On the balance of top-down and bottom-up
Kevin Kelly is on of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, which you all know I am pretty fond of. He wrote an article (link below) recently on the balance o...
Category: Philosophy
We’re moving into an oral culture on so many levels
We’re rapidly approaching an oral culture. The fluidity of the Web seems to have many aspects of an oral culture in terms of how we can interact with so m...
Are Kosovars Albanians or Serbians?
I grew up thinking that nations should be the scale at which people are governed. I could not understand why Israel didn’t just make all the Palestinians ...
Data does not equal knowledge
At LIFT 08 last week, François Grey gave a great talk about the intersection of grid computing, crowdsourcing, and science. One thing that miffed me was when he...
Alex Wright and the history of information systems over the past few billion years
I got through another amazing Long New Seminar (long dog walks are great for that). This one was by Alex Wright, author of ‘Glut: Mastering Information Th...
Elated with Saffo seminar
I finally listened to the Saffo’s Long Now talk on forecasting. What really excited me is that he said some things that I’ve been thinking about. I ...
The future of zoos
Society has come a long way in animal welfare. But we still are caught trying to balance the needs of humanity and the needs of the animal. Zoos are one example...
From the Boston Globe comes a great essay on colleges ignoring life’s bigger questions
The Boston Globe has this great essay, by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman, about the teaching of the meaning of life in US colleges and universities. It’s ...