“(Your mind) is like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking. And this happens every day of your life.”
— Sam Harris
Your mind
Reply
Tag Archives: Quotable
“Journalism is partisan now”
“Journalism is partisan now. Can’t help it. Just being ethical and educated is now a partisan position. We weren’t raised to believe that, but it’s the new reality.”
— Dave Winer
Ten years before the iPad
Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. Does the following excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon (punished in 1999) sound familiar?
“Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”
Light
“Like a hole in the paper is both in the paper and yet not of the paper, so is the supreme state in the very centre of consciousness, and yet beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind through which the mind is flooded with light. The opening is not even the light, it is just an opening.”
“When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.”
“There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas. They are of no use to you. See the light and disregard the picture.”
“In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.”
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)
“You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”
–The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)
The smartphone is our era’s cigarette
Ross Barkan writing in The Guardian:
“(The 2010s were) dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the twentieth century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.”
“In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.”
How we’ll be remembered
“This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”
– Dave Winer
Why the Brits don’t make computers
Spotted a new leak on the truck and reached out to my friend (and Land Rover expert) John Middleton:
Common place for them to leak. Rear transfer case output shaft seal. May need a speedy sleeve on the the output flange. The flange nut also might be loose. Eventually you will get oil on the parking brake shoes. All of mine have leaked or still leak there. If it stops leaking it means the transfer case has run out of oil!
Very hard to find a Land Rover that does not drip some oil. As the tappet brothers proclaimed: “The British were not successful in the computer industry because they could not figure out how to make one that leaked oil.”
How life happens
“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.”
Viruses
“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 virus
“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).