Bryan's collection of quotes
My old quotes.txt has vanished for a while, so I'm using this as a temporary fix, but importing everything is proving to be a lengthy task. The order of the quotes in this file don't mean anything at all, certainly not chronological order of when they were said, and certainly not chronological order of when I found them, indeed sourcing them is almost a pointless effort less Ted Nelson decides to spring out of the darkness and bring forth Project Xanadu. But if you ask me for it, I can recall the source. Note: stopped @ 2006-07-20 in log-reviewing. 2008-04-29, starting with 2006-07*
An old collection of quotes I had going:
Quote collection
- started 2007-11-29
Not till we are lost ... do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. - Henry David Thoreau
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. - John Muir
What binds us to space-time is our rest mass, which prevents us from flying at the speed of light, when time stops and space loses meaning. In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live "nowhere" and "nowhen"; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things. - Yuri Manin
Watch your thoughts; They become words.
Watch your words; They become actions.
Watch your actions; They become habits.
Watch your habits; They become character.
Watch your character; It becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw
"Whatever you do, don't think of yourself as an organic pain collector racing towards oblivion."
"As I move, so I move the universe." - Danlo wi Soli Ringess
"I must move. Yes, I will. Movement is the secret. As I move, so I move the universe." - Danlo
2007-12-09:
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth. - Jean-Paul Sartre
2008-04-29: Found via a Slashdot article re: usability testing on Ubuntu in comment #23223004 by ShieldW0lf: "The price of ignorance is subject to inflation."
"""
MOTTI: Any attack made by the people against scarcity would be a
useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained. This
patent troll is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use
it!
VADER: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed.
The ability to copyright is insignificant next to the power of viral source.
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and
personal computers going to be against Copyright?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a
shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
,,,
Commander #1: We've analyzed their approach vectors, sir, and there is a
danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you
overestimate their chances.
"""
-- Paul Fernhout, 2008-04
On Old Earth, the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created the Earth and the heavens in six days and who called forth the birds and the beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is, life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps unknowable; the ultimate mystery remains.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame
There is infinite hope, but not for man.
- Frank Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist
Strange, though alas! are the Streets of the City of Pain...
- Rainer Maria Wilkie, Holocaust Century Scryer
The goal of my theory is to establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods…The present state of affairs where we run up against the paradoxes is intolerable. Just think, the definitions and deductive methods which everyone learns, teaches and uses in mathematics, lead to absurdities! If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?
- David Hilbert, Machine Century Cantor, from "On the Infinite"
In the beginning, of course, there was God. And from God arose the Elder Ieldra, beings of pure light who were like God except that there was a time before their existence, and a time would come when they would exist no more. And from the Elder Ieldra arose the Ieldra, who were like the elder race except they had substance and flesh. The Ieldra seeded the galaxy, and perhaps many galaxies, with their DNA. On Old Earth, from this godseed evolved the primitive algae and bacteria, the plankton, slime molds, worms, fishes, and so on until ape-Man stood away from the trees of the mother continent.
And ape-Man gave birth to cave-Men, who were like Men except that they did not have the power to end their own existence. And from cave-Men at last arose Man, and Man, who was at once clever and stupid took to bed four wives: The Bomb; The Computer; The Test Tube; and Woman.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
- Lyall Watson, Holocaust Century Eschatologist
For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.
- Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist
I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the path of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!
- Emil Sinclair, Holocaust Century Eschatologist
And so Man dropped his seed into the Test Tube, and from the artificial wombs came many races of men, and races that were men no longer: the Elidi grew wings and the Agathanians carked their bodies into the shape of seals and dove beneath the waters of their planet; the Hoshi learned the difficult art of breathing methane while the Alaloi rediscovered arts ancient and ageless. On the Civilized Worlds there were many who sought to improve their racial inheritance in some small way. The exemplars of Bodhi Luz, for example, desired children of greater stature and so, inch by inch, generation by generation, they bred human beings ten feet tall. Chaos reined as human beings from different planets found that they were unable to mate and bear children in the natural manner. Thus Man formulated the third and greatest of his laws, which came to be called the Law of the Civilized Worlds: A man may do with his flesh as he pleases but his DNA belongs to his species.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
From Man and the Bomb were born the Hibakusha, the worlds of Gaiea, Terror, Death, and the First Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that man was forbidden to explode hydrogen into light. And the Hibakusha fled and took to bed Law, and so were born the Aphasics, the Friends of God, the Astriers, Autists, Maggids and Arhats of Newvania. And Terror wed Death, and so were born the Vild and the great Nothingness beyond. And Terror wed Law as well and begat the Hive Peoples, who valued life less than Order, and so they surrendered their Free Will to the lesser god of Order. Of the Hive Peoples we know almost nothing.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
Man cannot bear too little reality.
- saying of the cetics
Live? Our servants can do that for us.
- from Axel, by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Machine Century Fabulist
What an extraordinary thing, that the ripples in the spacetime continuum should ripple in such a way that the ripples could control their own rippling! That energy captured and bound should lead to greater concentrations of energy instead of gradually bleeding away into the heat death and universal calm! How mysterious that consciousness should lead to greater consciousness and life beget life greater and more complex!
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
If we become too many, we will kill all the mammoth and have to hunt silk belly and shagshay for food. And when they are gone, we will have to cut holes in the ice of the sea so to spear the seals when they come up to breathe. When the seals are gone, we will be forced to murder Kikilia, the whale, who is wiser than we and as strong as God. When all the animals are gone, we will dig tangleroot and eat the larvae of furflies and break our teeth gnawing the lichen from the rocks. At last we will be so many, we will murder the forests to plant snow apple so that men will come to lust for land, and some men will come to have more land than others. And when there is no land left, the stronger men will get their sustenance from the labor of weaker men, who will have to sell their women and children so that they might have mash to eat. The strongest men will make war on each other so that they might have still more land. Thus we will become hunters of men and be doomed to hell in living and hell on the other side. And then, as it did on Earth before the time of the Swarming, fire will rain from the sky and the Devaki will be no more.
- from the Life of Lokni the Unlucky, as told by Yuri the Wise
Preserve art above artifact; preserve memory above all.
- saying of the remembrancers
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favors nor your hate.
- from Macbeth, by the Shakespeare, Century of Exploration Fabulist
I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea’s kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that delight in searching which drives the sails toward the undiscovered is in me; if a seafarer’s delight is in my delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you O eternity.
For I love you O eternity!
- fifth death meditation of the warrior-poets
Much of death depends on state of mind.
- Maurice Gabriel-Thomas, Swarming Centuries Programmer
The brain is not a computer; the brain is the brain.
- saying of the akashics
What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem?
- saying of the warrior-poets
If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances and the bird-wisdom of my freedom came - but bird-wisdom speaks thus: "Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words heavy and made to die? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you O eternity.
For I love you O eternity!
- seventh death meditation of the warrior-poets
The first and hardest teaching of our profession always must be to view the world as through the eyes of a child.
- Marinar Adam, Twelfth Lord Cetic
We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.
- saying of the cetics
To be fully alive is to be fully aware.
To be fully aware is to be full of fear.
To fear is to die.
- saying of the warrior poets
The good Kristian should be aware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The dangers already exist that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bounds of hell.
- Saint Augustine of Hippo
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns
measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult heard from far
Ancestral voices prophecying war!
- from "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Koleridge, Century of Revolution Scryer
God created the integers, and all the rest is the work of man.
- Leopold Kronecker, Machine Century Constructivist
The knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.
- The Plato
Mathematics is a game. Its pieces are the axioms we create, and its rules are logic. That mathematics is occasionally useful to mechanics and pilots is accidental.
- Mahavira Lal, third Lord Cantor
I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton, first Lord Mechanic
When Man took to his bed the Computer, there was great rejoicing, and great fear, too, for their children were almost like gods. The mainbrains bestrode the galaxy at will, and changed its very face. The Silicon God, the Solid State Entity, Al Squared, Enth Generation - their names are many. And there were the Carked and the Symbionts, whose daughters were the Neurosingers, Warrior-Poets, the Neurologicians and the Pilots of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians. So beautiful were these daughters that man longed to touch them, but touch them he could not. And so was born the Second Law of the Civilized Worlds, which was that Man could not stare too long at the faces of the Computer or her children, and still remain as Man.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
It may be fairly asked why animals, who live by talon and beak and their most immediate and savage impulses, do not devour each other down to the last writhing worm? And why to the gods not shatter worlds when they tremble with godly wrath? Why is man uniquely cursed with war? The answer to this question is both historic and evolutionary: We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.
- from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
- Christopher Marlowe, Sailing Century Poet
When the Fravashi first became a people, the Dark God
came down from the stars and spoke to the First Least Father of the Adamant
Mindsinger Clan. "First Least Father," he said, "if I promise
to tell you the secret of the universe at the end of ten million years,
will you agree to listen to my song?"
The First Least Father was thirsty for new
music, so he told him, "Fill my windpipes; sing me your song."
So the Dark God sang his song, and ten million
years passed while the Adamant Mindsinger Clan warred against the Faithful
Thoughtplayer Clan and the other Clans, and in all this time on all of
Fravashing there was only this single, dreadful song.
When the Dark God returned, he told the First
Least Father the secret of the universe. "I don’t understand,"
the First Least Father said at last.
Whereupon the Dark God laughed at him and
said, "How did you expect to understand? Your brain hasn’t changed
at all in ten million years."
The First Least Father contemplated these
words and sang out, "My God! I didn’t think about that when we made
the bargain!"
- Fravashi parable
A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.
To talk about the world being made by God tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present Now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and near to God as this very instant.
~ Johannes Eckehart, Mongol Century Horologe
"She has been blinded by the slel nekers of memory, he thought, and with this turn of his mind, he began to rage against a universe that could engineer such a tragedy."
"All of history is the flight from death, and none flee more quickly than the gods ... inside all of the gods is the burning for the infinite, for the moment of creation where death and life are one. This is the pain of the gods. This is their eternal longing and torment. It is the burning awareness of life that grows and grows, without limit, on and on without end."
"I am not I. I am the one who sees myself, who sees that he sees."
"But in another and deeper way, it was only by being alone that he could search out his true connection with the other living things of the world. He remembered a line from a poem: Only when I am alone am I not alone. "
"But for a man, that glorious and doomed being halfway between ape and god, it was always too possible to fall out of love. Always, for all m
en and women across all the worlds of the galaxy's many stars, there was the danger of living along the knifeblade edge between a craven terror of nature and the urge to isolate onese
lf from the world, ultimately to dominate and destroy it. Along this fine and terrible edge was the wildness of the soul, its nobility and passion, neither cowering nor controlling bu
t simply living, bravely, freely, like a sparrowhawk racing along the wind. This was the challenge of the wild. But few human beings have ever dared to live this way. For it is only i
n accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated – but nev
er looked upon clearly face to face."
"As Danlo watched the light radiating out from the flame of the candles, he remembered a saying that he had once been taught: The surfaces ou
tside glitter with intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with the unintelligible truths. He rubbed the salt water from his burning eyes, and he marvelled that the search for the
truth could leave him so empty and saddened and utterly alone."
"Self-creation is the highest art." -- David Zindell
"It was her natural tendency to abandon any activity precisely at the moment when she began to feel tired or bored. Her meditation masters, appreciating her almost bodily hunger for excitement and ecstasy, had warned her that she possessed something of a 'monkey mind', a talent for leaping agilely from one branch of experience to another – but never holding any one experience very tightly or very long. They meant this as no insult, but rather an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of her wonderful vitality. Their criticisms, however, had devastated Tamara. From the very beginning of her novitiate as a courtesan, when she was a shy and nervous girl only twelve years old, she had vowed to overcome the flightiness of her mind. She found within herself immense desires for love and ever more life, and yet she found as well an immense will to control those very desires. All through her novice years and even into her time as a voluptuary, with a ferocious discipline that impressed the elder sisters of her Society, she cultivated for herself a new mind, a 'dolphin mind' as she called it, a way of diving deeply beneath the waves of her life's experience in order to drink in the essence of whatever task or pleasure engaged her. Whether dancing or washing dishes or memorizing the formulae for the methyl-tryptamine series of poisons, she learned the art of concentration, the ecstasy of details. She learned to pay attention to things. And most of all, she learned to enter into any new experience with all her natural verve and zest coupled with a marvellously intense awareness of the world. "
"And what he had truly loved about the real Tamara was her otherness, that unknowable essence of her soul that he had sometimes glimpsed but had never quite managed to capture in his memory. Ironically, he had remembered almost everything about her except the only true and important thing, and he realized that he could never quite grasp this mystery any more than he could keep a beautiful bird trapped in his hands without destroying it."
"As Danlo watched the light radiating out from the flame of the candles, he remembered a saying that he had once been taught: The surfaces outside glitter with intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with the unintelligible truths. He rubbed the salt water from his burning eyes, and he marvelled that the search for the truth could leave him so empty and saddened and utterly alone."
"There is no matter without form, and no form not dependent upon matter."
"Before, you are wise; after, you are wise; in between, you are otherwise."
"I would say yes to everything ... if only I could." - Danlo the Wild, re: asarya: "An asarya ... is a person who can look upon all aspects of creation and say \Yes\ no matter how 'painful' the universe may be."
"At other times of the day, we knitted, crocheted, and played simple woodwind instruments en masse. Sometimes we merely gazed about while our teachers spoke. The teachers urged us to imaginatively identify with whatever we studied or saw—to feel the life-force coursing through a tree, or absorb an eagle’s noble spirit, or experience the meaning of a boulder. Information of all kinds was kept from us, not just the ideological sort. The teachers, whose priority was to quietly condition our souls and hearts to receive spiritual influences, those that possessed holy secrets, they had keys to cosmic truth. -- I developed esoteric yearnings—I was eager for revelation—I longed for things transcendent, for supernal beauty and grandeur. The expectation of these blessings grew in me for years and sustained me. But then, gradually, a reaction set in. It became increasingly pronounced as I progressed through high school. I was pained that the world, and I, fell so far short—always, it seemed, so far short. Dreams of the transcendent remained just that—vague, alluring dreams, perpetually out of reach. Longing for the unobtainable is a prescription for frustration, or desperation. I continued to long—perhaps more than ever—" -- Roger Rawlings (more here)
"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Feynman
** Explaining that which you did not build or create, is mostly your [perhaps insightful] imagination at work. - me
"All models, representations, abstractions, ideas, illustrations, contents, organizations, categories, groupings, bookmarks, titles, names, data structures, file formats, files, clocks, technologies, knowledges, measurements, sensualizations, patterns, schemes, schematics, styles, credits, lists, shapes, pictures, symbols, signs, metaphors, examples, distinctions, classes, sets, fictions, drafts, prototypes, paradigms, systems, theories, philosophies, principles, doctrines, teachings, laws, rules, formulas, equations, functions, calculations, encodings, decodings, copies, designs, images, imitations, memories, words, sentences, statements, languages, books, thoughts, and types are wrong, but some are useful as tools."
`Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. ` ` That's hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls "error-embracing." It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors.`
Affirm when possible, contradict seldom, but always distinguish. - from the c2 wiki
"The Internet is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, eight billion pages, 20 exabytes of memory."
"The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned." - Douglas Adams
`That last sentence of course has a tragic ring for us now. It has been our privilege to know a man whose capacity to make the best of a full lifespan was as great as was his charm and his humour and his sheer intelligence. If ever a man understood what a magnificent place the world is, it was Douglas. And if ever a man left it a better place for his existence, it was Douglas. It would have been nice if he'd given us the full 70 or 80 years. But by God we got our moneysworth from the forty nine!`
`The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity are as comic in the world’s silicon valleys as anywhere else.`
"All software is complex. It is perhaps the most complex technology developed by mankind. (Almost) everybody that has walked on a bridge knows how bridges work at some simple level. You can't say the same for a web browser or video game. Completely virtual, arbitrarily defined and so abstract it takes years of study just to understand the basics." - J.D. Powell (Slashdot commenter)
"If life has meaning, how can we know if we're meant to find it?" (solution: meaning with respect to who?)
"No system in the universe is perfectly isolated, since, if it was, it would not be a part of our universe."
`A young Max Planck was to give a lecture on radiant heat. When he arrived he inquired as to the room number for the Planck lecture. He was told, "You are much too young to be attending the lecture of the esteemed professor Planck."`
`Edison's approach to creativity made a philosopher Alfred North Whitehead proclaim in 1926: "The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention, which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization".` (found 2006-02-16)
How much of an improvement in thought processing would there be if a person knew of no language? - me
-- CyberYoda brought this quote up. So I replied to him: there's this growing view in neurosci that 'language' is really just neurotransmitter shuffling and certain circuits that are being activated and so on, so these connections are reprogramming themselves, and language is a way of sharing this information on reprogramming yourself.
-- How well can you program without knowing any programming languages? - CyberYoda
`In essence, I should say that the problem with consilience is that our experience is not reducible.`
`We tend to be impressed with matter as representing the ultimate corporeal reality but it is in fact no more real than radiation.`
`But the same noisy environmental buzz of activity that communicators must package their messages to survive in itself contains information crucial to individuals -- information that is not in message form. These include potential threats or opportunities. Individuals clearly develop mechanisms by which they devote attention to certain stimuli, while ignoring others, in the flood of information that they receive from their senses. As Itti and Baldi write, "efficient and rapid attentional allocation is key to predation, escape, and mating -- in short, to survival." `
"Data that does not change your beliefs is not surprising," says Itti (& Baldi?)
Memes compete for dendritic space. - me (reinterpreting (on 2008-04-28) some thoughts recorded on 2006-03-16; re: recent Markram electromagnetic dendritic object vid)
-- how could this be true if there are 100 billion neurons and trillions of synapses? Where's the competition? Immediacy? Cache-space?
`Thank God we have Intellectual Property laws to stifle the advancements of the arts and delay the end of human improvement as long as possible.`
`As one of my college instructor told me, the next the big thing has already been around for at least ten years before anyone bother to take notice. The Internet been around since the 1970s but no one noticed until the web browser and general access became available in 1995. The concepts for a lot of late 20th century technology (i.e., TV, radio, radar and microwave ovens) that we take for granted today was developed in the 1900s through 1940s. The next big thing may already exist right now, we just don't know about it until it appears on Slashdot. ;)`
`The 'slow' rate of growth is entirely expected. The telephone system grew rapidly in the 30s through the 60s then 'growth' hit a wall and the increase in the number of subscribers was almost entirely due to old non subscribers passing away and a near 100% uptake rate amongst people in their 20s.`
`Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.` - Collary to Clarke's Law
The fundamental contradiction rests in two simple statements. An ant is inherently stupid. Ants are smart. - me 2008-04-28 reinterpreting 2006-03-20
`Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny.` (be careful here)
`Mind is not a thing. It's a process. There's no(thing) the matter with mind.`
-- even Markram would agree.
`"Each of us is infected with a huge array of viruses. The human genome,
considered as a mass, contains more retrovirus sequences than actual genes."
"The general public thinks genetic diversity is us and birds and plants
and animals and that viruses are just HIV and the flu. But most of the
genetic material on this planet is viruses. No question about it. They
and their ability to interact with organisms and move genetic material
around are the major players in driving speciation, in determining how
organisms even become what they are."
"We have been looking for our designer in all the wrong places. It
seems we owe our existence to viruses, the least of semiliving forms,
and about the only thing they have in common with any sort of
theological prime mover is their omnipresence and invisibility."
-- small units of (genetic) aggregation (viruses as RSS)
`Description is a dialogue, communication, and this communication is subject to constraints that demonstrate that we are macroscopic beings embedded in the physical world.`
"The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new." - Illya Prigogine
`"But consider, friend, that the bacteria in your swollen and suppurating arm are prodiguously complicated creatures, assembling themselves from that continual and far-from-equilibrium flow of energy and material which you are; that the leveling of this great city provides a splendid opportunity for urban morphogenesis; that the death of the innocents was not the outcome of blind deterministic laws, an always-fated condition of being, but open and stochastic, a moment of pure becoming; that the earthquake itself was a fluctuation in an open system, a strongly non-linear phenomenon leading to a more stable geophysical state; in short all this devastation you see around you is manifestation of the reality of time, of lived experience, of our own integration into the universe."`
`In addition to mathematics, Chandrasekhar, as a youth, also mastered German, devoured everything from Shakespeare to Hardy, and could read up to 100 pages in an hour "quite easily".`
` One goal of a well-developed life according to Jung is learning to transcend the inherent conflicts between past and present by building a bridge that could reach higher levels of understanding that could embrace both from a new point of view. Living art, language, science, humanities and religion as well as love and personal relationships are continually engaged in reorganization and creative synthesis. Dead languages, concepts or relationships, by contrast, are mired in a static state of equilibrium where nothing new ever seems to happen.`
`I suspect, instead, that the universe has a finite information density. I also suspect that there's no way to prove either that or the contrary. So, on second thought, forget it.` - Marvin Minsky
-- indeed, if the universe is undergoing exponential inflation then you can't really tell in that sense as long as you are an observer within that system, yes?
`Artists: They work obliviously to reprocess the information deposited within themselves and present it in new form to society as "works": they publish them. They emerge from themselves and enter the "work."`
`As process ontologists see it, enduring things are never more than patterns of stability in a sea of process. Like a wave pattern in water they are simply pending configurations in a realm of change.`
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Only say things that can be heard.
`Design is the process of resolving conflicting constraints.`
`Make himself look more competent by not arguing with the other, but developing the other's idea further.`
` Spew pages and pages of whatever is on your mind. Throw the pages on the floor. Scrabble desperately around trying to figure out what they are all about (this results in throwing at least half the pages away). Now you have an outline with a bunch of holes. Fill in the holes and you have a book.`
`The classroom dissection of the earthworm and other animals has become controversial in recent years. One response to this has been the development of online "virtual dissections".`
-- how terrible it must be to be sickened by reality. :-( (this is, of course, ignoring the aspect re: animals)
`Economists are trained to believe that "money" is to the economy what "energy" is to the physical world. This leads them to believe that whatever is "economically" possible is "physically" possible too. What economists fail to realize is that the economy is a subsystem of the physical system, and thus constrained [and empowered] by universal physical laws that they have not studied.`
`Once the economist's neurons and dendrites are fully programmed (usually for life), economists serve as robotic broadcasting devices explicitly designed to hide the political nature of the economy from the public. In other words, the economist serves no function in society except to protect the ruling elites from public scrutiny while they loot the planet.` (I cite this somewhat jokingly :-))
`Available energy is the precondition for all resources -- including more available energy.`
"Completion is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine."
`If you're really bold, you could even come up with a new way of looking at the universe, where existence lies on a foundation of information [subjectivity!], instead of matter and energy.`
`Put it together, and it's almost a parable for twentieth-century science: the more you know, the less certain you are. As information increases, the universe slips away from our capacity to understand it. By combining Shannon's and Boltzmann's concepts of entropy, you can calculate that there is a certain defined amount of energy that you must use to transmit one bit of information. There is no free lunch when you transmit information. You have to spend energy to do it; in fact, when you get information about a physical system, you increase its physical entropy at the same time (just as Heisenberg said: by observing a system, you change it). For those of us in this universe, this means that there are ultimate limits on communication. There is only so much information that you can transmit in a certain period of time, or over a certain astronomical distance. More profoundly, to quote John R. Pierce: "the energy needed to transmit info about the state of a physical system keeps us from ever knowing about the past in complete detail". Information theory suggests pretty strongly that stories of time-travel and alternate worlds will remain science fiction for a long time to come--possibly forever.`
-- indeed, perhaps this is why spike signals in the brain are more like RSS/aggregation rather than actual perceptions
`Jeremy Bernstein notes that Einstein admitted no knowledge of the Michelson-Morely experiment, yet Bernstein assures us Einstein formulated the equation e=mc^2. First of all, to arrive at this equation, one must, as Friedrich pointed out, invoke the pythagorean theorem. The Michelson-Morley experiment irrevocably involves this theorem. Indeed, the very ingenuity of the Michelson-Morley experiment consisted in the deliberate constructin of a triangle of light rays so as to make their test amenable to the pythagorean theorem so that the ether would be a "testable" phenomena. Contrast this with Newton's alchemical reverance for the pythagorean theorem. Newton, had mystical reverance for this great theorem which is why he stumbled on the same insight. In both cases, the result is e=mc^2. Poincare recognized this early on, as did the Irishman Joseph Larmar and Fitsgerald. It is for this reason, Edmund Whittaker, one of the first historians on the scene to understand the implications of the new scientific theory, didn't identify Einstein as the author.`
-- re: mathematical basis of reality (Tegmark and friends)
`The digits of pi, the keystrokes made by a room full of monkeys, the galaxies, stars, grains of sand, atoms are all countable. Each could be given a number.`
`And just as it takes an increase in entropy to drive a heat engine (2nd law of thermo), it also takes an increase in data entropy to get compression.`
-- s/compression/aggregation/ or (more daringly) s/compression/communication/ ?
`I feel sorry for the people, among my generation, who dont backup anything they make on a computer... because I know they dont produce anything on paper... A generation with no past is bad news.`
-- or is it?
`"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon; Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)`
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes ... attention." -- Herbert Simon
`So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.`
-- but this is just the swim/dive problem (re: Jef) that I reinterpreted 2008; the quote is from 2006-04-09. An interesting consideration: an exponential boom in attention production.
` Most discussions I’ve had lately are about this lack of attention. It’s getting to the point where people are going on “content diets” to
lose the drinking-from-a-firehose feeling, just like they go on food diets to lose weight. ` http://bokardo.com/archives/helpmy-attention-is-dead/ `We have been trying to tackle this problem as well - we have resorted to building a ‘heads-up-display’ so that we can track headlines WHILE we work instead of having to bury our head in a feed reader.`
`That there can be no decrease in the amount of energy, Leibniz took as implying that the universe as a whole must be a 'perpetual motion'. Although he strenuously denied that there could be perpetual motion machines within the universe, he suggested perpetual motion of the universe as a whole.`
`Boineburg was an avid letter-writer, nd he helped Leibniz to build up his own circle of correspondents by putting him in touch with intellectuals from all over Europe. Within a few years, Leibniz was in correspondence with literally hundreds of people at a time on almost every subject under the sun – science, mathematics, law, politics, religion, philosophy, literature, history, linguistics, numismatics, anthropology. He was obsessive about preserving his letters, and over 15,000 still survive. It is on these, and on a comparable mass of private notes and drafts, that we rely for most of our knowledge of his work, especially in the areas of philosophy, logic and mathematics.` src
`It may be helpful to think of ADHD in terms of a "poor regulation of attention." Unless a task is really exciting or new, children with ADHD are often not able to produce enough "attention" to engage in a task.` -- but in updated terms, think of it in terms of intense world syndrome -- switching attention between different things rapidly is the solution to 'information overload' and not knowing what to process.
`“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.”`
"ADHD hyperfocus. I think of it more as intention, self activated." `ADHD is the result of underfocusing of the frontal lobes, ritalin adds more juice to kick them into gear, the opposite of anticonvulsants.`
`The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not merely exist, but becomes.`
`Out in the wider world, though, there's a rebellion brewing precisely as a result of the sort of wild pronouncements about technology you see more and more often in press releases from places like MIT and Berkeley. There has long been a sense of economic injustice, but there's a brewing sense of spiritual injustice. There's this sense that it's one thing if rich people in America drive fancy cars and have lower infant mortality, but this notion that some elite somewhere is defining the soul or making the soul into an obsolete idea or is going to transform what it means to be human or is going to be first in line for immortality -- that idea strikes so deep it creates a sense of panic. And I believe this is the explanation for one of the weird features of our time, that every major religion has a terribly violent fundamentalist wing at the same time. ....`
`But I reached a point where I saw that one's assumptions largely shape the conclusions that one draws, and that reality is so richly complex that it can simultaneously sustain and reinforce all manner of contradictory viewpoints.` -- perhaps attention to detail is the solution.
"Obstacles are endless, I vow to cut them down."
`The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.`
`We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way before I began to study syst
ems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay c
lose attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government,
to getting along with people. But there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our abilit
y to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.`
`As we talked about the biological effects of life on a planetary scale we made each other aware of the fact that all live beings pr
oduce and remove gas. All life requires the production of some gases and the removal of others (for instance, plants release oxygen and carbon dioxide to the air; animals and plants r
emove oxygen from the air). Microbes produce and remove a great range of other gases as well. Yes, we concluded with enthusiasm, the atmosphere is the circulatory system of the biosp
here.`
`Looking back, counting the dead, enumerating the losses as well as the very real gains of the eighties and nineties, it all boils down to a rather simple dictum: "If you're not working on your self, you can be sure the world is eroding it."`
"Technology is [erroneously] treated as something that pushes us around rather than something we create." - Stewart Brand
`Already the following views are widespread: thinking is a type of computation, DNA is software, evolution is an algorithmic process. If we keep going we will quietly arrive at the notion that all materials and all processes are actually forms of computation. Our final destination is a view that the atoms of universe are fundamentally intangible bits. As the legendary physicist John Wheeler sums up the idea: "Its are bits."` (see also the Center for Bits and Atoms and "it from bit and bit from it").
`In the effort to create mathematical theories of how matter works at levels way below subatomic particles, and in the effort to actually build computers that operate in this realm, some scientists have found that using the language of bits best explains the behavior of matter. Their conclusion: Its are bits. Young Einsteins such as mathematician/theoretical physicist David Deutsch are now in the very beginnings of a long process of redescribing all of physics in terms of computer theory. Should they succeed, we would see the material universe and all that it holds as a form of computation.`
-- an ecology of computation, an ecology of process
`The grand physical description of life on a global scale is "energy flows and matter cycles."`
`Life furnished both: The atmosphere became saturated with oxygen, and plants encrusted the land. What photosynthesis put together, combustion pulled apart. The "slow combustion" of respiration acquired a more vigorous twin with the "fast combustion" we call fire. Beginning with the Devonian, fossil charcoal began to litter the sedimentary record.`
`The lesson here is that with an infinite number of pitch points on the musical continuum, relationships between intervals sensible to the composer are eminently transferable to the audience. Everything is intervals, after all; matter is intervalic on the sub-atomic scale. There is space between all things, and that is what creates meaning.`
`My father had been preparing himself for this catastrophe all his life. This was his instinct as an engineer and World War II survivor. He had supplies of all sorts of tinned food and tools. Unfortunately, he couldn't prepare himself for his loss of a male traditional role. With my mother sick, he had to cook and wash all the dishes. He did this under her severe control. As the state TV building exploded in flames, littering their street with corpses, my mother screamed at him because he'd dropped a pan.`
`But even the workaday tools reviewed in this issue can alter our perspective. A tool—any tool—is possibility at one end and a handle at the other. Because tools open up options, they remake us. A really fantastic atlas of the world is literally a new world. A whisper-quiet ultra-efficient electricity generator and a wireless Internet let us see ourselves as more nomadic than perhaps we have seen ourselves lately. There are many ways to change the world, but I think the most direct way, the way being pioneered by artists, hackers, and scientists—third-culture citizens—is to adopt new tools.`
`They just have to bring themselves to believe what they know.`
"What is it about Information wants to be free that you poor clowns don't understand?"
`Fire's scarier than water. It self-generates, self-perpetuates, tends toward the excessive. The heat of fire dries out nearby fuels, igniting them, creating even more fire. Fire's qualities are transportable; they can be reproduced from carried embers like a seed. Water cannot be seeded—carrying around a cup of water does not generate more rain. Fire, unlike water, changes into a new state that cannot be reversed. Ice can become liquid can become mist can become sleet and back again. We recognize it. But fire disappears into an invisible web of moving heat, mysteriously nurturing some new event, not easily traceable. Water stays close. Fire as heat is boundless, escaping beyond the biosphere.` .. and star system.
`Don't maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. As Kenneth Boulding once said, don't go to great trouble to optimize
something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as [creativity], stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easil
y measured or not.`
`It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if yo
ur workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the globa
l environment fails.`
`The brain uses loads and loads of energy which is a major challenge for your metabolism - the organ which uses most energy prefers to run on the fuel that can be stored worst.`
`(Indeed, there is an area of biochemistry called "cooperativity theory," which is focussed on the study of the many kinds of synergistic phenomena that occur at the biochemical level-- see Hill 1985.)`
"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe."
"The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction." - The Einstein
`Eternity as timelessness, and eternity as everlastingness, has been distinguished.`
"Motion is just a type of change."
`As with size, the notion that matter is made of something quickly leads to an infinite regress. If something is made of other things, what are the other things made of? And so on, ad infinitum. We are left with no choice other than to accept the nasty little truth that matter is made of nothing. But how can this be? How can something be made of nothing? What is the logic?`
-- the alternative is process physics
`an interaction is an imbalance, i.e., a violation of a conservation principle which must be corrected.`
` Here is another way of looking at it. According to the definition of motion, to move from one position to another takes a certain time interval. Time is an evolution parameter that is used in physics to denote change, regardless of the type or rate of change. Therefore, to change position in time would require a meta-time, i.e., a second time dimension orthogonal to the first. This meta-time would itself require a meta-meta-time and so forth. Before we have time (pun intended) to realize it, we find ourselves mired in an infinite regress dilemma.`
`What has been has indeed objectively been and is no more. What will be, objectively is not and has not been (and, in fact, is not even fully determined, according to quantum indeterminacy). All physical systems ride the universal wave of becoming. Any awareness (ours or that of other intelligences) of past and future reflects the objective wave of becoming. There is no problem of "the arrow of time." There simply is no arrow of time, as if time could go one "way" rather than another. That metaphor is an unfortunate result of spatializing time. The picture of time as a line along which one might travel in one direction or the other is a conceptual disaster. Time is becoming. Becoming is change. The undoing of a change is also a change. There is no "unbecoming".`
`As in everything else in nature, there is a yin-yang principle that underlies all including the present (I personally prefer to call it the NOW). What Mr. Carlin should have said is that there is only the NOW and that it consists of the immediate past and the immediate future. The latter is continually unfolding into the former. A particle undergoing change has an immediate past state that will no longer be and an immediate future state that is about to become immediate past. In an unchanging particle, its immediate past and future states are equal.`
`So the best conclusion that can be drawn from the true knowledge of principles is the importance of the practice of virtue.` - Leibniz
`If you seek gratification in those pursuits from which virtue turn aside, you do so without excuse` - George Boole
`So am I not the only one who's children have resorted to homeschooling themselves?`
`Men pass away, but their deeds abide.` - Cauchy's last words ?
`Leibniz was clearly not satisfied with Aristotle's system and began to develop his own ideas on how to improve on it. In later life Leibniz recalled that at this time he was trying to find orderings on logical truths which, although he did not know it at the time, were the ideas behind rigorous mathematical proofs.`
-- not the ideas behind proofs, but I suspect approaches and strategies etc.
`Another of Leibniz's lifelong aims was to collate all human knowledge. Certainly he saw his work on Roman civil law as part of this scheme and as another part of this scheme, Leibniz tried to bring the work of the learned societies together to coordinate research.` `It is no exaggeration to say that Leibniz corresponded with most of the scholars in Europe. He had over 600 correspondents.` [but surely there were more in Europe at the time?] `This pattern of discovery seems to have been charactistic of Leibniz. He was a sponge for knowledge and ideas, and he was tireless in ferreting it out of friends, acquaintences, and strangers alike. He tells us that, once he had gotten all the information he could about Pascal's machine, he set himself the task of making an even better machine.`
`For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.` - Leibniz
`Thus, to be complete, the encyclopedia must record all the procedures of the arts and crafts, and collect even the techniques of craftsmen, which can be the origin or occasion of discoveries and inventions of great scientific interest.181 In sum, the encyclopedia must be, in the words of Leibniz, "a true theater of human life drawn from the practice of men."`
`All of this shows that Leibniz was in many respects more modern than the majority of his contemporaries. In any case, we would not have a fair and complete idea of his encyclopedic genius if we did not recognize how he was able to join a curiosity for facts, a critical spirit, and a scrupulous concern for historical truth to his taste for logical rigor and clear ideas. Still, as he himself warned us, "it is not this method of carefully recording facts" that is the principal object of his logic, "but rather the method of guiding reason in order to profit both from the facts given by the senses or the reports of others and from the natural light,"200 and to derive from them general truths.`
`A prominent theme in Leibniz's writings is the importance of the systematic organization of knowledge, gathered from as many fields as possible, as a means to continued intellectual progress. `
`In other words, it must be brought about that every fallacy becomes nothing other than a calculating error, and every sophism expressed in this new type of notation becomes in fact nothing other than a grammatical or linguistic error, easily proved to be such by the very laws of this philosophical grammar.` - Leibniz
-- coming back to Leibniz, and reinterpreting some of his words, it is interesting to see that 'grammar' doesn't mean the same thing as an intensely parsed ruleset by a parser-compiler, but rather general approaches and strategies. Though this may not be the case since he was quite literal about his alphabet of human thought, focusing on physical markings and so on, instead of functional semantics.
`The logician Kurt Gödel, on the other hand, believed that the characteristica universalis was feasible, and that its development would revolutionize mathematical practice.(Dawson 1997) He noticed, however, that a detailed treatment of the characteristica was conspicuously absent from Leibniz's publications. It appears that Gödel assembled all of Leibniz's texts mentioning the characteristica, and convinced himself that some sort of systematic and conspiratorial censoring had taken place, a belief that became obsessional. Gödel apparently had failed to appreciate the magnitude of the task facing the editors of Leibniz's manuscripts, given that Leibniz left about 15000 letters and 40000 other manuscripts. Even now, most of this huge Nachlass remains unpublished.`
`Hence the characteristic, calculus ratiocinator, and encyclopedia form three pillars of Leibniz's Enlightenment project.` `the Enlightenment goal of "reason forming into reality"` ........ basically meme->gene
http://www.kheper.net/index.htm strangely detailed website: `Welcome to the new look Kheper website, over 1500 pages, dedicated to a new scientific and esoteric evolutionary paradigm concerning the nature of existence and its infinite metamorphoses, and the transformation of the Earth and the planetary consciousness to a post-singularity state of Supramental (Infinite Truth-Consciousness) divinisation`
"I guess the true rites of passage in 21st century middle-class suburban society probably don’t involve church rituals as much any more as they do, perhaps, entrusting your son or daughter to pilot a 3,000-pound hunk of steel at high rates of speed around other 3,000-pound hunks of steel also travelling at high rates of speed and also piloted by adolescents."
`The ability to effectively manipulate a complex system is a reasonable indicator of intellegence. I don't think this is so controversial a thing to say. Language is a complex system.`
`Only for the writer, it takes longer for the reader to process the words. So its not quicker, its just putting the burden over to the reader, instead of shouldering it yourself(which one should always do when writing). People should be taking time to write, because if you take time, and write as clearly as possible, others can read what you say without a lot of effort.`
`Philosophy is disciplined bewilderment. `
`According to modern cosmology, the entire universe is an evolutionary system.`
` We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing, logic, actuation, and displays.`
` An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.`
`As Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, we've been pounded into instantly-available pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the whole Gödel-to-Google net. Does the resulting mind (as Richardson would have it) belong to us? Or does it belong to something else?`
-- What is ownership??
`Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.`
`".. and still he dreamed of cyberspace...still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void..."`
`No keyboard, mouse or screen, just neural connections and a many-dimensional space of, at least, information, to explore, organise and communicate at will — perhaps, dare I presumptuously suggest, with occasional help from an editor. I fear it's too much for me to expect, but my grandchildren could love it.`
`There's a cheap debating trick which implies that if, say, science can't explain something, this must mean that some other discipline can.` `But it's not legitimately open to you to substitute a word like soul, or spirit, as if that constituted an explanation. It is not an explanation, it's an evasion. It's just a name for that which we don't understand. The scientist may agree to use the word soul for that which we don't understand, but the scientist adds, "But we're working on it, and one day we hope we shall explain it." The dishonest trick is to use a word like soul or spirit as if it constituted an explanation.`
`Here is the distortion. People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish. It's an unholy hybrid of Freud's idea of unconscious motivation and the straightforward modern theory of the natural selection of replicators. Now, I think I'm safe to say that it was not intended by Richard, and it doesn't follow from the logic of the theory.`
`The fact that our ability to recognize an object comes from complicated circuitry of the brain does not mean that there aren't real objects out there. Indeed, the brain evolved in order to give us as accurate a representation as possible of what is objectively out in the world.` But it wasn't the brain that did the evolving.
`Over twenty years, Hamilton convinced more and more biologists that parasites are the key to many outstanding problems left by Darwin, including the baffling riddle of the evolution of sex. The sexual shuffling of the genetic pack is an elaborate trick for outrunning parasites in the endless race through evolutionary time.` `His spin off theory of sexual selection (how Darwin would have relished it!) was that bird of paradise tails and similar male extravaganzas are driven by the evolution of female diagnostic skills: females are like sceptical doctors, actively seeking parasite-free males to supply genes for their shared posterity. Male advertisement is an honest boast of health.`
`Any science in which everyone agrees about everything is dead.`
`Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is something that is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the book of life, including an understanding of all human behavior. Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex. What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life.`
`There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.`
` Back to the physics for a second. One of the most remarkable and startling insights in 20th century thought was Claude Shannon's connection of information and thermodynamics. `
-- And it was John von Neumann who suggested it to Shannon. Heh.
` To tie the circle back to the "Rebooting Civilization" question, what I'm hoping might happen is as we start to gain a better understanding of how enormously difficult, slow, expensive, tedious and rare an event it is to program a very large computer well; as soon as we have a sense and appreciation of that, I think we can overcome the sort of intoxication that overcomes us when we think about Moore's Law, and start to apply computation metaphors more soberly to both natural science and to metaphorical purposes for society and so forth. A well-appreciated computer that included the difficulty of making large software well could serve as a far more beneficial metaphor than the cartoon computer, which is based only on Moore's Law; all you have to do is make it fast and everything will suddenly work, and the computers-will-become-smarter than-us-if-you just-wait-for-20-years sort of metaphor that has been prevalent lately.`
` But we've discovered instead, due to recent observations that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. This means that most of the energy of the universe is neither matter nor radiation. Rather, another form of energy has overtaken the matter and radiation. For lack of a better term, this new energy form is called "dark energy." Dark energy, unlike the matter and radiation that we're familiar with, is gravitationally self-repulsive. That's why it causes the expansion to speed up rather than slow down. In Newton's theory gravity, all mass is gravitationally attractive, but Einstein's theory allows the possibility of forms of energy that are gravitationally self-repulsive.`
` From this combination of passion and inventiveness I began to get a sense that what these students are really doing is reinventing literacy. Literacy in the modern sense emerged in the Renaissance as mastery of the liberal arts. This is liberal in the sense of liberation, not politically liberal. The trivium and the quadrivium represented the available means of expression. Since then we've boiled that down to just reading and writing, but the means have changed quite a bit since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming. I've even been taking my twins, now 6, in to use MIT's workshops; they talk about going to MIT to make things they think of rather than going to a toy store to buy what someone else has designed.`
` The World Bank is trying to close the digital divide by bringing IT to the masses. The message coming back for the fab labs is that rather than IT for the masses the real story is IT development for the masses. Rather than the digital divide, the real story is that there's a fabrication and an instrumentation divide. Computing for the rest of the world only secondarily means browsing the Web; it demands rich means of input and output to interface computing to their worlds.` ` There was an amazing moment as I was talking to these Army generals about how the most profound implication of emerging technology for them might not lie in designing a better weapon to win a war, but rather in giving more people something else to do. So we're now at a cusp where personal fabrication is poised to reinvent literacy in the developed world, and to engage the intellectual capacity of the rest of the world.` - Neil Gershenfeld
` And we cheated. People for years have talked about molecular computing, nanoscale computing, and all of that, without much success. We realized that molecules are already computing. If you look at the atomic nuclei and consider them to be bits, how they tumble is modified by their neighbors. If you do nuclear magnetic resonance, like an MRI scan or what chemists use to study molecular structure, you are actually doing logic on the nuclei, although it wasn't labeled as such. We realized that instead of heroically building a special-purpose quantum computing apparatus, it's possible to be a bit more clever in talking to nature in the language that it uses in order to make it compute.`
` Without being dogmatic about it, what's beginning to happen is that we're realizing that if molecules can compute, if nature computes, you can actually use a computational language to ask nature questions of fundamental theoretical and experimental interest, and it's beginning to invert how we understand our place in the world.`
` Now we're realizing that if the means of assembly themselves are computational, in turn there's a threshold for fabrication, so that if you want to make a perfect macroscopic thing out of imperfect parts, you need to compute within fabrication. It's not like a milling machine with the computer outside; the tool itself needs to be smart enough to do logic in assembly.`
` If you look at the development of the Internet, or the power grid, or new chips, or airplanes there's something disturbing happening. The c
ompanies that do these things have a secret that they don't want people to know: they're struggling to be able to continue developing their systems. What's hurting the chip companies isn't the cost of the fab, as bad as that is, but the cost of taping out of a chip. When you want to place a billion transistors, the design tools don't work any more. They assume that at some point somebody understands what they want to make, but it doesn't work when the system gets large enough. The companies that work on airplanes or the power grid don't really understand them as wholes any more. This means that, in a world of thermodynamic-scale engineering, you have to make a transition from designing systems to designing principles by which systems work, without actually saying how they do it.`
` The notion of such emergent engineering is very attractive. It's inspired beautiful demonstrations, but those have generally been on toy problems that don't scale to the really hard ones. And it's inspired equally beautiful theories that generally don't get reduced to practice. My colleague John Doyle calls these unfortunate examples of the study of "chaocritiplexity." There's a nearly null set of deep insight into emergent functionality that's reduced to useful practice.`
` Bill developed a programming model where little code fragments hop from particle to particle, traveling around and self-organizing into a system that solves a problem. He's used this model to do data storage and searching and all the things computers do, but it's a random fungible material, meaning that you can add a little bit and it gets a little bit better. Right now we are working on devices that can do this, turning the computer from a monolithic box to a raw material that gets configured by instructions traveling through it.`
`In exasperation I said that this isn't Internet 2, it's Internet 0. That was supposed to be a joke, but the name stuck. And industrial engineers started sidling up to me to say that this is what they always wanted to do but their companies got stuck supporting some proprietary protocol. So the joke is now leading to a standards process to bring the Internet to the physical world, by keeping the Internet protocols but replacing the rest of Internet practice with the kinds of tricks I described. This is an Internet for distributed devices without requiring centralized people.`
` Cells don't just carry information. They actually build things until something astonishing happens: a cell completes a closed nexus of work tasks, and builds a copy of itself. Although he didn't know about cells, Kant spoke about this 230 years ago when he said that an organized being possesses a self-organizing propagating whole that is able to make more of itself. But although cells can do this, that fact is nowhere in our physics. It's not in our notion of matter, it's not in our notion of energy, it's not in our notion of information, and it's not in our notion of entropy. It's something else. It has to do with organization, propagation of organization, work, and constraint construction. All of this has to be incorporated into some new theory of organization.`
` Nobody was thinking of the Web 300 years ago. ` - Kauffman
` There is a chance that there are general laws. I've thought about four of them. One of them says that autonomous agents have to live the most complex game that they can. The second has to do with the construction of ecosystems. The third has to do with Per Bak's self-organized criticality in ecosystems. And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible. If they did it too fast, they would destroy their own internal organization, so there may be internal gating mechanisms. This is why I call this an average secular trend, since they explore the adjacent possible as fast as they can get away with it. There's a lot of neat science to be done to unpack that, and I'm thinking about it.`
-- integrate some Salthe, maybe some Smolin.
` [Gödel] speaks only when spoken to and then only about mathematics. But his responses are stark and beautiful and the very few able to connect with him feel they have discovered an invaluable treasure. His sparse council is sought after and esteemed. This is a youth of impressive talent and intimidating strength. This is also a youth of impressive strangeness and intimidating weakness. Maybe he has no more than the rest of us harbor, but his weaknesses all seem so extreme hypochondria, paranoia, schizophrenia. They are even more pronounced when laid alongside his incredible mental strengths huge black voids, chunks taken out of an intensely shining star.`
` However, once the digital universe is thoroughly mapped, and initialized by us searching for meaningful things and following meaningful paths, it will inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things with the results. Once a system of template-based-addressing is in place, the door is opened to code that can interact directly with other code, free at last from a rigid bureaucracy requiring that every bit be assigned an exact address. You can (and a few people already are) write instructions that say "Do THIS with THAT" — without having to specify exactly Where or When. This revolution will start with simple, basic coded objects, on the level of nucleotides heading out on their own and bringing amino acids back to a collective nest. It is 1945 all over again.`
` And it is back to Turing, who in his 1948 report on intelligent machinery to the National Physical Laboratory advised that "intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search."`
`In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It's easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to describe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and a huge number of neurons) are left behind.`
`Physicists disagree over whether they are condemned forever to dig for deeper mysteries, or whether physics itself will come to an end in a final 'theory of everything', a nirvana of knowledge.`
`There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.`
`You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.`
`We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been standing in my place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara — more, the atoms in the universe. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.`
` Mathematics is not just a game or a poem with its own set of internal rules: it also has a striking correspondence to the real world. If I follow the rules it tells me things about the real world.` - Jaron Lanier
`How is it that by solving problems, and inventing tools and concepts to solve those problems, and then solving the new problems about those new tools and concepts—mathematicians often give physics a hand?`
-- In the modern age, mathematics needs to go computational.
` Handicap theory is a theory of biological communication in which information sent by a cell, organism, etc., must be costly to the sender in order to be reliable to the recipient.`
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
"The best writing is rewriting."
I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Chesterton: "He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire"
`I've always thought that the Table of Contents for Roget's Thesaurus was one of the greatest works of mankind. I don't think many people realize just how difficult the problem really is, and how long it's going to take.`
`Thinking at a subliminal rate of 32 concepts per second, as opposed to the 6-7 words per second experienced by typical verbal-sequential thinkers, thus appearing to intuitively come to conclusions that are very hard to reach by using typical linear reasoning.`
`"The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel MIMD processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes. "`
`The Notre Dame team says, on average, you can get from one site on the Web to any other randomly selected site in about 19 clicks. `
`Seth Loyd likes to play the game of thinking big in terms of limits to computation. It doesn't matter if the operating conditions of the resulting device are temperatures higher than in the interior of the sun or if the design involves instructions like "get yourself a number of tiny black holes (the gravitational kind) put them in a box, and convert the rest mass of the computer into photons."`
`Watch for struggles with human identity as machines on the other end of the phone acquire the thinking and responsive capacity of the human brain. Be prepared for a time when your doctor will be able to map your personal genome as fast as he draws blood.`
`We thought if we were to find the smallest universal machine then we could learn a great deal about computability -- of course that wouldn't be so!` - McCarthy (re: Turing tar pits)
`Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.` - Alan Perlis
`There's little more to say of this today, with any scientific certitude. Tomorrow, with those soon-to-come enormous gains in computational power, we may be able to explore just a little further into the mysterious ocean of all possible simple machines, and perhaps see a few more ideas that are isolated enough to share with other minds. That exploration, too, might tell us more about the origin of life itself, by showing us the simplest schemes that could support first stages of an evolutionary search.`
`So, if we insist on measuring the size of the universe, how do we do it? Draw a straight line from every particle of matter in the universe to every other particle of matter in the universe, so that every single particle of matter is connected with every single other particle of matter. Now take the outermost line segments, discard all inner line segments, and you have a wireframe that is the shape of the universe. Alternatively, imagine shrinkwrapping the entire universe, but with a type of shrinkwrap that cannot make curving surfaces -- it can only make flat surfaces. This would be the same shape as the wireframe described above. This is known as the "convex hull" in mathematics -- the smallest polygon which contains all points.`
`reality can only be understood as a gross exaggeration of fiction`
`one should never compete with one's collagues.`
"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom." Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
`Arbitrary does not mean random or meaningless. Arbitrary merely means without previous dependency.` http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Philosophy
"The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right name." - E. O. Wilson
`I’m science-fictionally intrigued with the idea of the big computation making up a kind of mind, and Lloyd also speaks to this: “Some of tha
t information processing, like digital computation can resemble thought. But the vast majority of the information processing in the universe lies in the collision of atoms, in the sli
ght motions of matter and light. Compared with what is normally called thought, such universal ‘thoughts’ are humble: they consist of elementary particles just minding their own business.” [p. 211] `
`But in Postsingular I’m gonna find a way to wake objects up...`
`I've the theory that the brain tends to get tired of thinking the same idea for too long. Like if after some time of thinking about something you reached a local minima and couldn't be able to think anything else beyond what you've done, thus you are unable to advance.`
`Most synapses are between adjacent neurons.`
- re: adjacent possible & Kauffman, re: Markram.
`If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up space in the middle` http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76487&cid=6822139
Release early, release often.
`The human being is not shaped by some given design which underlies natural and moral order in the cosmos, and which stands as the ultimate objective of human growth and experience. Rather, the ‘purpose’ of the human experience, if it can be so described, is more immediate; it is to coordinate the various ingredients which constitute one’s particular world here and now, and to negotiate the most productive harmony out of them. Simply put, it is to get the most out of what you have here and now.`
`Nature has always looked like a horrible mess, but as we go along, we see patterns and put theories together; a certain clarity comes and things get simpler.` - Feynman
`The right way to learn math is breadth-first, not depth-first. You need to survey the space, learn the names of things, figure out what's what. Think of it as a liberal arts degree in mathematics.`
`I think the best way to start learning math is to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day surfing in Wikipedia. It's filled with articles about thousands of little branches of mathematics. You start with pretty much any article that seems interesting (e.g. String theory, say, or the Fourier transform, or Tensors, anything that strikes your fancy.) Start reading. If there's something you don't understand, click the link and read about it. Do this recursively until you get bored or tired.`
`Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibniz with their wondrous mathematical harmonies; Coulomb measuring out electricity . . . Faraday, Ohm, Ampère, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Röntgen; and in another branch of science, Cavendish, Davy, Dalton, Dewar; and in another, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Lister, Sir Ronald Ross. All these and many others, and some whose names have no memorial, form a great host of heroes, an army of soldiers – fit companions of those of whom the poets have sung . . . There is the great Newton at the head of this list comparing himself to a child playing on the seashore gathering pebbles, whilst he could see with prophetic vision the immense ocean of truth yet unexplored before him . . .`
`Consider Laplace (restating Leibniz):. An intelligent being who, at a given instant, knew all the forces. `
`Reality is consistent; every correct theory about the universe is compatible with every other correct theory. Imperfect maps can conflict, but there is only one territory. `
`We are "web weavers and dancers at the dawn of the Meso-Electronic Period."`
There is a shattering truth, so surprising and terrifying that people resist the implications with all their strength. Yet there are a lonely few with the courage to accept this satori. Here is wisdom, if you would be wise:
Since the beginning
Not one unusual thing
Has ever happened.
Alas for those who turn their eyes from zebras and dream of dragons! If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.
Huh. Didn't know that was Eliezer for all those years.
`How dare an electrical engineer us standard electrical techniques to solve the universe.`
2006-07-10: `Think of the genome as analogous to the power spectrum; we'll call it the genomic spectrum. The organism is like the reconstructed image; we'll call that the phenotypic image. A mutation is like the filters applied to the power spectrum. Most discrete mutations will have small effects, and they will be expressed in every cell, while some mutations will affect prominent aspects of the phenotype and will be readily visible.`
"Theories become instruments, not answers."
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust
"Simply put, the purpose of human experience, if it can be so described, is to become the healthiest from the local resources here and now."
"Information means literally to put form to."
"If you haven't done everything you haven't done a thing."
"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."
"If you ever want to get anything done then stay away from the computer."
"A scientist is someone who discovers new things and gives them names." - Huge revelation that came to Henry Massalin in a dream
"Activation energies protect substances from change."
"Unsolicited advice is always self-serving. " - Dan Gottlieb
"life is what YOU make of it"
`If humans are indeed on the verge of realizing that we are caught in illusions while thinking we are perceiving reality, how do we propose to escape? The answer, Tart has concluded, could come in the form of "mindfulness training " -- a variety of exercises for elevating awareness by deliberately paying closer-than-usual attention to the mundane details of everyday life. Gurdjieff called it "self-remembering," and many flavors of psychotherapist, East and West, use it. Mindfulness is a skill that can be honed by the right approach to what is happening right in front of you: "Be here now" as internal gymnastics. Working, eating, waiting for a traffic light to change can furnish opportunities for mindfulness. Observe what you are feeling, thinking, perceiving, don't get hung up on judging it, just pay attention. Tart thinks this kind of self-observation -- noticing the automatization -- is the first step toward waking up.`
"We should do everything we can to avoid singularities. A singularity is a sign that we've failed." - who said this and why?
"Didn't build it? Do not explain it. Classify. Model. But don't explain."
"Now tell me Mother Earth, what went wrong, in the heart of everyone?"
"With every lost hour, a part of life perishes." - Leibniz
"I maintain that men could be incomparably happier than they are, and that they could, in a short time, make great progress in increasing their happiness, if they were willing to set about it as they should. We have in hand excellent means to do in 10 years more than could be done in several centuries without them, if we apply ourselves to making the most of them, and do nothing else except what must be done." - Leibniz
"No engineer talks about `rights`. Why ? Because they all know that `rights` are crap engineering."
"We need to learn how to distinguish the probable from the improbable, but so far such a probability calculation has never been given a precise definition." - ALAN GUTH
"How much of what we as persons can experience in life can we share with fellow human beings?"
"A chimpanzee cannot understand Bessel functions or the theory of black holes. Human forebrains are a few ounces bigger than a chimp's, and we can ask many more questions than a chimp. Are there facets of the universe we can never know? Are there questions we can't ask?"
-- yes, and that's one of the unaskables.
"For every beginning there is an end."
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
"The genetic book of life is a monotonous tome: it is written in just four letters. Now US chemists have shown that they can expand the language of the genes by adding a new letter."
"To hide a tree, use a forest!"
"Never explain anything but the model."
"Apparently there is colour, apparently sweetness, apparently bitterness, actually there are only atoms and the void." -- Democritus, 420 BC (from Robinson and Groves 1998).
"Whenever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity." - Erasmus
"But most people seem to be running the imagination race with their running shoes unlaced"
"What really exists? Histories or the wave function?"
"Shut up and calculate." - Feynman
Smolinism led the men to the stars.
"Imagination is creating ideas. Creativity is putting ideas into practice."
"Douglas was a brilliant teacher." "He was someone who loved to explain ideas and he was fascinated by ideas and I am sure that part of the success of Hitchhiker's was the underlying issues of the humor, real issues. It was part of his style as a teacher. He enjoyed teaching. He liked explaining things that were very complicated and he liked making them accessible." "Douglas was not organized and he lived his life in a bit of chaos. One of my roles was, to find things for him. One of the words he used much is 'where' followed by 'is' and then a number of any other objects."
"Thankfully, I live in the USA" "We shoot our children down from the trees."
"No decision is final, all decisions branch into other decisions."
"Everything happens by necessity."
"God is the action of the universe."
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, dedicated individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
"That which I can not build I can not understand."
"Each species is one twig on a branching tree of life extending back through ancestral species."
"most of the biomass in the ocean is made up of viruses" - hondje
"I believe in two things: I believe in knowledge, and I believe in more knowledge."
2006-09-02.232415.txt (23:56:05) --- searching for quotes
"Chaos? What, is that some sort of a dip?"
"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
"All our inventions are but words." - Henry David Thoreau
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
Mussel mystery: "the more you know, the more you don't know."
"In late twentieth-century America, when it is difficult or inconvenient to change the environment, we don't think twice about changing the brain of the person who has to live in it."
"Every organism contains other organisms."
"Matter is different from the laws that control it."
"Something is wrong. I am not the Jedi that I am supposed to be. I want more." - Anakin Skywalker
"The true success of a teacher is measured by how well the student teaches in return."
"Just because you are a head of state doesn't mean your head is on straight."
"Use tools. Feel human. Because if we don't, we're basically just monkeys with hands." - Ask.com's advertisement on television (2006-10-07)
"recursive science fiction"
"If we are to be damned, let us be damned for what we really are."
"Isn't interesting that religious behavior is so close to crazy that we can't even tell them apart?" - Dr. House
"I should have chosen custodial engineering." - Kurt Serge
"If somebody else ain't doing it, it's your job. Even if your job description says otherwise."
"The more you write, the better you do in college. In college, you have to write yourself to death to stay alive."
`The New Digital Divide is coming fast. Maybe I can become a millionaire by organizing Geek Trips to South Korea, Japan, and Sweden: "Experience crazy new applications that provide full-motion, hiqh quality video! Work faster! See immersive 3d game environments that make your puny American games look like antiques! Download files in a flash!"`
`I'm still waiting for the computer with one button: "Do What I Mean" Everything else is an abject design failure.`
"At some point, your brain figures out it only has one life to live and it's being wasted. So it "burns out" to get itself out of the current, unhealthy environment."
"When you look at yourself this way everything becomes a lot clearer. No longer are your mood swings something to blame on yourself, some kind of cognitive mistake. Now they're simply a side reaction gone wrong -- too much or too little of some neurotransmitter in some area -- easily fixed by making enough of that chemical available to let the reaction proceed in a normal way. When your stomach burns with indigestion, add enough basic material to bring the acidic content back down to where it should be. Of course the doctors are confident the pills will always win, the pills are manipulating your "self" on it's lowest level, instead of a higher, more conscious one. Sort of like wearing lenses if you're near-sighted, you're just finding the most elegant solution to a fundamentally low-level problem."
"The shockwave will disperse the nanoprobes over a range of five light years."
"What Linnaeus did for the world of organisms, Annie Jump Cannon did for the stars."
"No change is as expensive as no change."
"No time is as expensive as no time."
"To a great mind, nothing is little." - Sherlock Holmes (according to Robert Dilts)
"Korzybski suggested humans needed to be properly trained in the use of language to prevent the unnecessary conflicts and confusion that arose from confusing the 'map' with the 'territory'."
"Korzybski's law of individuality, for instance, states that no two persons or situations or stages of processes are the same in all details. Korzybski noted that we have far fewer words and concepts than unique experiences and this tends to lead to the identification or confusion of two or more situations (what is known as generalization or ambiguity in neurolinguistic programming)."
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet
"The purpose of the Sleight of Mouth patterns is to help people enrich their perspectives, expand their maps of the world and reconnect with their experience."
"I am not going to explain how the photons actually 'decide' whether to bounce back or go through; that is not known. (Probably the question has no meaning)." - Feynman in QED
- see the "Kantian metaphysics" page re: Bell was wrong about photons deciding.
"Mark Twain was the Jon Stewart of the 1800s."
"You see, all things that we attribute to habit, should be attributed to memory. Habit is memory."
Uthman's Law of Preventive Medicine: "If you prevent all the preventable diseases, it only guarantees that you will die of a non-preventable one."
"The universe gives birth to life; the essence of the universe is [hence] female."
"The secret of life is more life."
"Heredity is [not] destiny."
"The future is completely determined but unknowable because the creation of information is not predictable - it would take more information than is available to predict the future - and there is no way to process that amount of information more quickly than the universe does in the first place!"
-- re: Red Queen's Race, you better hope/intend that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
"I have forgotten what I have forgotten."
"The great philosophers Aristotle and Plato thought matter was continuous, fluid and could not be divided into individual particles."
"When I grow up, I want to be an arithmetician!"
"with great power comes great instability" - #osdev on thermodynamics
"After a while you start to realize that you really can't truly share your hopes and dreams with even the most special significant other."
"The present and the past are both in the future."
"That means the electrons may sometimes leak from one chemical bond to a neighboring bond, he said. They also can take forbidden walks on the wild side by tunneling through open space."
"The goal is not to inform, but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine, of construction materials, or of electronic components continues earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices, constitutes a new domain of practical experiences."
**********************************
**********************************
"If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline, my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself. My dog's brain serves only my dog's purposes; but my own brain labors at a knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter to me and my decay and death a calamity. Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom with less misgiving. This is because the philosopher is in the grip of the Life Force. This Life Force says to him "I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance: now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my path; so I have made a special brain - a philosopher's brain - to grasp this knowledge for me as the husbandman's hand grasps the plough for me. And this" says the Life Force to the philosopher "must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work.""
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a HUGE number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Feynman
"We do not know all of the basic laws of physics; there is an expanding frontier of ignorance."
"The test of all knowledge is experiment."
"You do not look at what they do wrong. You look at what they are doing well."
"Money is always on the minds of people. Universities know this, and are gladly willing to jack the price to attend because people are "required" to have a degree to get any decent job. How I love capitalism."
"For four hundred years since Galileo we [scientists] have been gathering information about the world which they [ignorant people] do not know."
"To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar-ajar only."
"And what is the mind but last week's potatoes? Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe?"
"The dream is to find the open channel."
"Anything that can be done, must be done." - due to Leibniz's law of necessity.
"To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt." - you must learn to cope with the uncertainty/nothing/etc.
2007-02-23 is where I stopped
"Perry E. Metzger" - "Consider our own culture a few hundred years from now at most. Given nanotechnology, any individual member could launch Von Neuman machines that travelled out in all directions at near the speed of light. Anything that requires so few members of a culture to launch will almost doubtless *BE* launched. With billions of individual entities, what are the odds that no one will do such a thing?"
"We know, from the fact that not only our galaxy but every other we've looked at looks convicingly like it lacks Von Neuman colonizers, that the density function of non-hiding VN cultures is very low. A VN culture will chew up a galaxy in a hurry. If relativistic intergalactic colonization is a no-go, then VN cultures may be effectively confined to a galaxy, but that's the smallest pen you can keep them in."
`Suppose we have an intelligent entity with a space/time footprint of, say, one light-hour in diameter and complexity on the level of 10^100 bit and similar computational power. Every minute the entity doubles in terms of effective complexity (in terms of features of architecture, not the number of bits) and after every hour all problems of the previous hour are either resolved or bypassed. Apparently then, any probe that was launched more than an hour ago, could not construct a computational structure that could bring any useful results back to the core; at the same time it could destroy something of value out there (imaging what kind of instructions you would give your great grandparents if you sent them on a scouting expedition: "just take a few pictures and PLEASE don't touch anything there, it may be important for research! Or better, just stay here; I will see pretty much from here before you get there, and it's safer")` - Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (found 2007-02-24)
`It is perfectly summed by a quote by a geneticist of the 1930s, John Haldane, who once tried to describe this notion: "Life is not only stranger than we imagine; life is stranger than we can imagine."`
"The [viewers] leaped, a trillion kilometers into the outer darkness [of the representation of the solar system]. The monstrous bulk of the Oort Harvester was at work here, a world-sized cylinder lumbering along through the hundred billion members of the cometary cloud. Slow and tireless, at home a tenth of a lightyear from Sol, the Harvester was hunting down bodies rich in simple organic molecules, converting them to sugars, fats, and proteins, and Linking the products back to feed the inner system."
"So far the loesson had been a general one, designed to teach Chan the structure and varied economies of the solar system. Now it would be specific to Pursuit Team training. The display changed scale again. Far beyond the boundaries of the solar system lay the members of the Stellar Group. The region of accessible space was a knobby and dimpled sphere, fifty-eight lightyears across and centered on Sol. The Perimeter formed a fuzzy outer boundary where the probe ships, limited at best to a tenth of light speed, expanded the accessible region by up to ten lightyears a century. Humans had never encountered another species possessing the Mattin Link. The Perimeter would remain roughly spherical, unless and until--people had talked of it for centuries--some probe ship at the Perimeter met a ship from a second bubble, bown by another species who had found the secret of the Mattin Link for themselves."
"Avoid literary flab." - Jeffrey A. Carver
"Heaven, stars, mountains, trees, rivers, of great oceans and seas, from the vast lands of the Earth and all living things around me ... please lend me, your energy." - Goku's spiritual chant
"Gaze at the stars .. and know that we have not gone that far. They are shining for us anywhere in the galaxy." - Gamma Ray
"When I invited friends to see [the infant] I told them bluntly she was destined to become "a genius". " - Aaron Stern
"Everything is destined to experience the terror of absolutism of money." - Edis, Slashdot age prophet
"Truth disappears the moment it is told--like steamy breath into air."
"Men's words are a poor exponent of their thought; nay their thought itself is a poor exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery, wherefrom both thought and action have their birth." --Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution
"Hope is the right hand of fear."
"The liberty is activity."
"I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience. How would they possibly know?" - Minsky by way of Superkuh
"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented."
`'Deconstruct and recontextualize' sounds fancier than 'cut and paste'`
"I want to be remembered as someone who's not dead." — Christine Peterson
"The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
"Absence of proof is not proof of absence."
"Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the flaws that govern them." -- Ivan Pavlov
"A determination to succeed and to sacrifice everything in the attempt. That could be a prescription for an unhappy life; certainly for a life out of balance, sneering at timidity and restraint. Sometimes, as Ramanujan sat or squatted on the pial, he'd look up to watch the children playing in the street with what one neighbor remembered as 'a blank and vacant look.' But inside, he was on fire." - Kanigel
"Ramanujan's was no cool, steady Intelligence, solemnly applied to the problem at hand; he was all energy, animation, force." - Kanigel
"We are prisoners of our natural brain."
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
"Salvation? You mean salivation, right? That's what happens in the mouth, I think. Yeah, what about it?"
"Program testing may convincgly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."
"Needless to say, that system completely hid the fact that, all by itself, a program is no more than half a conjecture. The other half of the conjecture is the functional specification the program is supposed to satisfy. The programmer's task is to present such complete conjectures as proven theorems."
"Earth is the cradle of mankind; one does not remain in the cradle forever." -- Tsiolkovsky
"The manned Lunar Landing Program was the most complex and largest single scientific exploration undertaken in the history of mankind. [...] The Apollo Program ultimately placed twelve men on the lunar surface. It was a major national event. During peak activity, more than 400 000 people and 20 000 companies were involved." - Richard S. Johnston and Wayland E. Hull
"Give in to indecision, or don't."
"In these stories, advances in science have both created new and needed products and dealt with pollution from the past." - McGaryne. And that's basically much of what the past brings us: tons and tons of mental pollution. As far as I can tell, chemistry is not unlike alchemy ... both chemists and alchemists just have to learn the tools of the trade.
"The smarter you are, the more stupid you feel."
`For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. . . . I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything."`
"Ketterle is of course one of the ascended gods of this field."
"I want to dive into the black hole. Into the dark. Into the future." - Gamma Ray in Beyond the Black Hole
"His interests are almost all cerebral. And when Christian is reading or working his concentration is total - all the children share this trait. Oblivious to the cries of his younger brother, or the piano playing of Adam, Christian diverts himself during his free time with a balanced and satisfying equation, a copy of The Scientist or an article reassessing Einstein's theory of relativity. When he is reading you can talk to him, or pummel him, or stand on your head in front of him without the slightest diversionary effect. When he finishes an article or a mathematical problem, it is almost as though he is returning from a deep sleep. He blinks, exclaims, and seems to have to reorientate himself to the objects in the room. But if he is dedicated in the exact sense of the word to his mathematics, neither his temperament nor his aura are cold or withdrawn. Christian is also likely to pass an afternoon playing wholeheartedly with his brothers and sister, or freely to push aside a treatment of the quantum theory in order to paint, to write a poem, or to build a model aircraft, often with Paul. His most frovolous diversion is science fiction. Not merely a simple connoisseur, he is a critic. He is still full of contempt for the author who told him that heavy water was an isotope of hydrogen, or that a galaxy existed in a spot already amply occupied by a recently detected body. He drives his way through anything and everything the local library can provide with a speed which results in a constant problem. His reading speed is an astonishing two hundred pages an hour - a capacity that allows him easily to devour two books a day - and a Council regulation allows a child only two library tickets. At weekends, desperate for something to read, Christian will sometimes visit the library twice in a single day, making an eclectic but highly serious selection of reading matter. Christian's intelligence burns with a cold blue flame. His judgment of other people is severe, and one might think his standards too high,l his regard too unblinkingly frank, were not these the same standards that he applies to himself."
"I rather expect that we shall someday find a mathematico-mechanical explanation for what we now call atoms which will render an account of their properties." - August Kekule, 1867
"That was so terrible that you gave me cancer."
"If pains must come, let them extend to few."
-- probably not the best of ideas
"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws."
`Solitude calls forth the mood of receptivity. Only then do we get the best. Great things are worked out in silence. Then come the flashes of inspiration—the new visions. Emerson tells us that " Solitude is to genius the stern friend—the cold, obscure shelter, where mould the wings which will bear it farther than suns or stars," and we have this thought from Carlyle: " Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together—that at length they may emerge full-formed and mamestic into the delight of life—which they are henceforth to rule."`
`Uruj is that state of mind when a person thinks with energy and enthusiasm: "I am going to do such and such a thing." This state of mind produces such a force and power, in order to create its object, that in its excess it produces such a mist that the faculty of reason and justice is often dimmed.`
"All this says is that an ordinary photon has a certain size that is quite fixed, and it is made of the substance "action" which is totally non perceivable and non-observable. Only changes in action are perceivable, observable, or detectable, never fundamental action itself. So physics already prescribes a universe made out of action, and that universe has no length, no time, no energy, no space, no concrete existence ... Each photon carries a small piece of time."
"Transmit in order to receive."
"Nature abhors a vacuum."
"Nature abhors a gradient."
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." -- Niels Bohr
"The best way to predict the future is by inventing it."
"The future is a race between education and catastrophe." -- H.G. Wells
"The electromagnetic force is due to the continuous exchange of virtual photons."
"Electricity doesn't exist. Drop the word. Archaic."
"The art of wondering makes life worth living."
"Was Goku a god?"
"C Code. C Code Run. Run, Code, RUN! PLEASE!!!!" - g1powermac
"Becoming an artist?" Automatons are artists. Should Smolin's cosmological natural selection happen to be true, then the universe itself is an artist practicing the art of self-expresssion, of self-creation."
"Organisms behave as photoresistors."
"Einstein showed that space-time is curved, but curved in relation to what?"
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done". --Linus Torvalds, by way of dkr
"Another possibility is to develop an animal which can produce meat without any need for killing ... When I get the chance I plan to become fully autotrophic. Writers have speculated about plant-humans for a long time, but I plan something more original. I want to live in free space, living of sunlight and the minerals in asteroids. This way I will not need to sacrifice the complexity of any other lifeform to increase my own. This is the logical conclusion of the line of inquiry started by the vegetarian accusation of being a carrion-eater." - Anders Sandberg ( asa@nada.kth.se )
"But the wild is growing faster than the tamed."
"Probably rather larger than the entire capacity of a single human brain." -> I suspect that we will die before our brains run out of storage capacity due to the construction of the brain and our linear rate of information accumulation. Brains seem to be able to deal with that sort of information eating style. Don't know about other rates, though- it may in fact then proceed to explode. :)
`(1) It is interesting to note that, close to the end of his life in 1954, Einstein wrote to his friend Michele Besso: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics."
"What will be possible then, should be possible now."
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." -- Sun Tzu
-- why have enemies?
"Isn't it odd that you start at the beginning by trying to look for the end? You're in the wrong place!"
"I am everything except myself."
"Goku was an ascended god ... through his transcension he was able to rise above his mortal linear limits and became the first ascended Super Saiyan-- with this new transformation he was able to conduct the symphony of materials all around him and within him and to keep up with all happenings within his range. He was a god and no man was destined to be as he."
"Get lots of jobs and steal as much literature as possible."
"All consumers must be specialists to some degree." - Salthe
"Containers all the way down."
"Pain is the cost of the maintenance of boundaries."
"He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River." -- Anonymous
"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." - Douglas Adams
"I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it."
"Each thought denied holds us back even further."
"Ah, yes ... in my journies I have made it all the way to Erdős-5 through an Asimov-29 and even snacked with one of the many command-92s. Technically I am classified as a tenth level intellect modeled after brainiac-seven."
"The ratio of people to cake is too big." - Milton Waddams
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
"We are a way for the universe to somewhat know itself."
"Those who are ignorant of history force the rest of us to repeat it."
"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" - Richard Feynman
"Being born is not a crime so why must it carry a sentence of death?"
"Not being alive is no excuse." -Scovetta
"Any real education is painful. It is going to hurt. And if thurst for information, and if you accelerate your rate of content consumption, it's like flying through space screaming- no one can hear you, but by god you know it hurts like hell."
"The frame is not the painting."
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
"To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world." -- First Goal of the Chaordics
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T. E. Lawrence
"Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly."
" The function of information (in the form of conserved charges) is to provide a pathway back to symmetry for the particles of matter."
"Causality allows matter's eventual return to symmetry."
`After studying a spider's web, an 11-year-old transformed his observation into a poem: "Dawn's reflection/honeycomb of light/bound by diamonds/caught ...`
"Any hacker, when he does his job, has the deepest respect for the system he cracks. As is the hacker, so is the scientist, who pays such great tribute to the complexity, diversity, variety and seeming unpredictability."
"One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king." - Abraham Maslow
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." -- Albert Einstein
"And I think I'd rather be alive, even if it means I die." - Hawk Zindell
"All relationships are fantasy."
- truly?
"We have enough youth, how about a fountain of intelligence?" - Slashdot
"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."
"To fear death is to misunderstand life."
"When you reflect that it's the human mind that has invented space, time, and matter, picking them out of reality in a quite arbitrary fashion--can you attempt to explain a thing in terms of something it has invented itself?" - Aldous Huxley
"We are so much the victim