14 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Celebrity Economy
This century's last great trend was noted by acute observers in 1996, yet most people failed to appreciate it. While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations. Nowadays, if you develop a marvelous piece of software, everyone will have downloaded a free copy from the Net the next day. If you record a magnifi...Folksonomies: art information economy
Folksonomies: art information economy
2 
2 Endless channels of media allow for more celebrities, but to smaller audiences. In order to make money from media, celebrities must sell more than their works. Their works must serve as advertisements for something else, like paid performances or lectures.
24 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Experiments Were Sacred to Darwin
Although [Charles Darwin] would patiently go on repeating experiments where there was any good to be gained, he could not endure having to repeat an experiment which ought, if complete care had been taken, to have told its story at first—and this gave him a continual anxiety that the experiment should not be wasted ; he felt the experiment to be sacred, however slight a one it was. He wished to learn as much as possible from an experiment, so that he did not confine himself to observing the... 1 
notes
notesHe hated to repeat them if he felt he had gained all the knowledge there was to gain from one, so he paid very close attention when performing one.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Man is Noble...
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it... 1 notes
notes...but still "bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." A quote from Charles Darwin.
03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Tangled Bank Theory
Michael Ghiselin developed this idea further in 1974 and made some telling analogies with economic trends. As Ghiselin put it, "In a saturated economy, it pays to diversify." Ghiselin suggested that most creatures compete with their brothers and sisters, so if everybody is a little different from their brothers and sisters, then more can survive. The fact that your parents thrived doing one thing means that it will probably pay to do something else because the local habitat might well be full...Folksonomies: evolution evolutionary theory
Folksonomies: evolution evolutionary theory
"In a saturated economy, it pays to diversify."
