10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Outboard Brain
Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention spans. They can't remember their own phone numbers. They spend more time on social media than they did with their friends irl (that's "in real life," my daughter tells me). They... 1 
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notes18 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
Eternitas: Transforming Data into Architecture
There is a little local exomemory that opens up while Isidore studies the structure. It describes Eternitas as an ‘experiment in transforming exomemory data directly into architecture and livable spaces.’ The Oubliette is full of similar art projects – indeed, many of Isidore’s fellow students work on considerably stranger things – but clearly there is something deeper here, something that is or has been important to the thief.
On impulse, he takes out his magnifying glass. He gasp... 1 notes
notes29 MAY 2014 by ideonexus
Cosmic Gall
Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass.
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass.
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class.
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall ...
1 Neutrinos wonderful or crass?
16 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
"Real Life" General Game Play
The first thing you'll notice about Real-life is that it about 9 months to start a new character, mainly because two other players have to "register" for a new player to enter the game, fortunately now-a-days "registering" is happening more and more frequently, unfortunately this means that the "sever" getting overcrowd. But back to starting a new character, after waiting 9 months, you enter the game (in a pretty graphic way) but after the tutorial begins, with learning about the breathing an...It takes nine months to spawn and everything is a mini-game.
10 SEP 2013 by ideonexus
Think of Everything as Already Broken
In his book Thoughts without a Thinker, psychiatrist
Mark Epstein recounts this teaching
by the Thai meditation master Achaan Chah.
“You see this goblet?” Achaan Chah asks.
“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy
it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably,
sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to
it. But when I put this glass on the shelf, and the
wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off
the table and it fal... 1 notes
notesA liberating perspective.
22 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
How Small are Atoms?
Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marke...So small that, if you were to pour a cup of water into the ocean and let it stir in, you could retrieve a cup of water from anywhere in the ocean that would contain 100 molecules from your cup.
17 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Shattered Glass as a Metaphor for Taxonomy
Let us suppose that we have laid on the table... [a] piece of glass... and let us homologize this glass to a whole order of plants or birds. Let us hit this glass a blow in such a manner as but to crack it up. The sectors circumscribed by cracks following the first blow may here be understood to represent families. Continuing, we may crack the glass into genera, species and subspecies to the point of finally having the upper right hand corner a piece about 4 inches square representing a sub-s...The smaller pieces you smash it into, the more specific the classification. TODO: I don't understand the "4 inches" part at the end concerning sub-species.
13 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Animals are "Other Nations"
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world old... 1 notes
notesThey are not below us or above or even our bretheren, they see and feel completely alien to us.
