From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, “We’re not playing.”

That "someone" was ETC Group, about which Decius commented recently.

The apparently alarming comments about DNA synthesis should come as no surprise to anyone who read Darwin’s Surprise a year ago.

Also, Freeman Dyson has been asking these questions for years now:

First, can it be stopped? Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits that our society must impose on it? Fourth, how should the limits be decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally and internationally?

But:

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

Fear not the explosion:

There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture.

The revolution will not be rational:

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.

See also, from the archive:

Scientists want to adopt a set of declarations to improve the security of research that uses DNA synthesis. A proponent discusses the whys and wherefores of this effort.

Shocking science | The Economist

Never has one generation spent so much of its children's wealth in such a short period of time with so little to show for it.

Get real or go home.

The greenest thing you can do in your kitchen is not tear it up and put in a new one.

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

It's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned.

The median household earned $48,201 in 2006, down from $49,244 in 1999, according to the US Census Bureau. It now looks as if a full decade may pass before most Americans receive a raise.

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

"Maybe this isn't the right heartless monolithic corporation for you."

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.

The meritocracy wasn't supposed to work this way.

Today I write not to gloat. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter

Erykah Badu, on Making It

Americans commuting patterns are changing fundamentally. Similar shifts in the way we work can't be far behind.

Work and Money | Another Noteworthy Year

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

I'm not thinking the way I used to think.

To think clearly is to be altruistic.

One in four of us have regular paranoid thoughts.

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

She wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.

Being "always on" is being always off, to something.

The problem is not the ignorance. The problem is the bliss.

In a selfish world, enlightened wisdom may be beyond the capacities of all states. But if there is any hope, it lies in a renewed understanding of the importance of values.

The amphetamine-assisted, physician-abetted social adjustment of yore is back as a mass phenomenon.

A motion picture essay which takes a revealing and shocking look at modern life and its imbalances.

The more we learn, the more capricious and imponderable lightning becomes.

Typography from the 1980s!

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

Where do computer files go when you die?

Like a Morricone-style dirge recorded by The Mamas and The Papas, Violent Femmes' cover of Gnarls Barkley's infamous "Crazy" is like nothing you've heard from the legendary alt-rock trio before.

What we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

Sensing, Memory, and Forgetting | Another Noteworthy Year

When Americans look back years from now, what will shame us most is that our country abandoned a bedrock principle of civilized nations: that torture is without exception wrong.

The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting.

It's not about left or right, it's about right and wrong.

Limiting the CIA's interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet.

What if warriors -- or prisoners of war -- could selectively disable their pain sense -- or their sense of decency?

It didn't take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

You can't beat the Axis if you get VD.

What a beautiful little war!

Other people's culture wars always look ridiculous.

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period.

The more Pakistanis I talked to, the more I came to believe that the most reasonable explanations were not necessarily the most plausible ones.

FRONTLINE goes to war with a platoon of National Guard soldiers to see the war through their eyes, as they filmed it using their own camcorders.

A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles.

In my opinion, the moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation.

Bush's War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history.

If the United States waits for a dramatic, 9/11-style attack on its critical infrastructure to act, it will be missing the real threat.

Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow passengers to access the plane's control systems.

Terrorism and War | Another Noteworthy Year

Paul Graham just finished Outliers and figured he could turn it into a story about Y Combinator.

Let's think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.

Daniel Lemire:

Paul writes good essays, but they are thin on research.

Recently:

Although merit varies widely in many fields, only a few have developed effective methods of performance evaluation.

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

From the archive:

The Artemis archetype represents a capacity for resisting the fall into 'Organization Man' or the 'Organizational Society', which uses patterns of rewards, sanctions and other inducements to achieve social conformity. Symbolic management again represents an important ideological tool in the desire to inculcate images for social compliance and the internalization of corporate values and goals. The Artemis archetype, therefore, is important in the contemporary era for preserving individual integrity and difference.

From The Organization Man:

An ideal of individualism which denies the obligations of man to others is manifestly impossible in a society such as ours, and it is a credit to our wisdom that while we preached it, we never fully practiced it.

But in searching for that elusive middle of the road, we have gone very far afield, and in our attention to making organization work we have come close to deifying it. We are describing its defects as virtues and denying that there is--or should be--a conflict between the individual and organization. This denial is bad for the organization. It is worse for the individual. What it does, in soothing him, is to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs. For the more power organization has over him, the more he needs to recognize the area where he must assert himself against it. And this, almost because we have made organization life so equable, has become excruciatingly difficult.

After Credentials

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

He wore a crisp dress shirt the color of mint ice cream and a color-coordinated tie, which made him look like an insurance claims adjustor.

My audit group's Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.

garfield minus garfield

Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.

It's not about Truth so much as the illusion of truth.

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Officials say some drivers are pretending to be out of gas, just so they can receive a precious, free gallon of fuel.

Stated reasons are often not the real reasons.

He seems to think that the facts speak for themselves. But facts never speak for themselves. We speak for them.

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Verifiability is really an appeal to authority--not the authority of truth, but the authority of other publications. Any other publication, really.

One of the great aesthetic legacies of the Soviet Union is the great wealth of magnificent propaganda posters it left behind.

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Beauty and Truth | Another Noteworthy Year

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Doing a job properly takes the time it takes.

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

The symphony of Manhattan Island is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.

"This place is really nice and tranquil."

For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn't true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Staring blankly at the seat back in front of you for the entire flight is no longer permitted on my airline. If you have brought nothing to read, a book will be provided for your use, at a charge of fifty dollars.

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read.

Time and Solititude | Another Noteworthy Year

There's been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

How do you organize this in a way that protects an incredibly valuable asset in the United States but does it in a way that doesn't alarm reasonable people, and I underline reasonable people, in terms of civil liberties?

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

Focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps pose to a democratic society.

I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me.

Though some federal appellate courts do not appear to require any degree of suspicion to justify a search, one federal district court stated categorically that all laptop searches conducted at the border require at least reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Surveillance and Privacy | Another Noteworthy Year

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives.

What worry me are the problems that we will bequeath to our children.

You often learn who you are by realizing who you are not.

Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Someone needed to bring it, so I brought it.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn't do.

Trust no one.

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective.

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life.

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

I will, at all costs, avoid this generic procedure.

It will be an uphill, years-long struggle.

You can't stop what's coming.

Ideas take life when they are shared.

It's like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and to learn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he's making so that we don't have to make the mistakes ourselves.

This trip was going to be different. Out of the five of us that were going, three updated their wills and/or life insurance policies in the weeks before we left.

This collection is very interesting. Don't miss part 2 and part 3.

The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) - The Big Picture - Boston.com