“Your soul adheres to a place because souls are notoriously fragile and places stick around a lot longer.”
- Bob Oswald

I found this interesting:

All communities are intentional, but some are more intentional than others.

… We all came here (or in the rare case of the true natives, stayed here) for a reason. Your soul adheres to a place because souls are notoriously fragile and places stick around a lot longer. You adhere because every day, you invest yourself into where you are.

- Bob Oswald @ Belltown Messenger: Link.

“The Lazy, Clever Programmer: A Compendium Of Code Reuse & Recycling”

“As developers, once we start separating our code into abstract ontological typologies, we make use of the human mind’s phenomenal ability to work with types. Our code becomes less about jump tables and registers and more about users, email messages and images. What once was a problem of allocating resources and operations within the computer becomes an abstract, logical problem within a collection of objects….Over time, by constantly working to reuse our own code, we choose practices that work well for ourselves and discard practices that don’t work as well or slow down our workflow. For developers flying solo or those working on small projects, this evolutionary process is a sufficient way of going about things. But there’s trouble when we add other players into the mix–other developers, a user interface person, a database person, a sysadmin, a project mana-jerk: as a developer, they don’t have access to our ‘experience’ of the code and we don’t have access to theirs. ”

- Edgar Hassler: Link.

Via Slashdot: Link.

Thought for today:

“Fate has decreed for each person the immutable working out of events, surrounding him with many occasions for good or bad… Two self-begotten gods, Hope and Fortune, the assistants of Fate, control man’s life and make him bear Fate’s decrees by using their compulsion and deception… Fortune raises some high only to cast them down and degrades others only to raise them to glory… Hope moves everywhere in secret, smiling like and flatterer, and she displays many attractive prospects which cannot be attained. By deceiving men, she controls most of them… Those ignorant of the prognostic art led away and enslaved by these gods. They endure all blows and suffer punishments with pleasure. Some partially attain what they hoped for; their confidence begins to increase, and they await a permanently favorable outcome–not realizing how precarious and slippery are these accidents of Fortune. Others are disappointed in their expectations, not just once but always… But those who have trained themselves in the prognostic art and in the truth keep their minds free and out of bondage. They despise Fortune, do not persist in Hope, do not fear death and live undisturbed… They are alien to all pleasury or flattery and stand firm as soldiers of Fate.”

- Vettius Valens , “Anthology”

Vettius Valens @ Wikipedia.

Thx, EB.

“In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.”

Kevin Kelly has posted some interesting thoughts about technology and wealth in the twenty-first century:

The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

- Kevin Kelly, Edge: Link.

Via Slashdot: What Makes Something “Better Than Free”?

Go read the entire essay. But first, I’ll spill the beans:

(more…)

Thought for Today:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Of Beauty. Link.

Wikipedia: Beauty - Francis Bacon

Here’s a story I like to tell:

I started programming when I was fifteen. (Actually, I wrote my very first BASIC program when I was ten years old, but that’s another story.) I’m now forty-six, so you can see I have some experience. Anyway, when I was fifteen, my dad taught me the rudiments of structured programming. He was a programmer himself, for the Star-Tribune.

Something he said has always stuck with me. He said, what usually happens is this: Management issues some directives; the programmers fulfill the directives; the end users try to use the programs — and things go wrong because the end users were never consulted about what kind of tools they need to do their jobs.

The successful programmer, dad said, is the one who first goes and sits down with the end users, talks to them about their jobs, finds out what they really need — then integrates this knowledge with Management directives. He called this “going native” (before he was a programmer, he took his degree in anthropology).

I’ve always taken this to heart, and in this sense, I’ve got something like thirty years experience in good interface design. Of course, I don’t actually say this on my resume, it’s kind of silly. But it’s a great story, and I think it illustrates the approach I take to my work.

- Karl Jones

Thought for today:

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot’s last words (1890)
(Blackfoot warrior and orator)

Thought for Today

Learning builds daily accumulation, but the practice of Tao builds daily simplification. Simplify and simplify, until all contamination from relative, contradictory thinking is eliminated. Then one does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. One who wins the world does so by not meddling with it. One who meddles with the world loses it.

Tao te Ching, 48. Lao-Tzu

Tao Te Ching @ Wikipedia

“The poet must not avert his eyes. You have to take a bold look at what is your environment, what is around you. Even the ugly things, even the decadent things …”

Interview with Werner Herzog:

Herzog on filmmaking: “The world is just not made for filmmaking. Every time you make a film you must be prepared to wrestle it away from the Devil himself. But carry on, dammit! Ignite the fire. Ultimately, the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.”

Via Big Man Tabasco Sauce.

Werner Herzog @ Wikipedia.

“In order to deceive others you need to deceive yourself.”

I’ve been alternating between reading The Secret and The Truth About Bullshit. Funny how complementary these two disparate books can be, which has led me to the concept of Secret Bullshit, based on a psychological notion that in order to deceive others you need to deceive yourself.

… You can watch secret bullshit becoming public bullshit as the language becomes increasingly perverted, ranging from the Bush doctrine that the new winning is not winning, to the cavalier morphing of the word debate to mean that candidates are not permitted to ask each other any questions–the very antithesis of what a debate originally meant.

“They should call it an AA meeting,” my wife Nancy observed. “No cross-talk allowed.” She is an instinctive detector of secret bullshit when expressed publicly, that transcends political correctness. As the pundits discuss the merits of stiffer sentences for hate crimes, Nancy wonders aloud, “And what are the others–love crimes?”

[Paul Krassner: Boing Boing]

paulkrassner.com

Thought for today …:

Ars longa, vita brevis is part of an aphorism by Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, usually truncated to its first two statements, art is long, life is short. (See also List of Latin phrases.)

The full text in Latin is:

Ars longa,
vita brevis,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

The full text is often rendered in English as:

“Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Also:

“Life is short, art [of medicine] is long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decisions difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.”

(from Aphorism, section I, no. 1)

[Wikipedia]

A thought for today: Three in the Morning

When we wear out our minds, stubbornly clinging to one partial view of things, refusing to see a deeper agreement between this and its complementary opposite, we have what is called “three in the morning.”

What is this “three in the morning?”

A monkey trainer went to his monkeys and told them: “As regards your chestnuts: you are going to have three measures in the morning and four in the afternoon.

At this they all became angry. So he said: “All right, in that case I will give you four in the morning and three in the afternoon.” This time they were satisfied.

The two arrangements were the same in that the number of chestnuts did not change. But in the one case the animals were displeased, and in the other they were satisfied. The keeper had been willing to change his personal arrangement in order to meet objective conditions. He lost nothing by it!

The truly wise man, considering both sides of the question without partiality, sees them both in the light of Tao.

This is called following two courses at once.

[Thomas Merton: The Way of Chuang Tzu, Shambala Pocket Classics]

Image: THE MONKEY TRAINER
India, Bengala, Region of Chandraketugarh
2nd-1st c. BC
Terracotta, 15.5” by 21”
asianart.com: Link