On Markets

To take arms against a market of troubles, or by walking on its flows, to surf them?...

 

Is intellectual change afoot?

Roll Call of the Dead

When all our professions have been replaced, what will we do then?  Of course, there will always be something, won't there?

Satanic Verses: Myths

Great backstory to the furor around that book and its fallout twenty years later.  Yes, the liberal spine needs to relocate its spirit, its imperative, its animus.  And goddamn it--that just might hurt some feelings. 

Susan Sontag

Never thought of her as any sort of model, but this sentence gives me pause to reconsider:  "Sontag continued her intense and sustained engagement with canonical novelists, philosophers, and poets such as Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anthony Trollope, and Leo Tolstoy."

More Lit-Bashing

I love hearing about the decrepitude of the study of literature in the academy.  It helps to justify a major life decision of mine (and one I continually question):  not to pursue the vaunted PhD and professor of literature perch. 

 

 

Paper Wasting

We waste a lot of paper.  While we have done a good job setting up recycling bins, we could save significant money on the purchase of paper if we found a way to internally re-use paper.  For instance, many times PDF files print incorrectly, producing a line of indecipherable gobbledygook on a huge number of wasted sheets of paper.  Turn these sheets over and they could be easily printed on again--so long as the person printing is only printing a document for internal use.  (I.e., it doesn't require a perfect sheet of paper). 

 

First step:  have a place to collect such sheets of paper.  (the person who printed the document tacitly approves that they be made available for re-use; i.e., there is nothing confidential or private on the mis-printed sheet.)

Second step:  put them in a printer in a designated drawer. 

Third step:  the IT department (perhaps working with printer vendor) will create a means by which anyone printing can choose which drawer they are printing from (so that they can print to the lesser quality paper if they wish to)

Fourth step:  Create 'job aid' sheets and distribute them to employees so they are aware of this option and how to use it.

 

 

On Writing

So You Want to be a Writer?...

YouTube Cashcow

Broadcasting--and earning a living--from the basement.  Wow...

Mortal Coil Shuffle

Worms amuck.  Oh yeah, that's where they live and consume us-- in the muck.  The world has gone awry. 

Mortal Coil Shuffle

Worms amuck.  Oh yeah, that's where they live and consume us-- in the muck.  The world has gone awry. 

Public Schools, Quo Vadis?

To reform or not to reform:  or rather, how much, how deeply to reform.  Soliloquies in Obama land.  I'm on the edge of my seat. 

 

Out of Control

I want to read this book--and it's online also.  It may be great, or it may be a Satanic manifesto on techno-triumphalism. 

 
Out of Control is a summary of what we know about self-sustaining systems, both living ones such as a tropical wetland, or an artificial one, such as a computer simulation of our planet. The last chapter of the book, "The Nine Laws of God," is a distillation of the nine common principles that all life-like systems share. The major themes of the book are:

• As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them.
  
• The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them.
  
• Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology.
  
• The main thing computers are good for is creating little worlds so that we can try out the Great Questions. Online communities let us ask the question "what is a democracy; what do you need for it?" by trying to wire a democracy up, and re-wire it if it doesn't work. Virtual reality lets us ask "what is reality?" by trying to synthesize it. And computers give us room to ask "what is life?" by providing a universe in which to create computer viruses and artificial creatures of increasing complexity. Philosophers sitting in academies used to ask the Great Questions; now they are asked by experimentalists creating worlds.
  
• As we shape technology, it shapes us. We are connecting everything to everything, and so our entire culture is migrating to a "network culture" and a new network economics.
  
• In order to harvest the power of organic machines, we have to instill in them guidelines and self-governance, and relinquish some of our total control.