[ Jesus. I'd've hit his ass wit my car. -k]

YouTube - Crazy psycho attacks car

Intriguing.

The McKinsey Quarterly: IT remedies for US health care: An interview with WellPoint's Leonard Schaeffer

Some Thoughts for Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Bob Schrum, Donna Brazile, John Podesta, Nancy Pelosi, and the Rest of the Shit-for-Brains So-Called Leaders of the Democratic Party, at the Start of 2006, a Year Which Will Either Restore the Party to Political Relevance or Witness Its Ultimate Humiliation and Extinction

Pretty on point.

The Blog | Andrew Foster Altschul: | The Huffington Post

DAVID GELERNTER

What are people well-informed about in the Information Age?

Let's date the Information Age to 1982, when the Internet went intooperation & the PC had just been born. What if people have been growing less well-informed ever since? What if people have been growing steadily more ignorant ever since the so-called Information Age began?

Suppose an average US voter, college teacher, 5th-grade teacher, 5th-grade student are each less well-informed today than they were in '95, and were less well-informed then than in '85? Suppose, for that matter, they were less well-informed in '85 than in '65?

If this is indeed the "information age," what exactly are people well-informed about? Video games? Clearly history, literature, philosophy, scholarship in general are not our specialities. This is some sort of technology age — are people better informed about science? Not that I can tell. In previous technology ages, there was interest across the population in the era's leading technology.

This is a response that has gotten me to thinking, as it touches on areas in which I have a strong interest...

He's right, in part, I think. I believe that we're only just on the cusp of entering the "Information" age, and have recently been living in the "Data" age. The explosion of technology to sort, process and create vast quatities of data have really made us advanced tool users, but the utility has limits. The generation we're entering now is the one which will give us tools that are capable of transforming our data into information. Of taking the raw material and offering up something which can be acted upon and used. Without a doubt, this site, and it's brethren, are the initial steps in that direction.

Modern, connected individuals have access to vastly more data than any past generation, both secondarily (in computer memories) and primarily (in their own brains). What they don't necessarily have is the capacity to organize, correlate and recall those data. The perception expressed above derives from this very fact... we seem less informed because we've absorbed too much. Limited sources allowed for simpler analysis. The virtually unlimited sources available to us now make even tentative certainty a goal requiring more time and effort than in the past. Couple that with the known fact that those sources are of widely variable and often unknown quality, and the job becomes even harder. The tools don't exist yet to really alleviate this problem, but as they come into being, we'll become capable of astonishing things.

David Gelernter surely understands all these things better than I... his writings and his company are (were? the site www.scopeware.com appears to be a squatter) based on the solutions to data overloading.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005

DENIS DUTTON

I've
encountered stiff academic resistance to the notion that Darwinian
theory might greatly improve the understanding of our aesthetic
and imaginative lives.  There's no reason to worry.  The
most complete, evolutionarily-based explanation of a great
work of art, classic or recent, will address its form, its
narrative content, its ideology, how it is taken in by the
eye or mind, and indeed, how it can produce a deep, even life-transforming
pleasure.  But nothing in a valid aesthetic psychology
will rob art of its appeal, any more than knowing how we evolved
to enjoy fat and sweet makes a piece of cheesecake any less
delicious. Nor will a Darwinian aesthetics reduce the complexity
of art to simple formulae.  It will only give us a better
understanding of the greatest human achievements and their
effects on us.

One is reminded of Feynman as well :

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.

(from Wikiquote - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 4

MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

So the dangerous idea on which our culture is based is that the
political economy has a silver bullet — the free market — that
must take precedence over any other value, and thereby lead to
peace and prosperity. It is dangerous because like all silver
bullets it is an intellectual and political scam that might benefit
some, but ultimately requires the majority to pay for the destruction
it causes.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 3

HAIM HARARI

Democracy
may be on its way out. Future historians
may determine that Democracy will have
been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very
realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).
Falling
boundaries between countries, cross border
commerce, merging economies, instant global
flow of information and numerous other
features of our modern society, all lead
to multinational structures. If you extrapolate
this irreversible trend, you get the entire
planet becoming one political unit. But
in this unit, anti-democracy forces are
now a clear majority. This majority increases
by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing
or negative population growth, while all
anti-democratic and uneducated societies
multiply fast. Within democratic countries,
most well-educated families remain small
while the least educated families are growing
fast. This means that, both at the individual
level and at the national level, the more
people you represent, the less economic
power you have. In a knowledge based economy,
in which the number of working hands is
less important, this situation is much
more non-democratic than in the industrial
age. As long as upward mobility of individuals
and nations could neutralize this phenomenon,
democracy was tenable. But when we apply
this analysis to the entire planet, as
it evolves now, we see that democracy may
be doomed.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

The
history of science is replete with discoveries
that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally
dangerous in their time; the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious.
What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think
about (not necessarily one you originated)
that is dangerous not because it is assumed
to be false, but because it might be true?

The smart folks over at Edge.org weigh in on "dangerous" -- which i interpret to mean potentially massively transformative -- ideas.

As usual, there's some fascinating stuff here.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006

The networks will all be creating exciting, innovative new spin-offs of today's shows. Approximately 67 percent of all television will be CSI-based, including CSI: Des Moines, CSI: New York but a Different Part than Gary Sinise Is In and NCSI: SVU WKRP, which covers every possible gruesome crime with a groovin' '70s beat. (Jerry Bruckheimer will also have conquered Broadway with the CSI musical "FOLLICLE!" starring Nathan Lane as a frenetic but lovable blood spatter and Matthew Broderick as lint.)
Lost has that one-of-a-kind alchemy that really can't be copied. Therefore, look for the original series Misplaced, as well as Unfound, Not So Much with the Whereabouts and Just Pull Over and Ask!
In a stunningly cost-effective move, CBS will air How I Met Your Biological Mother, That Bitch, which is just old episodes of How I Met Your Mother with snarkier narration. HBO's Westminster will continue the trend pioneered by Deadwood and Rome by making 19th-century England really dirty and weird, like Jane Austen with Tourette's. (Actually, I can't wait for that one.) Also, the constant slew of cable mergers will result in the creation of CinePax, a channel that's just very confused about its morals.

"Not So Much with the Whereabouts." classic.

Joss Whedon on the future of TV

Some of these are absolutely incredible.

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