July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Thank goodness, Gen. Dempsey!
“I’ve learned that issues don’t exist in isolation. They’re always complex. And I’ve been scarred by rereading a quote from Einstein, who said if you have an hour to save the world, spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem and five minutes of it trying to solve it. And I think sometimes, in particular as a military culture, we don’t have that ratio...
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On Time: Thoughts at 3:45a
When you are young, everything is a countdown. A countdown to your birthday, to Christmas, to when you get to see a friend, to when summer starts, to when Thanksgiving break starts, to when you have a test, quiz, or project due, to when it will snow again. The list is almost endless. You watch time like it were a chess game. It stands like it were in a vacuum, and life seems long. You yearn to be...
4 tags
Save a Penny, Build a Hack
Just finished putting together a $1,250 computer that runs Mac OSX for editing. Big time savings over the Mac Pro line!
http://www.tonymacx86.com/
3 tags
On Religion: Thoughts While Running
Inspired by a doctor in S.F. who heals without touching a patient, or prescribing medication. The Brother’s Karamazov. Shamanism/the documentary The Horse Boy.
Is it not possible that the failure of religion—the paradoxes, the hypocrisy, the subsequent hundreds of millions of deaths over it—is the contamination of raw belief in the divine omniscient by human logic? Is the...
April 2011
3 posts
2 tags
The Black Swan of Cairo →
“Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable. It is no surprise that one hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the...
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Don't let ignorant people vote →
“I know close to nothing about the inner workings of my car, and so I come to my mechanic, ignorant — but not stupid. As this relates to voting, if people don’t know much about current government and politics, they too are ignorant, not necessarily stupid. The difference is that naively paying too much for repairs on a car is not nearly as damaging to foreign policy as a bunch of...
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RSA on YouTube →
“The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress for over 250 years.”
Collection of lectures turned into videos.
March 2011
10 posts
3 tags
A Very Big Bang →
“Sixty-five million years ago, in one catastrophic flash, the Earth changed forever. Without warning, a mountain-sized rock from space crashed through the atmosphere like a giant flaming fireball.”
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Sad as Hell →
An essay on technology’s reach into daily life.
“With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click,” he confesses, “I am becoming a different person—solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes … With each passing year, scientists...
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Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance →
“Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources,and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.”
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Intervention in Libya: The Neocon-Liberal Alliance →
“Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn’t really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Raises some very important questions.
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Man and Nature: Thoughts at 4:30a
Maybe we are just blind fools. Maybe the science and technology we create and deem as true and our savior is false and our demise.
It always surprises me how we as people have separated ourselves from nature so well. Sometimes I think that we honestly forget that we are born of this planet. That we share everything that is around us. That we are made up of the same chemicals that made up life on...
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Observations on Film Art: Watching You Watch There... →
“P. T. Anderson has created a scene which commands viewer attention as precisely as a rapidly edited sequence of close-up shots.”
Brillant.
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“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most...”
– Aldous Huxley
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“It’s a Wall Street government.”
– Robert Gnaizda