Culture & Society

"Personal strivings are the central projects that people think about, plan for, and allocate time and energy toward. Strivings provide information about what a person wants as well as the type of person they wish to be. Men disproportionally strive for wealth, success, and power compared to women. Women tend to have a different instruction manual for life, putting a premium on nurturing and befriending other people. This doesn't mean that the average women is unconcerned about success and status, but that this is less likely to be done without checking in on friendships to ensure they attain their highest potential." - Lit

"Using rigorous scientific techniques, we know that strivings matter for well-being. Striving for wealth and power is less likely to bring about happiness and meaning in life than working hard to care for other people and developing intimate bonds." - Lit

"The world's oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society, has made its historical journal, which includes about 60,000 scientific papers, permanently free to access online. (...) Its archives offer a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries. Nestling amongst illustrious papers by Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution, including gruesome tales of students being struck by lightning and experimental blood transfusions." - Amira

Excellent news! :) - Jenny

TRANSACT ALL THE PHILOSOPHY! - Pete's Got To Go

Archive of All Online Issues 1665-1887 http://rstl.royalsocietypublis... January 1887 - Present http://rstb.royalsocietypublis... - Amira

"Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how the ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. (...) It is vital that the two hemispheres work together, but McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure and self-interest hold sway. (...) Whatever the relationship between consciousness and the brain – unless the brain plays no role in bringing the world as we experience it into being, a position that must have few adherents – its structure has to be significant. It might even give us clues to understanding the structure of the world it mediates, the world we know. (…)" - Amira

"The structure and experience of our mental world. In this sense the brain is – in fact it has to be – a metaphor of the world. (…) I believe that there are two fundamentally opposed realities rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. But the relationship between them is no more symmetrical than that of the chambers of the heart – in fact, less so; more like that of the artist to the critic, or a king to his counsellor. (...) I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.” - Amira

A+ - Ali Oz

+ - Amir

“Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.” (...) The defining force behind life is not energy but information. Evolution is a process of information transmission, and so is technology, which is why it too reflects a biological transcendence. (...) Life is built on bits, on ideas, on information, on immaterial things. (...) When we think about who we are, we are always talking about information, about knowledge, about processes that increase the complexity of things. (…) Life is not a binary thing that is either there or not there. It is a continuum between semi-living things like viruses and very living things like us. What we are seeing right now is an increased “lifeness” in technology as we move across the continuum. As things become more complex, they become more lifelike. (…)" - Amira

"I always think of technology as a child: You have to work with it, you have to find the right role and keep it away from bad influences. (...) We are destined by the physics and chemistry of matter. If we looked at a hundred planets in the universe that were inhabited by intelligent life, I bet that we would eventually see something like the internet on almost all of them. (...) The purpose of technology is to provide us with tools to maximize our talents and explore our opportunities. The challenge is to make use of the tools that fit us. (...) If you look at the collective, you might think that we are all becoming more alike. But when you go down to the individual level, technology has the potential to really bring out the differences that make us special. Innovation enables individualization. (…) Life is brimming with possibilities, details, intelligence, marvels, ingenuity. And the Technium is very much an extension of that possibility space.” - Amira

"Culture is not a trait that is unique to humans. By studying orangutan populations, a team of researchers headed by anthropologist Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich has demonstrated that great apes also have the ability to learn socially and pass them down through a great many generations. The researchers provide the first evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots, thus answering the contentious question as to whether variation in behavioral patterns in orangutans are culturally driven, or caused by genetic factors and environmental influences. (...) The researchers show that genetic factors or environmental influences cannot explain the behavior patterns in orangutan populations. The ability to learn things socially and pass them on evolved over many generations; not just in humans but also apes. "It looks as if the ability to act culturally is dictated by the long life expectancy of apes and the necessity to be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions," Krützen adds, concluding that, "Now we know that the roots of human culture go much deeper than previously thought. Human culture is built on a solid foundation that is many millions of years old and is shared with the other great apes." - Amira

"Princeton computer scientists have developed a new way of tracing the origins and spread of ideas, a technique that could make it easier to gauge the influence of notable scholarly papers, buzz-generating news stories and other information sources. The method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents -- whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics -- and to determine which documents were the most influential. (...) "We're trying to make sense of how concepts move around. Maybe you want to know who coined a certain term like 'quark,' or search old news stories to find out where the first 1960s antiwar protest took place." Blei said the new search technique might one day be used by historians, political scientists and other scholars to study how ideas arise and spread. (...) Instead of focusing on citations, Blei and Sean Gerrish, a Princeton doctoral student in computer science, developed a statistical model that allows computers to analyze the actual text of documents to see how the language changes over time. Influential documents in a field will establish new concepts and terms that change the patterns of words and phrases used in later works. (...) "We are also exploring the idea that you can find patterns in how language changes over time," he said. "Once you've identified the shapes of those patterns, you might be able to recognize something important as it develops, to predict the next big idea before it's gotten big." - Amira

"The model runs census data through an assembly line of high-powered mathematical processes, but at its root is one basic assumption: that community-level violence is primarily a function of geography, modulated by the overlap of political, topographical and ethnic borders. (...) According to Bar-Yam’s team, between-group violence is unlikely when one of two conditions are met: Either diverse communities are so well-integrated as to prevent any one group from dominating, or — lacking such integration — when political or geographic boundaries match demographic borders. When there’s a mismatch, tendencies to persecution have opportunity to flourish. Majority groups have the power to define local rules, but minority groups are large enough for conflicts to arise. With the right borders, this wouldn’t happen. “Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves,” (...) Heightened risks of violence occasioned by religious differences were smoothed out by the inclusion of borders. “Switzerland could have been Northern Ireland, except they made cantons,” said Bar-Yam. For linguistic differences, heightened risks of violence persisted only in the northwest, where the Jura mountains form a porous boundary between historically French and German-speaking communities. (...)" - Amira

"The amazing thing about social networks, unlike other networks that are almost as interesting — networks of neurons or genes or stars or computers or all kinds of other things one can imagine — is that the nodes of a social network — the entities, the components — are themselves sentient, acting individuals who can respond to the network and actually form it themselves.”" -- Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis "I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built [...] The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual [...] Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain.” -- George Dyson in “Turing’s Cathedral” - Amira

"After carving limestone pillars with all sorts of animal images, they hauled the 16-ton stones into multiple huge rings — without the help of wheeled vehicles or domesticated animals. The site is billed by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt as the world's first temple, constructed by hunter-gatherers. Schmidt found no convincing signs of human occupation there: no ovens, fireplaces or other hints of residential dwellings. The huge T-shaped pillars seemed to him to represent stylized human shapes, and their carved images — scorpion-like animals, snakes and wild boar — he saw as religious totems. E.B. Banning suggests that the builders of Gobekli Tepe may have been settlers (not hunter-gatherers), living in spaces best understood as both sacred and domestic, i.e. there was no temple, but symbolic rituals of a sacred nature probably did take place within people's ordinary houses. Banning charges that anthropologists superimpose the modern Western concept of sacred versus profane incorrectly onto the Near Eastern past." - Adriano

"Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins: The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources. The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?” - Amira

I still don't understand what the claim is? 'Mathematics of Renaissance arts'? Like perspective and golden ratio and junk? - Eivind

Interesting historical link between issuing currency, global debt, and military strength. "Debt is intrinsically linked to power, since credit can be used to exploit or control people. And the power is doubly effective because debt is so overlaid with moral context. There is no better way to justify unequal power relations than “by reframing them in the language of debt … because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim which is doing something wrong”. Just as debtors in Mesopotamia used to end up as slaves, so too, American subprime mortgage borrowers – or third world nations – become in effect enslaved to credit systems." Review http://www.ft.com/intl... - Adriano

Graeber was denied tenure as a professor most likely because he criticized certain (labor and academic) practices at Yale. He is now part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His perspective is currently very relevant since the global financial crisis has escalated from the homeowner level to national and supranational levels -- all due to debt issues. #OccupyWallStreet - Adriano

quotable: "A major reason the U.S. has a deficit to begin with is that we spend more on our military than all other nations in the world combined. But the military backs up the entire financial system. Think of these "loans," then, as the salary we're being paid for acting as the world's enforcers." http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion... - Adriano

2012 Authors@Google, http://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs FYI 81-min running time. - Adriano

Tim O’Reilly on the Birth of the global mind: "Computer scientist Danny Hillis once remarked, “Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.” (…) The web is a perfect example of what engineer and early computer scientist Vannevar Bush called “intelligence augmentation” by computers, in his 1945 article “As We May Think” in The Atlantic. He described a future in which human ability to follow an associative knowledge trail would be enabled by a device he called “the memex”. This would improve on human memory in the precision of its recall. Google is today’s ultimate memex. (…) This is man-computer symbiosis at its best, where the computer program learns from the activity of human teachers, and its sensors notice and remember things the humans themselves would not. This is the future: massive amounts of data created by people, stored in cloud applications that use smart algorithms to extract meaning from it, feeding back results to those people on mobile devices, gradually giving way to applications that emulate what they have learned from the feedback loops between those people and their devices.” (...) - Amira

"In this significant article he [Vannevar Bush] holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. (...) this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.” (...) - Amira

Wolves appear in folklore and mythological traditions around the world. Symbolism of the wolf varies: a hungry Shadow self, a Trickster, or a demonic presence. Some cultures believe humans descend from wolves (see below), and the wolf may have a protective quality as well. - Halil

Fenrisulven :) - Eivind

It's interesting that he was the eldest child of Loki, he had a lot of children. On one occasion Loki took the form a mare and gave birth to a 8 legged horse which ended up being Odin's horse. I never actually realised that Loki was adopted, I always thought he was Odin's son and Thor's half brother. - Halil

International Space Station, Life on Earth, The Known Universe as mapped through astronomical observations #earth #humanbeing #society #politics #culture #perspective - Amira

"Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan, and his colleagues asked groups of American and Japanese students to rate how happy or sad various computer-generated emoticons seemed to them. The Japanese gave more weight to the emoticons’ eyes when gauging emotions, whereas Americans gave more weight to the mouth. The American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did. Then he and his colleagues manipulated photographs of real faces to control the degree to which the eyes and the mouth were happy, sad or neutral. Again the researchers found that Japanese subjects judged expressions based more on the eyes than the Americans, who looked to the mouth. Expressive muscles around the eyes provide key clues about a person’s genuine emotions, thus Japanese people could be better than Americans at perceiving people’s true feelings." - Adriano

“Nothing is genetically programmed. (...) An epigenetic effect. “Epi” means on top of, so that the epigenetic influence is what happens environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes. (…) Life experiences that not only shape the person’s personality and psychological needs but also their very brains in certain ways. And that process begins in utero. (...) The great British child psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott, said that fundamentally, two things can go wrong in childhood. One is when things happen that shouldn’t happen and then things that should happen but don’t. (…) “Interpersonal Neurobiology” which means to say that the way that our nervous system functions depends very much on our personal relationships, in the first place with the parenting caregivers, and in the second place with other important attachment figures in our lives and in the third-place, with our entire culture. (...) " - Amira

"On a certain level the nature of our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature. We come up with more social variability than any species out there. More systems of belief, of styles, of family structures, of ways of raising children. The capacity for variety that we have is extraordinary. (…) The myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met." - Amira

“Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Steven Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two world wars and the mass killers Stalin and Hitler, the likelihood of a European or American dying a violent death was less than 1%. Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans first developed agriculture 10,000 years ago. And it has dropped steeply since the Middle Ages. It may come as a surprise to fans of Inspector Morse but Oxford in the 1300s, Pinker tells us, was 110 times more murderous than it is today. (...) Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. (...)" - Amira

"The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. (...) Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots. (...)" - Amira

"After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent. (...) The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. (...) Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity." - Amira

See also: Steven Pinker on The Colbert Report http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col... (video) - Amira

"The cellist is an intellectual omnivore as much as a musician. He talks about why neuroscience fascinates him – and what it reveals about our creative impulses. (...) I suggest that music is exploiting our instincts to make sense of our environment, to look for patterns, to develop hypotheses about our environment. It’s setting us puzzles. (…) Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.” (…) It is about finding ways to communicate ideas in a manner that yields the greatest harvest of creativity. “There is nothing more important today than to find a way to be knowledge-based creative societies. My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it’s memorable… If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there’s really not much point in you having been there – or me, for that matter. Now, isn’t that the purpose of education too? That’s when I realised that education and culture are the same. Once something is memorable, it’s living and you’re using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.” - Amira

he came to my undergrad to play; it was incredible - ωαřмaiden ❤Bassetmom❤

I freaking love Yo-Yo Ma. - Hookuh Tinypants

I first misread the title as Yo Yo Mama, and thought somebody was just mocking around. - babeuf(donata donata'dan)

““Nothing is ever lost” means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are. We’re running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can’t adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn’t a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are. (…) I discovered the cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s notion that human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic—that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. So it’s a deeply interdisciplinary study. I’m drawing on biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and child-development researchers all in order to understand the deep roots of what would ultimately become religion.” - Amira

"NS: Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation has recently helped renew public interest in the axial age concept too. What do you think of that book? RB: I’ve been with her up on the platform, and I know she’s a very intelligent person. But she doesn’t know much about the axial age. For her, it’s all about compassion. Compassion is a great thing, but that just won’t do! When she ends up excluding Greece from the axial age because there was no compassion there, I thought I would pull my hair out. It’s so simple-minded. In terms of the big picture, I don’t see any other book that does anything like what I’m trying to do." Poor Karen. She never quite gets it :) - Eivind

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. (…) I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. (…) I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. (…) - Amira

"I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.” - Amira

See also: Bertrand Russell’s message to future generations http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... - Amira

“Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research. (...) Analysis of story elements was used to create an interconnected web of 100 trillion relationships. (…) Computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200–kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. (...) News contains far more than just factual details: an array of cultural and contextual influences strongly impact how events are framed for an outlet’s audience, offering a window into national consciousness. A growing body of work has shown that measuring the “tone” of this real–time consciousness can accurately forecast many broad social behaviors, ranging from box office sales to the stock market itself. (...)" - Amira

"The geographic clustering of the news, the way in which it frames localities together, offers new insights into how the world views itself and the “natural civilizations” of the news media. While heavily biased and far from complete, the news media captures the only cross–national real–time record of human society available to researchers. The findings of this study suggest that Culturomics, which has thus far focused on the digested history of books, can yield intriguing new understandings of human society when applied to the real–time data of news. From forecasting impending conflict to offering insights on the locations of wanted fugitives, applying data mining approaches to the vast historical archive of the news media offers promise of new approaches to measuring and understanding human society on a global scale.” - Amira

Very cool. - Eivind

"Europe’s exceptional virtues, it is diversity, the wealth of variety, that he places above all others. Abundance of diversity is deemed by him as the most precious treasure which Europe managed to save from the conflagrations of the past, to offer to the world today. To live with Another, live as Another for Another, is the fundamental task of man - both on the highest and the lowest level …therein perhaps dwells that specific advantage of Europe, which could and had to learn the art of living with others. (...) It is impossible to underestimate the weight of this task, or the determination with which Europe should undertake it, if (to echo Gadamer once more) the condition sine qua non, necessary for the solution of life problems of the contemporary world, is friendship and “cheerful solidarity”. (...) For the ancient Greeks, the word “friend”, according to Gadamer, described the ”totality of social life”. Friends are people capable and desirous of an amiable mutual relationship unconcerned by the differences between them, and keen to help one another on account of those differences; capable and willing to act with kindliness and generosity without letting go of their distinctness - at the same time taking care that that distinctness should not create a distance between them, or turn them against one another. (...) All of us Europeans (...) are perfectly suited to become friends in the sense given to friendship by Ancient Greeks, the fore-fathers of Europe: not by sacrificing that which is dear to our hearts, but by offering it to neighbours near and far, just as they offer us, as generously, that which is dear to their hearts. Gadamer pointed out that the path to understanding leads through a “fusion of horizons”. If that which each human agglomeration regards as truth, is the basis of their collective experience, then the horizons surrounding their field of vision are also the boundaries of collective truths. (...)" - Amira

"So much inaccessible human wisdom hides in the experiences written in foreign dialect. One of the most significant, though by no means the only component of this hidden wisdom. (...) How much wisdom we would have all gained, how would our co-existence have benefited, had part of Union’s funds been devoted to the translation of members’ writings… Personally I am convinced that it would have been perhaps the best investment into the future of Europe and the success of its mission.” - Amira

"As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are co-evolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. (...) Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today. (…) Homo sapiens is a tendency, not an entity. Humanity is a process. Always was, always will be. Every living organism is on its way to becoming. (...) The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand pro- cess than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. (...) Technologies are like organisms that require a sequence of developments to reach a particular stage. Inventions follow this uniform developmental sequence in every civilization and society, independent of human genius. You can’t effectively jump ahead when you want to. But when the web of supporting technological species are in place, an invention will erupt with such urgency that it will occur to many people at once. The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative." - Amira

"[Stamet] compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure. (...) “I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate.” (…) The devices of desire are those that connect. The Crackberry is just the latest super-connectivity and conductivity device-of-desire. The psilocybin mushroom embeds the form of its own life-cycle into consciousness when consciousness is altered by the mushroom, and this template, brought home to Google Earth, made into tools of connectivity, potentiates the mycelium of knowledge, connecting all cultural production. (...) The desire extends the filaments, and energizes the constant linking and unlinking of the vast signaling system that lights up the mycelium. Periodic visits to the psychedelic sphere reveal the progress of this mycelial growth, as well as its back-history, future, origins, inhabitants, and purpose. Google is growing the cultural mycelial mat, advancing this process exponentially. Google is the first psychedelically informed super-power to shape the noosphere and NASDAQ. Google is part of virtually everybody’s online day. The implications are staggering. (…)" - Amira

"Terence McKenna kept cycling through, and represents the key noetic technology for the stabilization of the transformation of consciousness in a sharable conceptual architecture. In Terence’s words, “It’s almost as though the project of communication becomes high-speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and intentionality. This would remain a kind of esoteric performance on the part of shamans at the height of intoxication if it were not for the fact that electronics and electronic cultural media, computers, make it possible for us to actually create records of these higher linguistic modalities.” - Amira

i looks like there are some butterfly on the picture. - MayLing

"You have to look at what launderettes are offering, whether or not they are they social centres and how you could encourage that” Sir John Hegarty Brain behind famous Levi's advert - Halil

I just did them in college (I suppose that's a college launderette), I don't think I've ever really been to one of those high street ones you see on TV. They seem like odd places - people just sit and read waiting for their washing to finish and then carry it home in a bag. Seems weird to me. - Winckel

"The mathematics of quantum theory has something to say about the nature of human thinking. (...) “Quantum” mathematics really isn’t owned by physics at all, and turns out to be better than classical mathematics in capturing the fuzzy and flexible ways that humans use ideas. “People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic,” “The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.” (...) People aren’t logical, at least by classical standards. But quantum theory, Aerts argues, offers richer logical possibilities. (...) “Quantum probabilities have the potential to provide a better framework for modelling human decision making,” (...) “The structure of human conceptual knowledge is quantum-like because context plays a fundamental role,” (...) How search engines retrieve information. (...) “We often rely on hunches, and traditionally, computers are very bad at hunches. This is just where the quantum-inspired models give fresh insights.” (...) Quantum operations in semantic Hilbert spaces are a powerful means of finding previously unrecognised associations between concepts. This may even offer a route towards computers being truly able to discover things for themselves. (…)" - Amira

"Why should quantum logic fit human behaviour? The reason is to do with our finite brain being overwhelmed by the complexity of the environment yet having to take action long before it can calculate its way to the certainty demanded by classical logic. Quantum logic may be more suitable to making decisions that work well enough, even if they’re not logically faultless. “The constraints we face are often the natural enemy of getting completely accurate and justified answers,” (...) This idea fits with the views of some psychologists, who argue that strict classical logic only plays a small part in the human mind. (...) Much of our thinking operates on a largely unconscious level, where thought follows a less restrictive logic and forms loose associations between concepts. (...) This is not to say that the human brain or consciousness have anything to do with quantum physics, only that the mathematical language of quantum theory happens to match the description of human decision-making. (...) To be human is to be quantum.” - Amira

“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” With that tweet, Jon Huntsman set himself apart from every other candidate in the Republican primary field. (...) With the exception of Huntsman, the candidates don’t know science, haven’t bothered to ask someone who does, and, in several cases, don’t even know anything about the settled policy issues (judicial precedent and investigation of claims about fraud). Why would we want these traits in a president? (...) The leading candidates in the Republican party are successful in part precisely because they are voicing an opinion that runs counter to expertise. For many in the US, expertise has taken on a negative cultural value; experts are part of an elite that thinks it knows better than the average citizen. (This is accurate, for what it’s worth.) Very few object to that sort of expertise when it comes time to, say, put the space shuttle into orbit, but expertise can become a problem when the experts have reached a consensus that runs against cultural values. (...) Carbon emissions are creating a risk of climate change. Humanity originated via an evolutionary process. All of these findings have threatened various aspects of people’s cultural identity. By rejecting both the science and the expertise behind it, candidates can essentially send a signal that says, “I’m one of you, and I’m with you where it counts.” (...) “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party—the anti-science party—we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science—Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.” (…) My biggest concern is that, ultimately, Huntsman may be wrong. We’re in an environment where economic concerns will almost certainly dominate the election. And the campaigns will be covered by a press that cares more about the strategy of what a candidate said than its accuracy, a press that thinks it achieves balance by pretending there are two sides on every issue that merit serious consideration. In that environment, it’s entirely possible that the US electorate may not recognize or care much about the implications of a few scientific questions." - Amira

Please don't go down the anti-science road, America. - Eivind

"Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. (...)Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style. (…) There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. (...)We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about. And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. (...) We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to. (...) Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions. (...) The most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. (...)" - Amira

"This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut. But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences. (...) But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium. No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. (...) Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational. (...)" - Amira

I think that nowadays big ideas are typically carried by entrepreneurs, and later institutionalized in the new businesses they found. The idea of making all the world's information instantly retrievable is doing pretty well, as is the idea of letting every individual share themselves online with others. Not every type of idea lends itself to build a business around though, and these ideas may indeed not get any traction. Maybe until someone figures out how to build a business around it anyway. - Meryn Stol

See also: 'The Secret of Innovation: The Best Ideas Are Small': "Malcolm Gladwell praised what he saw as the real genius of Apple’s late CEO [Steve Jobs]. He was a tweaker. He took things that existed, such as the computer mouse and the smartphone and the tablet, and he made them more perfect. (...) The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.Today, one can say that the best ideas are small and mean it literally. (…) It is also safe to say that they will be microscopic. (...) The odds are that the next innovations will be a series of small bangs, miniscule sparks illuminating pockets of dark space and expanding the known universe incrementally. (…) The best ideas are incremental. Earth-shattering innovations don’t look like the end of history. They look like a few more spindles on the cotton mule.” ---- 'All scientific discoveries are in principle ‘multiples’ [updated] http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... - Amira

"At present, linguists predict that over 50 per cent of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by the turn of the century. (...) I am a romantic and romantics are nowadays always disillusioned because the world is no longer how they had hoped it to be. I had gone to the top of the world and had wished to find elderly folk sitting around telling stories. Instead, I found adults and children glued to television screens with a bowl of seal soup on their lap, playing exceedingly violent and expletive crammed Hollywoodian video war games. Time and time again, I discovered this awkward juxtaposition of modernity meets tradition. Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates. (...) Some Polar Eskimos may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon delivers. Most 8 year-olds who live in Qaanaaq and the remote settlements have the latest smartphones. Media entertainment will, however, never be produced for a language of 770 speakers because it is loss-making. Technology, be it mobile phones, DVDs or video games may support the top 50 languages maximum, but never more than that. Some languages are not suited to these technologies: Greenlandic words are too long to subtitle and to use in text messaging. Polar Eskimos tend to send text messages in Danish or English because it is easier. (...) A language is so much more than a syntactic code or a list of grammar rules. To treat language as such is to reduce it to its least interesting features. When languages die, we do not just lose words, but we lose different ways of conceptually framing things. For the Polar Eskimos, there is no one concept of ‘ice’, but over twenty different ways of referring to various forms of ice. Through different distinctions in meaning, languages provide insights onto how groups of speakers ‘know the world’." - Amira

"Despite the wars and despite different religions. All the sciences, all the arts, thus received mutal assistance in this way: the academies formed this republic. (…) True scholars in each field drew closer the bonds of this great society of minds, spread everywhere and everywhere independent. This correspondence still remains; it is one of the consolations for the evils that ambition and politics spread across the Earth.” — Voltaire "The Republic of Letters (...) organized itself around cultural institutions (e. g. museums, libraries, academies) and research projects that collected, sorted, and dispersed knowledge. A pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed. (...) Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed. (…) Intellectuals across Europe came to see themselves, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as citizens of a transnational intellectual society—a Republic of Letters in which speech was free, rank depended on ability and achievement rather than birth, and scholars, philosophers and scientists could find common ground in intellectual inquiry even if they followed different faiths and belonged to different nations.” - Amira