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

"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

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.

Amitav Ghosh:

There is no such thing, Gandhi tells us, as a means to an end: means are ends.

It affords me no satisfaction that the "incendiary circumstances" of these essays are no longer exceptional anywhere in the world. But their contemporary relevance lies, I hope, not merely in the circumstances they address but also in the renewed urgency of the question of means and ends. For if there is anything instructive in the present turmoil of the world, it is surely that few ideas are as dangerous as the belief that all possible means are permissible in the service of a desirable end.

From the archive:

After 9/11 the gloves came off.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.

Bush said he wanted to be remembered "as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process."

Mind you, he's not denying that he sold his soul (and yours). He's just saying he wasn't motivated by a desire to be accommodating.

"While there's room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I've made -- and there's plenty of debate -- there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe."

Bush's offer of "room" for debate is fallacious. There is only one debate. Means are ends. While the ends to date are "inarguable", which is to say indisputable, their status as historical fact is not the subject of the essential debate. The questions are moral questions, and the consequences are predominantly ahead of us, not behind us.

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years.

And now this current generation is pretty much fucked.

So his self-praise for "keeping America safe" is just a polite, roundabout way of saying, "I hope you all have enjoyed the past eight years of comfort and joy, because the next eighty are going to be rather uncomfortable."

Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of our Times

David Brooks:

Great people aren’t so great. Social forces largely explain why some people work harder.

As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought — the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes.

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power.

From the archive:

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention. Attention can keep us grounded and focused -- not diffused and fragmented.

The first study ever to look at where sensations of dread arise in the brain finds that contrary to what is widely believed, dread does not involve fear and anxiety in the moment of an unpleasant event. Instead, it derives from the attention that people devote beforehand to what they think will be extremely unpleasant.

Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

Lost in the Crowd

For the eighth year in a row, we have compiled an alphabetical digest of ideas, from A to Z (almost), that helped make the previous 12 months, for better or worse, what they were.

We've previously covered a few of these ideas here at MemeStreams:

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model revealed

Amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.

There are now a growing number of reports of cases of infections caused by gram-negative organisms for which no adequate therapeutic options exist. This return to the preantibiotic era has become a reality in many parts of the world.

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

The action bias, or the desire to do something rather than nothing when you have just been through a terrible experience, plays a powerful role in our lives.

Some excerpts from the digest:

When presented with men and women to lead a company that's going down the tubes, people pick the woman.

Do these air bags make me look parachute-y?

"Personal techno-garter": When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg.

The temptation to appear decisive -- particularly when you're being heavily scrutinized -- can be overwhelming.

It's a silly fad, like leg warmers and parachute pants.

Laziness almost always works.

"We can make a catwalk on Mars! Or on Venus! Or on top of two buildings, like Spider-Man. Whatever!"

Al Gore called on young people to engage in "civil disobedience."

Subjects ignored had a larger appetite for hot coffee and hot soup than did players who'd seen more action.

It was the first-ever forensic dog-poop DNA unit. Naturally, the project faced several hurdles.

The survey showed that Predator crews were suffering through "impaired domestic relationships" -- a problem which might possibly have something to do with the proximity of the Vegas strip.

If the measure sounds desperate, that's because it is.

The jump from 10 to 20 m.p.g. saves more gas than the one from 20 to 40 m.p.g. The move from 10 to 11 m.p.g. can save nearly as much as the leap from 33 to 50 m.p.g. Consumers don't get this.

Virtual kidnappings have become alarmingly commonplace in Mexico.

In many circumstances, privacy advocates get the link between discrimination and the availability of personal information precisely backward.

Duffy's look: street urchin with a stylist ...

"It's something we can engineer," Schiller says.

Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us?

The real engineering challenges may not be physics but politics.

Hmm, maybe I should just walk.

The Year In Ideas 2008

Malcom Gladwell:

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

From the archive:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!

I was thinking earlier about the idea of "through-lines" in films as a great illustration of how patterns and themes emerge. In fact, in Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton's character makes a comment about this very phenomenon -- something like, "You're thinking about a plate o' shrimp, and then suddenly someone'll say 'plate o' shrimp' out of the blue ..." And of course, through the whole movie, signs for "plate o' shrimp" are everywhere.

Decius wrote:

What do you think of [Gladwell's] new book? I've considered getting it but I have a horrible track record of not finding time to read books ...

I think it is a lot like his previous books. I bought and read The Tipping Point and Blink, but I haven't bought Outliers. Between his talk at the New Yorker festival and his articles, I feel like I know the gist of the message without bothering to read the whole book. He's been building on these ideas for years now. Still, I might pick up a copy later on; Amazon is offering it for 45% off these days.

For me, not buying the book has almost nothing to do with the prospect of not reading it any time soon. Or, said another way, I can buy a book without feeling the least bit compelled to read it promptly.

Most Likely to Succeed

He said he wanted to be remembered "as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process."

Officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications.

I enjoy people most when I'm away from them.

From the archive:

In the 21st century, we "shy away from death," and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one.

Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

While the world has focused on the rampant piracy problem afflicting the Gulf of Aden, which saw yet another tanker held for ransom last week, the seizing of ships is only a symptom of a much more terrifying malaise.

I knew that it was getting fairly risky driving in deer country in Arkansas, but I was stunned to learn that Arkansans have a one in 108 chance of hitting a deer. That’s mind-boggling. We live in Heber Springs and Arkansas 25 to Batesville is like running a gantlet. There’s a dead deer about every 200 feet and the road is littered with truck bumpers. Can you tell me what’s going on?

Many have spoken out against the idea of teaching patois in schools. Many believe that if patois is taught it will be at the detriment to English. Why do so many have this "either-or mentality"?

“Now, more than ever, depression is running rampant and one of the best cures is to help someone who’s worse off than yourself.”

As the music industry has been beset by piracy, and the price of DVDs has dwindled, the gaming market will grow by 42 per cent this year.

"This is a different ball game we're in; this is moving into a lack-of-confidence game."

Gasoline prices seem safely tamped down.

The key is firmly pressing the pickles down into the jar and not just sticking them on top, Mrs. Pemberton said.

Scott Westerfeld looks into a future where hormonal balancers tamp down teen romances and “bioframes” obviate sleep and dreams.

(For lesbians, the issue is less about fear of damaging their partners' egos than about women's capacity for verbal intimacy and emotional relatedness, which may obviate a lesbian couple's need for sex to achieve closeness.)

Those who have indulged know these can be very messy fruits to open.

Mr. Gibbs said one of the main challenges for Mr. Obama was tamping down expectations a bit without making anyone think he was moving away from the promises of his campaign.

Obama also said "we should make sure that those immigrants have the opportunity to learn English, because we are part of a common culture with a common language, but you know what? We should also be teaching our children some Spanish and some Mandarin and some Patois."

Indeed, the patois of PowerPoint often threatens to disrupt the enjoyment of Mr. Gladwell’s newest treatise.

Virgil is, without a doubt, a hacker rock star.

Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to “make the Internet a better and more interesting place.” The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes.

From the archive:

"I never thought I'd see the day when a laptop was better at picking up girls than a Ferrari. That's it, I'm ditching Windows."

Virgil Griffith, Internet Man of Mystery