30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Digital Archiving Creates an Immense Wealth of History
With digital archiving in all its forms, however, a new regime of technologies for holding past experience has emerged. Our past has always been malleable, but now it is malleable with a new viscosity. Whereas in the past our experiences were frequently (literally!) pigeonholed into rigid classification systems, leading to a relative paucity of tales we could tell of our past, today the traces have multiplied and the rigid classifications are withering. (Who now does a “tree” search using...We once had to document history, but now our lives are documented for us all over the place online.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Chemists Live More Sweetly Than Persian Kings
The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king.Knowledge for its own sake is more satisfying than immense wealth.