“Life is nothing but moments, and every moment is nothing but another culmination of the universe’s incalculable ripples. Out where we can’t see, they’re crossing and merging, bringing toward us new forms and experiences that are almost perfectly unpredictable. Yet the way we think about life seldom reflects that reality. We plan and worry and forecast and dread, all with an absurd sense of certainty, like we’re setting up snooker shots and we can see all the balls.”
— David Cain
“Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself.” — Snow Crash
I’m stuck on the role of FB and Twitter as virus vectors. How naive of us to think the worst parts of humanity — racism and white supremacy — would not spread more rapidly than our better natures.
“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.”
— Snow Crash
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book but discover something new each time I pick it up. I like Stephenson’s female characters. Always smart and strong. Y.T. the skateboard courier in Snow Crash; Eliza in The Baroque Cycle; and Zula in REAMDE.
Same goes for William Gibson: Molly Millions (Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive); Angie Mitchell (Count Zero); Chevette Washington (Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition); Hollis Henry (Spook Country and Zero History); and Flynne Fisher (The Peripheral).
Financial historian William J. Bernstein explores how communication tools shaped human history. Among the book’s many narratives:
Below are some excerpts from the book: Continue reading
David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.
“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”
“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”
“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”
I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page.
“Every time someone in a group of people deploys a screen, the whole group is affected. Each disengaged person in a crowd is like a little black hole, a dead zone for social energy, radiating a noticeable field of apathy towards the rest of the room and what’s happening there.”
— The Simple Joy of “No Phones Allowed”
“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”
— Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)
Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”
“There is something marvelous in the fact that we barely understand what most of the cells in our brains are doing.”
— Carl Zimmer (Discover magazine, September 2009)
“It is man’s cunning to endlessly solve problems; it’s the universe’s intelligence to have never a problem. Man’s dominion is one of constant control: the domain of the universe is one where everything competently, perfectly, manages itself: everything!
— Robert Wolfe
“The noticing of a passing thought and the explosion of an ancient star are not unrelated phenomenon: both the product of a self-creating, self-destroying ubiquitous capability.”
— Living Nonduality