Lisbet Rausing:

It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good.

In today's era of electronic abundance, how can libraries archive the dreams and experiences of humankind? What do we discard?

David Lynch:

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

Rivka Galchen:

I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Rausing:

We have belatedly realized that humankind understands only poorly what will last through the ages.

You see the problem. What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered?

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Alberto Manguel:

For the last seven years, I've lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

Brad Lemley:

It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do -- run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Stewart Brand:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed?

Toward a New Alexandria

The pope, meanwhile, continues to be under fire for a 2001 Vatican letter he sent to all bishops advising them that all cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his then-office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret.

The Associated Press: Pope under fire for transfer, letter on sex abuse

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Worker ID Card at Center of Immigration Plan - WSJ.com

There is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d'Ivoire. Young boys whose ages range from 12 to 16 have been sold into slave labor and are forced to work in cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse.

They buy children to make your candy bars. Crack that whip! Oompa loompa and so forth.

Chocolate Slavery on the Behance Network

"Robots that are programmed properly are less likely to make errors and kill non-combatants, innocent people, because they're not emotional, they won't be afraid, act irresponsibly in some situations," says Robert Finkelstein.

Famous last words.

BBC News - Can battlefield robots take the place of soldiers?

Police forces all over the UK will soon be able to draw on unmanned aircraft from a national fleet, according to Home Office plans. Last month it was revealed that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers, and will be in place in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Future police: Meet the UK's armed robot drones

Now Americans — and increasingly gay American couples — are follwing American corporations into the world of oursourcing.

The practice of hiring a woman in India, or some other remote location, to be implanted with an embryo and bear a child is termed pregnancy outsourcing and, less charitably, as "rent-a-womb."

Gay Adoption | Indian Outsourcing

That Philip plans to revolutionize AI technology -- in effect, achieving singularity in a virtual world -- isn't that surprising, because he said as much when I talked with him for The Making of Second Life:

"It'll be possible for constructs that we build in Second Life and things like it in a simulated space to actually think," he told me in 2007. "It's only a decade away, the simulation engines." I just didn't imagine he'd essentially take the helm on that project himself.nullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnull

New World Notes: Philip Rosedale Attempting to Create Sentient Artificial Intelligence That Thinks and Dreams in Second Life!

The good news is, we can now control a pinball machine's flippers with our brains, as this demo at Germany's ceBIT Technology Fair proves. The bad news is, it's not going to make aspiring pinball hustlers look cool in bars.nullnull

Looks like fun.

Is There Some Way To Be A Telekinetic Pinball Wizard Without Looking Demented? - Brain-computer interfaces - io9

Alain de Botton:

Being good has come to feel dishonest. The nun, the parish priest, the self-sacrificing politician; we have been trained to sense fouler impulses behind their gentle deeds.

An exchange:

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Alain de Botton:

In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society.

One wonders whether the idea of freedom still always deserves the deference we are prepared to grant it; whether the word might not in truth be a historical anomaly which we should learn to nuance and adapt to our own circumstances. We might ask whether for developed societies, a lack of freedom remains the principal problem of communal life. In the chaos of the liberal free-market, we tend to lack not so much freedom, as the chance to use it well.

Freedom worthy of its illustrious associations should not mean being left alone to destroy ourselves. It should be compatible with being admonished, guided and even on rare occasions restricted -- and so helped to become who we hope to be.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

The Limits of Freedom