from: January 4, 2017 at 11:32PM
Category Archives: Uncategorized
‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’ by Bertolt Brecht
Every time I talk about baseball on Twitter now, I think about these lines:
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
# 2017.01.04 – 23:26
Adrienne Rich Reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
from: January 4, 2017 at 06:47PM
# 2017.01.04 – 20:46
Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression
from: December 21, 2016 at 11:33PM
# 2016.12.22 – 01:11
Brian Eno – ‘What is Art actually for?’
Brian Eno – ‘What is Art actually for?’
# 2016.12.12 – 13:56
“WESTWORLD,” RACE, AND THE WESTERN
“The first season of “Westworld” fused the robot-rebellion genre with mythology of the American West, but it failed to reckon with the racial implications of its fictional civil war.”
[…]
“In the Western, as John Ford made it, the West liberated America from the divisive issue of slavery, allowing white men and white women to come together, at last, in making America great again.”
# 2016.12.11 – 13:39
Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties
Bertolt Brecht, 1934:
“Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties.
- He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed;
- the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed;
- the skill to manipulate it as a weapon;
- the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective;
- and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.
These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.”
# 2016.12.10 – 22:20
The Case Against Dark Matter
Many early attempts at tweaking gravity were easy to rule out, but Milgrom found a winning formula: When the gravitational acceleration felt by a star drops below a certain level — precisely 0.00000000012 meters per second per second, or 100 billion times weaker than we feel on the surface of the Earth — he postulated that gravity somehow switches from an inverse-square law to something close to an inverse-distance law.
# 2016.12.08 – 10:31
Belief vs Trust: which is the foundation of religion?
“In this article, we do not want to deny the existence of the element of ‘acceptance without proof’; in a sane religious view. Nevertheless, we think that this acceptance–which we know it as belief or faith–in religion must be limited to a few items and its extension to a large set of rules and rituals (i.e., religious package), stems from another element called trust. In this article, we explain that trust not only is not something upon which the religion is founded, but also in some cases it is indeed the very same corrupted element that religion rose to confront it.”
# 2016.12.05 – 18:35
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist
“But now companies like Apple and Google have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design. For example, they could empower people to set predictable times during the day or week for when they want to check “slot machine” apps, and correspondingly adjust when new messages are delivered to align with those times.”
# 2016.12.04 – 17:44
Learning From Trump in Retrospect
“Trump and his team were a mess on campaign discipline. But when it comes to the economic platform in his speeches he remained disciplined and clear: he’s going to crush undocumented workers, roll back globalization, and cut taxes and regulations in DC. He has catch-phrases and symbols for each (the wall, rip up trade deals, drain the swamp), and it’s easy for his (white) voters to see how those line up with a better economic situation for themselves. As I’ve emphasized, this is what policy is, and Trump was fantastic at it.”
# 2016.12.02 – 09:16
Prepare for the Emergent Era
“One characteristic of emergent change is that it seems impossible until it happens, at which point it feels overwhelming, sudden, and inevitable. The moment when water droplets and wind combine into a hurricane is one example. Another example is the moment when, at about 11:00pm Eastern Time in the United States, election predictions made a wild and irrevocable swing in favor of Trump.”
# 2016.12.02 – 07:22
The map is not the territory
The difference here is that even a wrong map provides you with an opportunity to learn. Without a map, you have no systematic way of learning about the territory — the rules of the game, what context specific play works and what is universal — other than hoping someone remembers it all and develops an internal mental model of the landscape.
# 2016.11.24 – 15:06
Syria and the Statistics of War
“When Pasquale Cirillo and I examined the historical accounts of wars for our statistical analysis of violence, we discovered huge holes –people take numbers for gospel, yet many accounts were fabrications. Many historians, political “scientists”, and others for fall for them, then get to write books.”
# 2016.11.24 – 09:20
I’m not sure if I like what I did here or not
“As we reviewed her work together, she said something that really impressed me. She said, “I’m not sure if I like what I did here or not”. I loved it. Not what she did, but that she said that.
It takes real confidence and self-awareness to talk to someone who’s considering hiring you and telling them that you aren’t sure you like what you did. We dug into it. It wasn’t the idea at large — she was very happy with that — it was a specific flow, a specific part of the design. She did it, but she wasn’t thrilled with it.”
# 2016.11.23 – 09:21
Election Over-read
“One crude way to describe the social order in this country is that straight, white progressives are at the top, conservatives are in the middle, and various presumably oppressed groups are at the bottom. Progressives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the bottom. Conservatives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the top. I might add that some progressives see a social order that includes two layers on the left, with centrist Clinton Democrats on top of true progressives. In this view, the centrists are the ones who received the kick in the pants.”
# 2016.11.21 – 20:48