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Two is the magic number: a new science of creativity - 0 views

www.slate.com/...2267004
shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • But a new body of research has begun to show how growth and achievement emerge from relationships. The new science begins with infancy. For centuries, babies were seen as blank slates who just filled their stomachs, emptied their bowels and bladders, and cried and slept in between. As for any significant aspects of their environment, small children were seen as passive receivers. (And largely insensitive ones: For most of the 20th century, doctors routinely operated on babies without anesthesia, believing them exempt from pain.)
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "The ultimate triumph of the idea of individualism is that it's not really seen as an idea at all. It has seeped into our mental groundwater. Basic descriptions of inter-relatedness-enabling, co-dependency-are headlines for dysfunction. The Oxford American Dictionary defines individualism as, first, "the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant" and, second, as "a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control." This lopsided contrast of "freedom" vs. "state control" is telling. Even our primary reference on meaning, the dictionary, tilts in favor of the self." By Joshua Wolf Shenk at Slate on September 14, 2010.
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A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...singlepage futurism predictions
shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • 2) The future isn't going to feel futuristic It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
  • 16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze While it's already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.
  • North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989 Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Oct 10
       
      No it can't. I'm going to trust geography in this instance.
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "The iconic writer reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you'll need to talk about your messed-up future." By Douglas Coupland at The Globe and Mail on October 8, 2010.
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Terror Alerts vs Elections - 0 views

www.informationisbeautiful.net/...terror-alerts-vs-elections visualizations
shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "Accusations today over the timings of terror alerts and elections. The Bush administration used to raise threat levels around campaign time, apparently. Is Obama doing the same with European terror alerts to create a rally-round-the-president effect? I wondered if there was a correlation between terrorism and elections we could actually see."
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NASA World Wind Java Demo Applications and Applets - 0 views

worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/demos geography longnow
shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "This page gives you access to a number of World Wind Java example applications or applets, and user applications of the SDK."
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Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10google.html technology
shared by anonymous on 10 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Oct 10
     
    "Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has. Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided - more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today's personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected. " By John Markoff at The New York Times on October 9, 2010.
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Despite highest health spending, Americans' life expectancy falls behind other countries' - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/..._falls_behind_other_countries_ layscience nutrition
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries.
  • When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries.
  • In terms of obesity, researchers found that, while people in the U.S. are more likely to be obese, this was also the case in 1975, when the U.S. was not so far behind in life expectancy.
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  • "But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects—smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, homicides, and racial and ethnic diversity are not the culprits. The U.S. doesn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy."
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "America continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance-obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and homicide-are not to blame, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. " At Lab Spaces on October 7, 2010.
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200-Year-Old Echoes in Muslim Center Uproar - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08zero.html religion
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church's initial location, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site outside the city limits, at Barclay and Church. Unlike the organizers of Park51, who have resisted suggestions they move the project to avoid having a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied. " By Paul Vitello at The New York Times on October 7, 2010.
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Geithner's Speech on the Global Economy | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eithners_speech_global_economy geopolitics economics
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • three points where the United States sees dangers to the global system.
  • The first is maintaining growth.
  • Next, Geithner pointed to differences in exchange rate systems.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Third, Geithner spoke about the reformation of the global financial architecture and evoked the framework agreement signed at the September 2009 G-20 summit.
  • The problem for China is that while Germany and Japan are U.S. allies, firmly lashed to the American-dominated international system, and have already been forced to change in response to American demands — such as the 1985 Plaza Accord in which Washington forced them to adopt market-oriented exchange rate policies — China is not.
  • If the United States is serious about enforcing such a policy, it will require changes to the next three biggest economies — China, Japan and Germany — as well as to those who have grown accustomed to the status quo, that is, in some way, almost everyone else in the world.
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke at the Brookings Institution on Oct. 6 and outlined Washington's economic and financial goals for a series of major upcoming international meetings. He called for G-20 countries to continue working together on global economic and financial challenges, and presented three points where the United States sees dangers to the global system. " At Stratfor on October 7, 2010.
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Middle-Aged Columnists Think America Is In Decline. Big Surprise. - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...ica-in-decline-thomas-friedman history politics society
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • A Google search for the phrase “America’s decline” turns up 42,500 hits. Comparisons to Rome and other once-powerful empires abound, as in Cullen Murphy’s popular 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. From the Tea Party right comes the constant, screeching cry that President Obama and the Democrats are “destroying America.” The National Intelligence Council itself, a few years ago, predicted the “erosion” of American power relative to China and India. Clearly, the most popular classical figure in America today is that high-strung Trojan lady, Cassandra.
  • Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of “America’s decline” had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s.
  • What is particularly fascinating about these older predictions is that so many of their themes remain constant. What did our past Cassandras see as the causes of America’s decline? On the one hand, internal weaknesses—spiraling budget and trade deficits, the poor performance of our primary and secondary educational systems; political paralysis—coupled with an arrogant tendency toward “imperial overstretch.” And on the other hand, the rise of tougher, better-disciplined rivals elsewhere: the Soviet Union through the mid-'80s; Japan until the early '90s; China today.
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  • What the long history of American “declinism”—as opposed to America’s actual possible decline—suggests is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses.
  • nations do not in fact behave like individuals.
  • But the psychological impulse to see the country in decline leads writers again and again to neglect these differences, and to cast the story of a huge, complex nation as a simple individual morality play.
  • Would Rome not have fallen if a group of clear-sighted, hardheaded Roman commentators had sternly told the country to buck up in the late third century, lest the empire share the fate of Persia? Was Great Britain’s decline in the twentieth century a product of moral flabbiness that a strong dose of character-building medicine could have reversed?
  • We would do better to recognize that calling ourselves “the new Romans” is really just a seductive fantasy, and that our political and economic problems demand political and economic solutions, not exercises in collective moral self-flagellation.
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "Yet again this Sunday, Thomas L. Friedman used his column in The New York Times to issue an ominous warning about America's decline. Quoting from Lewis Mumford about the moral decadence of imperial Rome, he commented: "It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine-way, way too close for comfort." He ended the column with a call for a third-party candidate in 2012 with the courage to say to the voters: "I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world's leaders, not the new Romans."" By David A. Bell on October 7, 2010.
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The real cost of free - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...e-online-content-cory-doctorow technology
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Commenters who claim I tell artists to give their work away for free are wrong - and they should focus on the real online villains" By Cory Doctorow at The Guardian on October 5, 2010.
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Objectivism & "Metaphysics," Part 14 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ivism-metaphysics-part-14.html objectivism criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Exhibit 1:I was astonished at how closed she typically was to any new knowledge [testifies Nathaniel Branden] .…When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression have a biological basis, she answered angrily, ‘I can tell you what causes depression; I can tell you about rational depression and I can tell you about irrational depression—the second is mostly self-pity—and in neither case does biology enter into it.’ I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, since she had never studied the field; she shrugged bitterly and snapped, ‘Because I know how to think.’” (Judgement Day, 1989, 347)
  • Rand is claiming because people have free will, they cannot possibly be influenced by biological factors. But this is merely an a priori rationalization of the worst sort. Claims about the biological basis of an emotion can only be settled experimentally, through empirical testing. The evidence for the hypothesis that biological factors can influence emotions is overwhelming and not in dispute among psychiatrists familiar with the relevant research. If anyone has any doubt on the score, just consider how diseases of the brain can affect emotion and personality.
  • So how exactly does evolutionary psychology explain the misery, the jealousy, the lying [that occurred as a result of Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden]? When Rand and her followers tried to wish away obvious facts about humans' emotional constitution, their feelings didn't change. But they made each other miserable pretending that they felt the way they were supposed to feel. Rand and Nathaniel had to pretend that Nathaniel was attracted to Rand. Their spouses had to pretend that they weren't jealous. Rand and Nathaniel had to pretend that they believed that their spouses weren't jealous. The more they tried to talk themselves into having feelings contrary to human nature, the worse they felt. Nathaniel coped not by admitting error, but by finding a mistress and lying to cover it up. Since Rand had already ruled out the obvious explanation for Nathaniel's behavior, she went on a wild goose chase to find the "real" explanation. Etc...
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  • Human beings evolved in small groups where good relations were vital for survival. People who weren't interested in other people's opinions had trouble staying alive and reproducing. Caring about the opinions of others isn't as immutable as our sexual preferences, but it's very deeply rooted.
  • To deny a human nature consisting of innate propensities is a far more serious matter than denying facts about quantum mechanics or Einstienian relativity.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Where the Objectivist metaphysics seriously leads its partisans astray is on the issue of free will and human nature. For Rand, free will is axiomatic, which means, "self-evident" and "fundamentally given and directly perceived." Now whether free will is self-evident I will leave for another post. Here I'm only interested in specific facts that are sacrificed on the alter of Rand's free will." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on October 5, 2010.
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What will future generations condemn us for? - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010092404113_pf.html morality history longnow
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
  • a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.
  • Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")
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  • And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
  • four contenders
  • Our prison system
  • Industrial meat production
  • The institutionalized and isolated elderly
  • The environment
  • Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours.
  • People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
  • Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.)
  • Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you'll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That's the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe's first man-made desert.
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today." By Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Washington Post on September 26, 2010.
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New Statesman - Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...social-facebook-geek-women economics society technology
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The film's basic formula is the familiar blogs-to-bling-and-bitches redemptive parable of male geek culture, with the added bonus that it happens to be based on real events. The protagonist, Facebook's co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, is a brilliant 19-year-old coder. His painful social ineptitude, as told here, gets him savagely dumped by his girlfriend, after which, drunk and misunderstood, he sets up a website to rate the physical attractiveness of the women undergraduates of Harvard, thus exacting his revenge upon the female sex that has so cruelly spurned his obvious genius.
  • The Social Network is an expertly crafted and exhaustively modern film, and one of its more pertinent flashpoints is the reminder that a resource that redefined the human interactions of 500 million people across the globe was germinated in an act of vengeful misogyny.
  • This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.
  • There is a certain type of nerd entitlement that is all too easily co-opted into a modern mythology of ruthless capitalist exploitation, in which the acquisition of wealth and status at all costs is phrased as a cheeky way of getting one's own back on those kids who were mean to you at school.
  • The protagonist is invariably white and rich and always male -- Hollywood cannot countenance female nerds, other than as minor characters who transform into pliant sexbots as soon as they remove their glasses -- but these privileges are as naught compared to the injustice life has served him by making him shy, spotty and interested in Star Trek. He has been wronged, and he has every right to use his l33t skills to bend the engine of humanity to his purpose.
  • For me, being a geek is about community, energy and celebration of difference -- but in the sterile fairytale of contemporary capitalism, successful geekery is about the rewards of power and the usefulness of commodifying other humans as a sum of likes, interests and saleable personal data.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "The Social Network is an elegant psychodrama of contemporary economics. " By Laurie Penny at New Statesman on October 1, 2010. Referred to by Nicholas Schiller.
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Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix it - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...science-journalism-spoof layscience
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; butscience reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.
  • A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion.
  • If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.
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  • thanks to the BBC's multi-platform publishing guidelines, the first few paragraphs of any news story need to be written in such a way that they can be cut and pasted into a Ceefax page.
  • Another issue affecting style is the need to reach a diverse audience. This puts pressure on commercial media groups who need to secure page views to generate advertising revenue
  • As a writer, word limits are both a blessing and a curse. Many bloggers would have their writing immeasurably improved if they stuck to a word limit – doing that forces you to plan, to organise your thoughts, and to avoid redundancy and repetition. On the other hand, some stories need more time to tell, and sticking dogmatically to an arbitrary 800-word limit for stuff that's published on the internet doesn't make a lot of sense. The internet is not running out of space.
  • Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.
  • Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they're not even the most interesting stories in many cases.
  • Members of the public could be forgiven for believing that science involves occasional discoveries interspersed with long periods of 'not very much happening right now'. The reality of science is almost the complete opposite of this.
  • One of the biggest failures of science reporting is the media's belief that a scientific paper or research finding represents a conclusion of some kind. Scientists know that this simply isn't true. A new paper is the start or continuance of a discussion or debate that will often rumble on for years or even decades.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    What's wrong with science journalism, and how do we fix it? By Martin Robbins at The Guardian on October 5, 2010.
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Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money - 0 views

www.good.is/...isinformed-about-who-has-money
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The top row shows the actual distribution of wealth in America. The richest 20 percent, represented by that blue line, has about 85 percent of the wealth. The next richest 20 percent, represented by that red line, has about 10 percent of the wealth. And the remaining three-fifths of America shares a tiny sliver of the country's wealth.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Americans have a really distorted view of how wealth is distributed in this country. This chart is from a paper called "Building a Better America One Wealth Quintile at a Time" by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton." By Andrew Price at GOOD on September 28, 2010.
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U.S.-Pakistani Relations: Islamabad's Perspective on the Tensions - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...slamabads_perspective_tensions geopolitics gwot
shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Islamabad realizes that it is more dependent than ever on U.S. financial assistance, especially in the wake of devastating floods that ravaged some 20 percent of the country’s territory and 12 percent of its population. From the Pakistanis’ viewpoint, the Americans are trying to take advantage of this dependency and extract as many concessions from them as is possible. Having been forced to accept U.S. UAV strikes in their country as routine, the Pakistani leaders now fear that if they don’t draw the line, they could easily find themselves being forced to accept U.S. forces entering their territory to conduct raids against militant forces as a norm.
  • The latter scenario is a red line for Islamabad, as it could make the Pakistani state even more unstable than it already is (something which would also go against current and long-term U.S. interests).
  • Pakistan is also using its vulnerability to its advantage. The United States cannot afford severe destabilization in Pakistan and thus cannot push Islamabad too far. This gives Pakistan an advantage over the United States.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "After years of tolerating countless UAV strikes and clandestine ground incursions by the U.S. military and particularly the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division, the Pakistanis are telegraphing that they can no longer tolerate violation of their borders by U.S. forces. Pakistan is making this move now out of a sense of vulnerability, and because the Pakistanis want to capitalize on the most recent affront." At StratFor on October 6, 2010.
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Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1 technology wired
shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind.
  • Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another. Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
  • Kelly: In part, that’s because ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can absorb only one advance, one small hop, at a time. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another. Johnson: Charles Babbage is another great case study. His “analytical engine,” which he started designing in the 1830s, was an incredibly detailed vision of what would become the modern computer, with a CPU, RAM, and so on. But it couldn’t possibly have been built at the time, and his ideas had to be rediscovered a hundred years later.
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  • Johnson: And for wastes of time and resources. If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "Say the word "inventor" and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation-by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors-argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs-teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another." At Wired on September 27, 2010.
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Why it doesn't feel like a recovery - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "The nation's economic woes boil down to this. Compared with a healthy economy, about 7 million working-age people and 5 percent of the nation's industrial capacity are sitting idle, not producing what they could. The economy is growing again, but at a rate - less than 2 percent in recent months - that's too slow to keep up with a population that keeps increasing and workers who keep getting more efficient. This is the output gap, the divide between the amount the United States can produce and what it is actually producing. The gap, currently $900 billion, explains why we feel so miserable more than a year into what is technically classified as an economic recovery." The Washington Post
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Why All Indiscretions Appear Youthful - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05mind.html psychology morality layscience
shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • In recent years psychologists have exposed the many ways that people subconsciously maintain and massage their moral self-image. They rate themselves as morally superior to the next person; overestimate the likelihood that they will act virtuously in the future; see their own good intentions as praiseworthy while dismissing others’ as inconsequential. And they soften their moral principles when doing a truly dirty job, like carrying out orders to exploit uninformed customers.
  • In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward, these new studies suggest — creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography.
  • “We can’t make up the past, but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we’re able to shift elements around,” said Anne E. Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. “The result is that we can create a personal history that, if not perfect, makes us feel we’re getting better and better.”
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  • “People honestly view their past in a morally critical light, but at the same time they tend to emphasize that they have been improving,” the authors concluded.
  • But the mind seems particularly prone to backdating when it comes to cruel, greedy or cowardly acts — the physical evidence people weigh against stand-up deeds to judge whether they are as good as their parents told them they were. In a 2001 paper titled “From Chump to Champ,” Dr. Wilson and Michael Ross of the University of Waterloo demonstrated in a series of experiments that young adults described their teenage selves in far more negative terms than they did their current selves, often skewering their past judgment.
  • “The weirdest thing about reading about all these bad moral choices,” Dr. Escobedo said, “is that it makes you kind of feel good about yourself. Just seeing how everyone makes mistakes and regrets not doing what was morally right: It makes you feel more attached to humanity.”
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "In recent years psychologists have exposed the many ways that people subconsciously maintain and massage their moral self-image. They rate themselves as morally superior to the next person; overestimate the likelihood that they will act virtuously in the future; see their own good intentions as praiseworthy while dismissing others' as inconsequential. And they soften their moral principles when doing a truly dirty job, like carrying out orders to exploit uninformed customers. " By Benedict Carey at The New York Times on October 4, 2010. Thanks to Shannon Turlington for the pointer.
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What I Think About Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

whatever.scalzi.com/...t-i-think-about-atlas-shrugged objectivism
shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.
  • Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.
  • In a similiar vein Rand seemed to think that all rational thought led to the same conclusion. This is on its face false and simplistic. Scientists can looks at the same data results and draw different conclusions. How do they resolve this difference? They do further experiments, they challenge currently held assumptions that were themselves the result of a rational thought process. Rationality and empiricism inherantly encourage doubt and self examination. I didn’t see any of this in the “converted” Atlases. Once Galt had his claws (or fangs if you prefer) in them they were zombiefied. No an objection raised to the deaths of millions (that could have been prevented), not a doubt uttered as to their own righteousness, not a single second thought about what they were doing. There’s a term for that: cult. We in the real world tend to frown upon such organizations but Rand holds them up of having discovered the one eternal Truth. As Patton once said, “If everyone is thinking alike than no one is thinking.”
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "That said, it's a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn - if you're an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by "going Galt" has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I'll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I'll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can't figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care." By John Scalzi at Whatever on October 5, 2010.
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