“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.

The idea of peacefully replacing our ruler through a legal process is still a wild, alien thought for us. The powers-that-be are above the law and they're unchangeable by law. Overthrowing them is something we understand. But at the moment, we don't want to. We've had quite enough revolution.

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did.

Some ideas are reeled into our mind wrapped up in facts; and some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

From curious children, hackers were born.

The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences.

The idea was to erect an island of intellectual freedom where young people could probe and question and develop their own ideas before reality closed in and everybody went to work for a private equity firm.

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.
--V.S. Naipaul

Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical. Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has. Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.
-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey

Here is Tim O'Reilly:

Verizon announced last month that it will open its network to “any application and any device” by the end of next year.

But while Verizon’s pledge sounds promising, the language in which it is couched makes me wonder whether Verizon understands what a true open platform looks like. The announcement states that “the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network,” and that “devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab.” It’s not yet clear what standards developers will need to follow to write applications that work with both the device and the network, and who will control those standards.

This is not “open.” It’s just a little less closed. A true open platform like the Internet doesn’t have certification of trusted devices or applications. Developers get to do anything they want, with the marketplace as their only judge and jury.

...

The power of a social network like MySpace or Facebook isn’t in its software or its control over which applications get on its platform. It is in the critical mass of participating users.

Static on the Dream Phone

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did.

A generator, cow and goat were raffled off. Wizened elders sat on carpets and sipped green tea. Some wealthy farmers seemed interested. Others seemed keen to attend what they saw as a picnic.

These are not what I could call hedge funds. This is just gambling.

"Who won the cow? Who won the cow?"

"You can't win them all," Mr. Silber said.

Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off?

... "a sheik engagement," the Pentagon itinerary said ...

Eighty suspected terrorists killed. An enormous weapons cache recovered. And, in what the report called "pocket litter," a notebook with the name and phone number of the imam of a mosque halfway around the world, here in the state capital.

"We are entering a new golden era of vaccinology."

Winemaking in France is entering a crucial period, some might say an end-game.

In a French country kitchen a woman recalls, with horrified outrage, a trip to Chicago, where she encountered "the fattest people I ever saw in my life."

Why is my favorite brand of lipstick more expensive than a nice bottle of Italian wine?

Chuck Prince, chief executive of Citigroup, dismissed fears about an early end to the postmillennial debt frolics. "When the music stops," he told The Financial Times, "in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

Harper, 37, described the record as "not rock, not folk, not gospel, but with all those elements included."

It's nylon-string solo acoustic guerrilla folk.

I don't feel rooted here. But New York... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

There's another reason, surely, for the cult of bad art, and it has to do with liberation: the anarchic pleasure of disorder, the repudiation of established rules of judgment. Bad art is an invitation to escape the formal boundaries of adulthood and be a child, delighting in the rude and raw.

For anyone at all familiar with rich people, the idea that to be rich is to be sophisticated is almost laughable.

"You try to accommodate, and then people start to abuse the privilege," Ms. Fasano said.

"Las Vegas is about creating experiences that people cannot have at home. You see the girl next door here and know that she would not go topless at home."

"That's real progress," Mr. Baird said, though he confessed he did not tell his wife about the region's nickname, the triangle of death.

You hear it and you say: "That's the core. People aren't supposed to be that honest."

Good people should be concerned about this.

"Pull a prank involving 100 lawn gnomes" is a goal shared by 65 members.

"Some guys collect coins. If I wasn't doing this, I wouldn't know what to do with myself in the summer."

More than any sequel before it, "Aliens" demonstrated that a good idea -- and a female action hero in minimal underwear -- had legs.

"It's easy to live in the past," she said. "Where do we go from here -- that's what worries me."

"They said, 'I want the stirrup to be easy to get in and out of, but when I'm in there, I really want some sort of grip,'" said John Pierce, the company's director of product development.

To hear the couple talk, it will be an enriching, madcap adventure that will allow their children to learn things on the road they might not in a classroom.

"I was flabbergasted," she said.

"What I liked about it is, it wasn't candy-coated," she said.

Shouting "Cotton candy! Get your cotton candy here!" will only irritate people during a game's tense moments.

"For this guy in a few weeks to go from Mr. Tiger to be Mr. Pussycat, I don't see it."

"We have overrated the childlike aspects of adolescence."

Kindergarten is not what it used to be.

"I'm trying to garner from them whatever wisdom I can about how you go through it."

The secret to getting good services, the 19th-century writer Emily Huntington told the readers of her book, was to get them very young.

Nearly half the executives said that entry-level workers lacked writing skills, and 27 percent said that they were deficient in critical thinking.

The children are the tiny Ed McMahons of the race, warming up the audience before the main pitch.

Not only was I young, I looked young. It was a challenge to be taken seriously.

Special Agent Timothy Coll of the FBI was asked during his cross-examination whether Mr. Aref had been under 24-hour surveillance. Mr. Pericak objected. "I'm concerned that a truthful answer should implicate classified information," he said.

His caution stems from the murky legal status of unlocking cellphones.

"I would characterize it as tantalizing evidence."

"I don't sic the cops on them," Mr. McGhee said. "I preach to them. That's all I have to give them: Jesus."

Tom has great ears.

This was supposed to make us feel better. It did not.

It was one in a series of regrettable events and choices that brought out the relentless self-questioner in him.

It wasn't quite humility, but it was a start.

"This has been going on for a while," he said, "and this is the latest salvo."

What is really needed to protect consumers is a national database.

"As far as I remember, we have always discouraged that as being somewhat nonsensical."

"The net effect is to capture more and more mind space," Mr. Hanke said. "I want to be left alone."

Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events.

"It was a lovely lunch, a nice-napkin lunch," said Ms. Schakowsky. But it was also, she said, a lunch with a message.

"The Oasis of Rapport is the time spent with the client building rapport and gathering information. At this point in the sales cycle, rates, points, and fees are not discussed. The immediate objective is for the Account Executive to get to know the client and look for points of common interest. Use first names with clients as it facilitates a friendly, helpful tone."

"It was rather idyllic, but a fool's paradise as it turned out."

"There is no water anywhere. There is no help. We are alone."

A sparsely populated desert province twice the size of Maryland, Helmand produces more narcotics than any country on earth.

"Everywhere you turn, it's luxury rentals."

The object was cylindrical, made of duct tape and smelled of marijuana, said Bob. "It was not a bomb or a bong. We don't know what to call it."

If elected, Mr. Obama said he would establish a Drug Enforcement Agency office in New Orleans that would be dedicated to stopping drug gangs across the region.

Who's to blame? The human race, first and foremost.

Advocates say that if adolescents get bitten by the civic bug, they will be less likely to kick the habit as they grow up.

"I'm not collecting guns anymore. I'm really focused on finding better paintings."

Reasoning by historical analogy is inherently dangerous," Professor Record said.

Farsi, as a language, is elusive and indirect. There's this whole idea of 'taarof' -- you say something you don't mean, and the other person is supposed to pick up on it.

"I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible," the sales representatives would say.

We're not propagandists, but we do have a message.

Omneuron uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads.

By crosshatching vast amounts of information, based on relatively few confirmed elements, it is possible to detect patterns that can expose the network through its benign operations and then focus on its more malignant schemes.

As of June 30, almost one in four subprime loans that Countrywide services was delinquent.

In just about any other profession, a person who has collected that kind of praise would have some job security.

"Maintain calm," he said. "Don't spread rumors."

The crash left the street littered with strawberries, shattered glass and bloodstains.

"This will be great for Countrywide," he said, "because at the end of the day, all of the irrational competitors will be gone."

Unless Mr. Bernanke is replaced by Chuckles the Clown, it won't happen.