Crashes are a form of feedback. But a really, really inefficient one.
Anatole Kaletsky writes: Does this mean that financial cycles are pathological and immoral? The alternation of greed and fear certainly causes losses and econom...
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
What every child wants.
Fun quote from an essay on CCTV surveillance and free will: God is really no different than any other parent. All he wants is absolute, unquestioning obedience ...
This is what secular hope looks like, feels like.
By Michael Marantz featuring the late Carl Sagan reading from his book, “The Pale Blue Dot”. via Jack Shedd
If it sounds complicated…
Aaron Swartz: How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart… But…...
A leviathan for the modern man.
The most interesting adversary in a story is one to which the protagonist owes a debt. To whom or to what do we owe the greatest debt at this moment? To God or ...
La familia y la política.
Las relaciones entre los seres humanos jamás son fáciles. Nacemos irresponsables y egoístas y poco a poco aprendemos como esforzarnos a ser humano, gracias a es...
Neil Gaiman: information then, a desert; information now: a jungle.
Neil Gaiman Information used to be gold: hard to find, expensive, the equivalent of going off into the desert and coming back with a perfect lump of gold. Now, ...
The next phase of the war, our war, in Afghanistan.
The very direct Realism in Afghanistan: Rethinking an Uncertain Case for the War is an excellent supplement to the recent New Yorker report “War by Other ...
Movies as a vehicle for time travel: not so much.
Reading about the recently discovered graves of Roman gladiators and their lives, as best we can imagine them, I wondered if any movie can reproduce the experie...
Yelp as a catalyst for business growth.
We first went to Al Watan, a great Pakistani restaurant by the airport, in June of 2009. By then, it had been reviewed 34 times on Yelp. It has since been revie...
An invention called anticipation.
Ana is making some beans. They smell great. Part of why they smell great is the feeling of anticipation. It is a feeling of pleasure set in the future. (Most of...
La Banda Lavanda
Their adventures trying to make it as techno cumbia band with openly gay members. The Monkees meets Entourage with a twist of lime.
What kind of a girl do you think I am? Oh, that kind of girl.
The ads that turn up during election time are like exquisite pick-up lines. What kind of a girl do you think I am? Oh, that kind of girl. I just read an ad for ...
clever adjustable table
The crutch table by the ADDI pair.
Playing fetch.
One of our dogs loves to play fetch. The more the object he is fetching behaves like prey (a bouncing ball can change its trajectory in unexpected ways), the mo...
Psyche! (as in Sike!)
I noted last week that the trades which are devoted to the study of the mind appear to be in a race against the trades that are devoted to exploiting the limits...
Unarchiving me.
I’ve been using an Apple computer for almost 20 years. I have files that date back to 1991. Back then, storage was limited. (I have mp3 files that are big...
The rise of the web, short and long term memory and oh
Nicholas Carr’s essay about the deleterious effects of the web is going to be controversial and that controversy could be very productive. Some of the men...
Bright moon light.
I woke up last night with a bright white light pointed at my face. It was the full moon beaming in through the window. There was a shadow of my head against the...
Models that don’t factor in psychology aren’t very serious.
James Surowiecki warns of political risk in global markets and or the spectre of sovereign capital: Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down ...