I don’t have any clear preferences in chess. I do what I think circumstances require of me – I attack, defend or go into the endgame. Having preferences means having weaknesses.
The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
Super high-def image of earth from space
“A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. “
See the full 64 Megapixel version.
(via Flickr Blog)
The greatest invention
Tom Standage argues that writing is the greatest invention.
The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.
Many of the great inventions since (e.g. the printing press, email, the internet, social networks) are powerful because of the way they efficiently transmit the written word. The great inventions since writing have been better ways to spread writing, iterations on a central idea.
Writing today is ubiquitous and everyone learns it in school, but it wasn’t always like that.
The amazing thing about writing, given how complicated its early systems were, is that anyone learned it at all. The reason they did is revealed in the ancient Egyptian scribal-training texts, which emphasise the superiority of being a scribe over all other career choices, with titles like “Do Not Be Soldier, Priest or Baker”, “Do Not Be a Husbandman” and “Do Not Be a Charioteer”. This last text begins: “Set thine heart on being a scribe, that thou mayest direct the whole earth.” The earliest scribes understood that literacy was power – a power that now extends to most of humanity, and has done more for human progress than any other invention.
Photographers with their best work
Wired has a collection of portraits by Tim Mantoani of photographers holding prints of their most famous works.
Photographer Jeff Widener with his iconic photo of the man in Tienanmen Square from 1989. Photo by: Tim Mantoani
via Kottke.org
The public domain needs Mickey Mouse
Kevin Kelley points out the value of the public domain.
It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.
Just imagine the amazing things that could happen if the copyright on the Star Wars saga, Harry Potter, and the Chronicles or Narnia expired and those works entered the public domain. There are already imaginative remixes of all those works out there, but they ride the fine line between fair use and copyright infringement.
What could artists using modern mediums create without worrying about being sued?
What’s different about this tech bubble?
Bussinessweek’s Ashlee Vance explores some of the unique aspects of the current tech bubble in her article, This Tech Bubble Is Different. The biggest problem is the vast amount of wasted talent.
[Jeff] Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”
The other fear is that the tech industry just becomes the new TV/Hollywood.
“My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”
But there is reason to hope. There are many tech companies that are working to solve big problems.
Eric Schadt, the chief scientific officer at Pacific Biosciences, a maker of genome sequencing machines, says new-drug discovery and cancer cures depend on analytical tools. […] The scientists have struggled to build the analytical tools needed to perform this work and are looking to Silicon Valley for help. “It won’t be old school biologists that drive the next leaps in pharma,” says Schadt. “It will be guys like Jeff who understand what to do with big data.”
A degree alone is not enough
Degrees are losing their clout according to the New York Times.
The U.S. produces a large number of workers whose skills aren’t needed.
A degree by itself is not worth what it once was. This means high schoolers planning to go to college need to start thinking more about what they intend to do after graduation so they can put their college years to good use.
A college degree is not a one-size-fits-all ticket into the middle class. It needs a plan paired with it to be of value.
16th Century social media
Social media brought attention to and was even the force behind several social revolutions in the past 12 months. However, The Economist show that the use of social networks for societal change is nothing new, citing how Luther went viral in the 16th Century.
The rate of technological progress creates a strong urge to believe the world we live in today is unique and different from everything that’s come before, but looking at other periods of technological change in history reveal the similar routes revolutions take when new technological tools become available.
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.
(via The Economist)