25 OCT 2017 by ideonexus
A Sick Burn
Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulat...Folksonomies: insults
Folksonomies: insults
1 
notes
notes22 APR 2015 by ideonexus
Apple is Not the Alternative Choice
For some reason Apple is still considered the liberal/counter-cultural choice but if you think about every dystopian novel/movie and then I said “there’s going to be a company, the world’s largest company (or thereabouts), they’re going to sell one product (basically - the difference between an iphone/ipad/macbook/apple watch is just the form factor) that everyone has to accept as is, and people will line up for days for that one product, missing work to get it, you will have no contr...Folksonomies: walled garden
Folksonomies: walled garden
1 notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Causality as a Conceptual Tool
Causality itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause—of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an intersection, or nexus, of factors (including the absence of precluding conditions). In War and Peace, Tolstoy asks, “When an apple ripens and falls, why does it fall? Becau...
1 John Tooby on how causation is a way we simplify the world to more easily understand it, but it can also over-simplify.
14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
eBook Purchasers are Second-Class
We have come to accept as inevitable a duo of coexisting lousy extremes. Sometimes information is supposedly free but people are subject to weird surveillance and influence, with insufficient commensurate rights. This is the familiar world of Google, Facebook, et al. It will not be a sustainable path as technology advances.
On the flip side, customers can be locked into one-sided contracts in order to have access to what they want online. This is the world of proprietary tree-shaped stores f... 1 notes
notesThey are not making an investment with their purchase, they are renting. A physical book can be signed, manipulated, and resold.
07 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Privacy is Impossible on the Internet
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him;105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
[...]
Sure, we can take measures to pr...Folksonomies: privacy sousveillance
Folksonomies: privacy sousveillance
1 notes
notesThere are too many companies gathering too much data in too many ways.
08 FEB 2012 by ideonexus
The Earliest Account of Newton and the Apple
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a c... 1 notes
notesIncludes the fact that he extended the force pulling the apple to the ground up to the moon.
28 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Newton, Adam, and the Apple
When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation—
'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground
For any sage's creed or calculation)—
A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round
In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation';
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple. A poem by Lord Byron.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Byron's Don Juan and Controversy
However, on receiving an early copy of the first canto of Byron’s Don Juan in 1819, Banks was outraged. ‘I never read so Lascivious a performance. No woman here will Confess that she has read it. We hitherto considered his Lordship only as an Atheist without morals. We now must add to his respectable Qualifications that of being a Profligate.’16 Yet had Banks lived to read the tenth canto (1821), he might well have been amused by His Lordship’s nimble mockery of Newton and the story o... 1 notes
notesThe poem pokes fun at Adam in the Garden of Eden, and predicts a hopeful future through science.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Newton's Apple Gave New Meaning to the Garden of Eden Story
Part of the power of the story was that it replaced the sacred Biblical account of the Fall from Innocence in Genesis (Eve and the apple) with a secular parable of the Ascent to Knowledge. See Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (2005); and for a broad visionary perspective, Jacob Bronowski’s scientific classic The Ascent of Man (1973).
1 The apple bequeathed knowledge to man in the secular fable of Newton observing the apple drop.
20 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Importance of Smell and Taste in Infant Development
Olfactory recognition may also be the first step toward human bonding and attachment. As we've seen, newborns quickly learn and prefer the scent of their own mother or other caretaker. Nursing babies clearly have the richest olfactory experience, being bathed several times a day in the odors of their mother's milk and areolar secretions. Nonetheless, bottle-fed babies also can learn their parents' scents rather rapidly, depending on the amount and closeness of their contact. After the breast,...Smell allows an infant to label its world, identifying its mother, father, and siblings; while taste prepares it for the environment it will be born into and influence its preferences for foods within its culture.
