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...
notes 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.
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... notesIncludes the fact that he extended the force pulling the apple to the ground up to the moon.
It Wasn't the Apple that Newton Used to Discover Gravity
Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Camb] idge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for k...Gravity was already known, Newton's vision was extending the force of gravity up to the Moon.
1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial
TODO: Make this Link an Embedded Video
notesAn old Macintosh commercial, where Apple is the revolution against the conformity of PC's at the time.
The End of the Wild Wild Web
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally p...Stewart Brand said "Information wants to be free" but he also said that "Information wants to be expensive." As corporations restrict what we can do with computers, making them simpler, like the iPad and smart phones, where restrictions are marketed as features, the Internet becomes more homogenized, and we are more willing to pay for the content provided.
