
Fronted by Daniel Ellsberg - the former US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the truth about the Vietnam War - the statement says: “WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.”
From the open letter of support
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“I can’t prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has...”
– Douglas Rushkoff
What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?