There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
An exceedingly complex system
Topic: Politics and Law
6:26 am EST, Nov 7, 2007
As the number of places on the planet grows where power really resides in the people, the world will become more, not less, complex. Democracy, which is simple in concept, is in practice an exceedingly complex system.
The world alters as we walk in it, so that the years of a man's life measure not some small growth or rearrangement or moderation of what he learned in childhood, but a great upheaval.
At each branching point the options are well defined, but the choice is arbitrary. So two systems that are wholly identical at the outset might end up on quite different branches while experiencing the same driving force, simply because they happened to take different paths at each junction. "Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures," as Jorge Luis Borges says in his story "The Garden of Forking Paths."
It is dangerous to stand up to a military dictatorship, but more dangerous not to.
I recall the words of President Bush in his second inaugural address when he said: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”
"If there were a Hall of Fame for influential public-policy ideas, then the 'broken windows' thesis would probably have its own exhibit."
In the 1960s ... order maintenance became, to a degree, coterminous with “community relations.” But, as the crime wave that began in the early 1960s continued without abatement throughout the decade and into the 1970s, attention shifted to the role of the police as crime-fighters.
The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must accommodate them. And therein lies the problem.
It's interesting to observe how, in the popular image, the police are overwhelmingly depicted as "crime solvers" rather than "crime preventers." There must be more to this than a (questionable) intuition about what makes for "good television." Something about a deep-seated need to submit to authority, and an unbounded (and unrealistic) faith in the power of experts.
As We May Think | Vannevar Bush | July 1945 | The Atlantic
Topic: Technology
10:07 pm EST, Nov 5, 2007
A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
... All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
Although the concept of milieu does not necessarily include a spatial dimension, I argue that in the case of information technology industries, at least in this century, spatial proximity is a necessary material condition for the existence of such milieux because of the nature of the interaction in the innovation process. What defines the specificity of a milieu of innovation is its capacity to generate synergy; that is, the added value resulting not from the cumulative effect of the elements present in the milieu but from their interaction. Milieux of innovation are the fundamental sources of innovation and of generation of value added in the process of industrial production in the information age.
Click through for the official web site; the video is just a compilation of informal testimonials. I must say that the sight of young children enthusiastically shaking Bacon Salt on their steamed vegetables is more than a little disconcerting. (Buy it online.)
A fascinating immersion within a highly ritualized Stone Age oral culture that, at least according to tradition, existed almost unchanged for thousands of years before the European arrival.
It's common enough to describe a film as being like no other you've ever seen but in this case it may literally be true.
I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness. Likewise many of nature’s five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and cornfields. In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God’s trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of. Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by millions, smashed to confusion, and the smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred years. After the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia had been mostly cleared and scorched into melancholy ruins, the overflowing multitude of bread and money seekers poured over the Alleghanies into the fertile middle West, spreading ruthless devastation ever wider and farther over the rich valley of the Mississippi and the vast shadowy pine region about the Great Lakes. Thence still westward the invading horde of destroyers called settlers made its fiery way over the broad Rocky Mountains, felling and burning more fiercely than ever, until at last it has reached the wild side of the continent, and entered the last of the great aboriginal forests on the shores of the Pacific.
...
There will be a period of indifference on the part of the rich, sleepy with wealth, and of the toiling millions, sleepy with poverty, most of whom never saw a forest; a period of screaming protest and objection from the plunderers, who are as unconscionable and enterprising as Satan. But light is surely coming, and the friends of destruction will preach and bewail in vain.
About ninety thousand acres of old-growth redwoods have remained intact, in patches of protected land. The remaining scraps of the primeval redwood-forest canopy are like three or four fragments of a rose window in a cathedral, and the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away. "Oh, man, the trees that were lost here," Sillett said to me one day as we were driving through the suburbs of Arcata. "This was the most beautiful forest on the planet, and it's almost totally gone. This is such a sore point."
Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. ... it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world ... it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.
