This is the second installment of my reading highlights from my Kindle. This one is much more digestible than the first. Again, I’ve included links to the originals. Enjoy.
Understanding America-Exceptionalism – The Heritage Foundation
Added on Monday, May 09, 2011, 12:47 PM
Why is America Exceptional? “America is exceptional because, unlike any other nation, it is dedicated to the principles of human liberty, grounded on the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights.” While other nations are bound by a common ethnicity, religion, or history, America’s dedication to liberty makes it unique.
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Unspoken Truths (vanityfair.com)
Added on Thursday, May 12, 2011, 11:05 PM
Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift.
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In the medical literature, the vocal “cord” is a mere “fold,” a piece of gristle that strives to reach out and touch its twin, thus producing the possibility of sound effects. But I feel that there must be a deep relationship with the word “chord”: the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion. We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones who can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humor to produce higher syntheses. To lose this ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.
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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Stained Teeth: A Column About Wine. (mcsweeneys.net)
Added on Friday, May 13, 2011, 10:50 PM
In Plato’s Symposium, a philosophical discussion about love takes place because everyone involved is drinking wine. Symposium itself—now mostly referring to an academic conference—comes from the Greek for “drinking party.” As Fritz Allhoff writes in Philosophy and Wine, symposia “were effectively wine parties that gave rise to profound philosophical dialogue.”
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The wine is there to get us somewhere else. It’s a gimmick, but a gimmick that is more fun for me than the other way of doing this.
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Silicon Valley and the technology industry (economist.com)
Added on Saturday, May 14, 2011, 07:57 AM
Same again, only different So is history indeed about to repeat itself? Those who think not point out that the tech landscape has changed dramatically since the late 1990s. Back then few people were plugged into the internet; today there are 2 billion netizens, many of them in huge new wired markets such as China. A dozen years ago ultra-fast broadband connections were rare; today they are ubiquitous. And last time many start-ups (remember Webvan and Pets.com) had massive ambitions but puny revenues; today web stars such as Groupon, which offers its users online coupons, and Zynga, a social-gaming company, have phenomenal sales and already make respectable profits.
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Kevin Kelly — Chapter 2: Increasing Returns (kk.org)
Added on Saturday, May 14, 2011, 01:04 PM
The unacceptable transgression of the traditional monopolist was that as a mono-seller (thus the Greek, mono-polist), it could push prices up and quality down. But the logic of the net inherently lowers prices and raises quality, even those of a single-seller monopolist. In the network economy, the unpardonable transgression is to stifle innovation, which is what happens when competition is stifled. In the new order, innovation is more important than price because price is a derivative of innovation.
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Network organizations experience small gains while thieir network is being seeded. Once the network is established, explosive growth follows with relatively little additional genius.
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Technology is no longer outside, no longer alien, no longer at the periphery. It is at the center of our lives. “Technology is the campfire around which we gather,” says musician/artist Laurie Anderson. For many decades high tech was marginal in presence. Then suddenly—blink—it is everywhere and all-important. Technology has been able to infiltrate into our lives to the degree it has because it hasbecome more like us. It’s become organic in structure. Because network technology behaves more like an organism than like a machine, biological metaphors are far more useful than mechanical ones in understanding how the network economy runs.
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Dropbox, a Model of Innovative Consumption : The New Yorker (newyorker.com)
Added on Saturday, May 14, 2011, 02:38 PM
American consumers, businesses and individuals alike, are inordinately willing to take a gamble on new products.
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Least Resistance (theatlantic.com)
Added on Saturday, May 14, 2011, 04:00 PM
we dressed in the silence of Adam and Eve after the apple.
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“Sometimes,” she said, sitting forward, “God, it’s like it just happened. Sometimes he’d nurse so hard I was raw. I’d be in tears by the time he was done.” She stared down at the old braided rug, with its frayed threads and little spills, and might have been looking into the past. “The morning after we lost him, I was so engorged, I had to pump. My body didn’t understand that he was gone. I pumped six ounces and then had to pour it down the drain. That almost killed me. I would’ve given anything for another bloody nipple.”
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Kevin Kelly — Chapter 3: Plentitude Not Scarcity (kk.org)
Added on Sunday, May 15, 2011, 02:58 PM
Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems.
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The law of plentitude is most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise. Furthermore, the number of new opportunities increases exponentially as existing opportunities are seized. Networks spew fecundity because by connecting everything to everything, they increase the number of potential relationships, and out of relationships come products, services, and intangibles.
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Maximize the opportunities of others. In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow others to build their success around your own success.
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The cost of replicating anything will continue to go down. As it does, the primary cost will be developing the first copy, and then getting attention to it. No longer will it be necessary to coddle most products. Instead they should be liberated to flow everywhere.
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To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Added on Sunday, May 15, 2011, 10:23 PM
There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one…