May 2013
1 post
Conscious Computing: The Slow Web
If there’s a single moment that symbolises the beginning of conscious computing, it probably happened in 2007, when Linda Stone, a Silicon Valley executive with 16 years’ experience at Microsoft and Apple, followed her doctor’s advice to take a course in Buteyko breathing, a Russian technique used to treat asthma and stress. The day afterwards, sitting down at her computer to...
March 2013
4 posts
4 types of attention
There are several types of attention that people use during everyday activities, such as when driving or cooking or in a classroom setting. Selective attention is one of the types of attention that requires a person to focus on one activity in the midst of many activities. Sustained attention is used when a person needs to focus on one event for a longer period of time. The other types of...
The Fine Art Of Paying Attention.
It’s a cycle as old as time. (Or, at least, as old as the game.) Content comes out. It’s difficult at first. Then it gets manageable. And then it’s … not so bad. Then it’s easy. Then it becomes so mindnumbingly repetitive and boring that it feels like dental surgery.
…
I find it helps to have backup entertainment in these situations. These days, I pay...
January 2013
4 posts
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
November 2012
6 posts
4 tags
4 tags
4 tags
3 tags
4 tags
5 tags
October 2012
6 posts
4 tags
6 tags
4 tags
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
“If what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of not being, we...”
– - Arthur Schopenhauer: On Death and Its Relationship to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature: The World As Will And Idea
September 2012
6 posts
4 tags
Desire and Alienation.
DG: .. perhaps what’s new with modernity is that people feel they shouldn’t be alienated. Colin Campbell wrote a book called The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism [1987], in which he argued that modernity has introduced a genuinely new form of hedonism. Hedonism is no longer just getting the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll or whatever but it’s become a...
3 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew...”
– - Donald Miller. via whiskey river
3 tags
3 tags
August 2012
2 posts
4 tags
“And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your...”
– via New Yorker: Keith Ridgway : Everything Is Fiction.
4 tags
July 2012
1 post
1 tag
June 2012
3 posts
4 tags
3 tags
“The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a...”
– via David Graeber: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
3 tags
May 2012
2 posts
2 tags
4 tags
April 2012
3 posts
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
March 2012
11 posts
3 tags
2 tags
4 tags
5 tags
6 tags
Jacob Bronowski and life as an improbable...
In 1973, thanks to a 13-part television series on BBC2, he had become one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, and by the late summer of 1974 he was dead.
Ultimately, his journey leads him “through the gateway of the atom … in a world which our senses cannot experience. There is a new architecture here, a way that things are put together which we cannot know: we only...
4 tags
2 tags
5 tags
5 tags
“The critic Frank Kermode has argued, persuasively, I believe, that one of...”
– - John Banville
via Beauty, Charm, and Strangeness: Science as Metaphor
3 tags
Health and self-tracking devices.
When Henry Ford first created the Model T, it didn’t have a dash-board. Early drivers had no idea how fast they were going or how much gas was in the tank. We’ve been functioning in much of the same way when it comes to monitoring our health. Aside from the occasional visit to the doctor, we’ve had little way of really knowing what was going on underneath our hood. But now technologists see ...
4 tags
February 2012
10 posts
4 tags
Lewis Thomas on the etymology of "love" and...
Sanskrit dictionaries list several words for loving, arranged in order of both intensity and degree of attachment. Snehah meant fondness, anurahah implied devotion, while manmathah was reserved for passionate and presumably sexual commitment. Priyate simply meant to love someone, and priya was the word for dearest, beloved. The words are etymologically distinct from one another, but linked...
