The Web is the Death of the Anecdote

Surveillance serves not just as a legal and historical record but as a record of rep: proof that you’ve done what you say you’ve done. You bark, and anyone on the mesh can search to see if you also bite. It’s the foundation of the reputation economy. It’s not just video, of course, but surveillance of all types. Ubiquitous, ever-present surveillance has become the new public record in countless habitats. You’ve seen the phrase, “Links or didn’t happen,” right? Without footage...

 Science and Poetry are Like Binary Stars

I would liken science and poetry in their natural independence to those binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope discovered to revolve round each other. 'There is one light of the sun,' says St. Paul, 'and another of the moon, and another of the stars: star differeth from star in glory.' It is so here. That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, is SCIENCE: that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues and magnificent blaze, is POETRY...

 Carl Sagan on the Belief in God

I think it's impossible to be a scientist and to confront, even occassionally, the grandure, subtlety, elegance and magnificience of the universe without feeling a sense of reverence and awe, but that's very different from concluding that there's a god who issues punishments and rewards after your dead or that prayer works or that the bible is written by anybody but fallible human beings. [...] The word god is used to cover so many different points of view... First of all, you can be religi...