“Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted.” — From William Gibson’s 1996 novel, Idoru
Category Archives: Quotable & Notes
Poor Person Baton
There’s a sad little woman
with a cardboard sign
standing by the off-ramp
pretty much rain or shine.
The sign says “god bless you”
but I never look too close.
She wears those long dresses
that say I’m a child of god,
you can forget about my legs.
When I miss the light
and have to stop
I hold up a bill and she trots over
“God bless you, god bless you”…
Whoosh I’m gone.
When the light is green
I go sailing by, “next time” say my eyes.
Or we try a daring hand-off move
like passing the poor person baton.
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
“It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.” — Paul Graham
Chris Rock on race and comedy
A long, but interesting, interview with Chris Rock in New York magazine. A few excerpts to wet your whistle:
If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.
When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.
An end of radio
“Just as newspapers fell off a cliff, radio is about to follow. It’s going to happen faster than anyone expects. And of course, it will be replaced by a new thing, a long tail of audio that’s similar (but completely different) from what we were looking for from radio all along. And that audience is just waiting for you to create something worth listening to.”
Seth Godin blog post
The transistor radio
From Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators:
“Transistors were being sold in 1954 to the military for about $16 apiece. But in order to break into the consumer marker. Haggerty insisted that his engineers find a way to make them so that they could be sold for less than $3. They did. He also developed a Jobs-like knack, which would serve him then and in the future, for conjuring up devices that consumers did not yet know they needed but would soon find indispensable. In the case of the transistor, Haggerty came up with the idea of a small pocket radio. When he tried to convince RCA and other big firms that made tabletop radios to become a partner in the venture, they pointed out (rightly) that consumers were not demanding a pocket radio. But Haggerty understood the importance of spawning new markets rather than merely chasing old ones. He convinced a small Indianapolis company that built TV antenna boosters to join forces on what would be called the Regency TR-1 radio. Haggerty made the deal in June 1954 and, typically, insisted that the device be on the market by that November. It was. The Regency radio, the size of a pack of index cards, used four transistors and sold for $49.95. It was initially marketed partly as a security item, now that the Russians had the atom bomb. “In event of an enemy attack, your Regency TR-1 wiU become one of your most valued possessions,” the first owner s manual declared. But it quickly became an object of consumer desire and teenage obsession. Its plastic case came, iPod-like, in four colors: black, ivory, Mandarin Red, and Cloud Gray. Within a year, 100,000 had been sold, making it one of the most popular new products in history.”
“More fundamentally, the transistor radio became the first major example of a defining theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal. The radio was no longer a living-room appliance to be shared; it was a personal device that allowed you to listen to your own music where and when you wanted—even if it was music that your parents wanted to ban.”
Spark
This was a very satisfying read. The cold, professional killer story has been told so many times it must be difficult to find a fresh take. I liked this one. By John Twelve Hawks.
In reality, the universe is neutral about our existence. Only dogs care.
A Vast Machine watched and evaluated them, remembering their past actions and predicting their future behavior.
All language –everything we say– is just an approximation of reality.
Most conscious thought is simply an attempt to claim ‘authorship’ for a choice that has already been made. Our thoughts are just an ongoing attempt to explain what we’ve already decided.
Lying, not love, is the fundamental indication of humanity.
The laws of mathematics are stronger than the laws of man.
True ideology has vanished, replaced by fear and fantasy. The right wing wants corporate control and a return to a past that never existed. The left wing wants government control and a future that will never exist.
Our problem is not machines acting like humans — it’s humans acting like machines.
What happens in our future can change the meaning of what has happened in our past.
The Tao of Zen
“The Tao of Zen is a nonfiction book by Ray Grigg. The work argues that what we recognize as traditional Chinese Ch’an/Japanese Zen Buddhism is in fact almost entirely grounded in Chinese Taoist philosophy, though this fact is well shrouded by the persistence of Mahayana Buddhist institutional trappings. Utilizing an array of scholarly commentary on the two traditions and historical deduction from what can be considered to be the best primary source material available, the author traces the development of Taoism and Buddhism in China and Japan for two millennia.” (Wikipedia)
I’ve read this book twice and expect to read it again but I wouldn’t know where to begin to describe it. The Wikipedia link above is a good start. As is my habit with nonfiction, I highlighted as I read: The Tao of Zen (Ray Grigg)
Waking Up
Just finished Waking Up – A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Amazon reviews here; more about Mr. Harris here. Ideas I found highlighter-worthy below.
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.
It is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determine the quality of your life.
Everything we want to accomplish is something that promises, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. […] Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”
Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?
On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.
A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.
It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.
We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy.
(Mindfulness is ) a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness. […] Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.
The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing we are thinking.
Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.
Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives.
Meditation is a technique for waking up.
Investigating the nature of consciousness is the basis of spiritual life.
Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
If you shut your eyes at this moment, the contents of your consciousness change quite drastically, but your consciousness (arguably) does not.
Are we unconsciousness during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?
We are not aware of all the information that influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
I’ve forgotten most of what has happened to me over the course of my life.
Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. […] Reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.
(I am) a continuum of experience.
The feeling of “I” is a product of thought. […] Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.
(Thoughts are) transient appearances in consciousness.
We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening.
Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. […] We spend our lives lost in thought. […] Taking oneself to be the thinking of one’s thoughts is a delusion.
One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts — that is, prior to the arising of the next one.
We imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. We seem to be riding around inside our bodies.
(The self) is the feeling that there is an inner subject, behind our eyes, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experience.
It may be that an awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s own.
Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness — uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.
Consciousness is intrinsically free of self.
That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. Notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself — you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind.
Consciousness is intrinsically undivided.
Nothing is intrinsically boring — boredom is simply a lack of attention.
We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.
It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness — to our thought, moods, and desires — that we make progress.
There is experience, and then there are the stories we tell about it.
Consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows.
The Masked Avengers
“All you need to be a world-class hacker is a computer and a cool pair of sunglasses. And the computer is optional.” — The Masked Avengers: How Anonymous incited online vigilantism from Tunisia to Ferguson.