Tämän jälkeen kirjailija toteaa, kuinka merkillisen paljon tilanne vuonna 2009 kansalaisoikeuksien osalta muistuttaa tilannetta, joka vallitsi Ranskassa viimeisinä vuosikymmeninä ennen vuoden 1789 vallankumousta. Maassa käytiin tuolloin rajua taistelua lehdistön vapaudesta. Kokonainen uusi ideoiden maailma oli nousemassa esiin uuden kehittyvän painoteknologian ansiosta. Ratsiat salaisiin kirjapainoihin, pamflettikirjoitusten takavarikoinnit ja itse painovälineiden takavarikoinnit olivat arkipäivää. Pidätysmääräyksiä jaeltiin päivittäin samalla kun yöaikaan salakuljetettujen painotuotteiden virta - joka sisälsi kaikkea pornosta poliittiseen propagandaan - jatkui vuolaana Preussin puolelta Pariisiin. Vuosien 1730 ja 1780 välillä Ranskan valtion sensoreiden määrä nelinkertaistui, ja samassa suhteessa lisääntyivät ratsiat laittomia painotaloja vastaan. Jälkikäteen me tiedämme, että koko tuo taistelu oli täysin turhaa. Yritys pysäyttää uudet aatteet ja ideat sensuurin ja ratsioiden avulla pikemminkin kiihdyttivät näiden aatteiden leviämistä.
Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals - Voi ei, rikollisia ei ole tarpeeksi ja vartijat menettävät työpaikkansa. Kaivataan selvästi tiukkapipoisempia lakeja työllisyyden lisäämiseksi, tai ehkä ex-vartijat masentuvat työttömyydestään, alkavat häiriköimään ja päätyvät lopulta itse vankilaan. Loppu hyvin, kaikki hyvin.
Boyd argues that art, including fiction, is a unique human adaptation whose chief function is "for improving human cognition, cooperation and creativity". -- "Art alters our minds because it engages and reengages our attention," Boyd writes. This may sound obvious, but for Boyd it has sweeping implications for the content of stories. For one, it means that surprise is crucial - fiction must appeal to our evolved preference to pay attention to the unexpected.
“There are no known astronomical size solid (or floppy) objects that are shaped as strings,” he said. “It thus remains for humans to make them. As stated by a referee of our paper ‘No one is an expert on the ideas displayed in this paper.’ At this moment, the only judge is pure mathematics and it shows that our RSE can work, in a fascinating fashion.”
Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource—one psychologist has calculated that we can attend to only 110 bits of information per second, or 173 billion bits in an average lifetime—our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” For Gallagher, everything comes down to that one big choice: investing your attention wisely or not. The jackhammers are everywhere—iPhones, e-mail, cancer—and Western culture’s attentional crisis is mainly a widespread failure to ignore them. “Once you understand how attention works and how you can make the most productive use of it,” she says, “if you continue to just jump in the air every time your phone rings or pounce on those buttons every time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.” -- A grad-school friend tells me that Adderall allowed him to squeeze his mind “like a muscle.” Joshua Foer, writing in Slate after a weeklong experiment with Adderall, said the drug made him feel like he’d “been bitten by a radioactive spider”—he beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,” he wrote.
Life of a Social Cyborg - Kevin Lim, sosiaalinen kyborgi, esittelee oman elämän dokumentointiprojektia ja käyttämiään laitteita.
It might be said that The Spirit Level merely formulates what everyone has always felt. Western European utopias have almost all been egalitarian. Polls in Britain over the past 20 years show that the proportion of the population who think income differences too big is on average 80%. But what is new about their book, the authors insist, is that it turns personal intuitions into publicly demonstrable facts. With the evidence they have supplied, politicians now have a chance to “do genuine good”. By reducing income inequality, they can improve the health and wellbeing of the whole population.
Humanity+ on avattu ja vanha WTA:n sivu arkistoitu. Yhdestä tunkkaiseksi käyneestä siirtymäkaudesta on jälleen siirrytty uuteen ja raikkaampaan siirtymäkauteen. Tulevaisuusystävällisen ihmisyyden ja ihmisystävällisen tulevaisuuden puolesta. Muista myös H+ Magazine.
Teklepaattisia tekstiviestejä ja syksyllä kauppoihin saapuvat teklekinesialelut. Jos keskittymiskykyä mielileluilla leikkimiseen ei riitä omasta takaa, täytyy keksiä keinotekoiset midichloriaanit käyttää mieltä tiukentavia lääkkeitä.
Researchers Use Brain Interface to Post to Twitter Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. “You have to press a button four times to get the character you want,” he says of texting. “So this is kind of a slow process at first.” However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. “I’ve seen people do up to eight characters per minute,” says Wilson.
Brain Wave of The Future In the 1st century, Heron of Alexandria invented the aeolipile: a metal ball with curved nozzles sticking out of it, perched on stilts. With water in it, and flame beneath it, the resultant steam would make it spin, whiz, whiz, whiz. Such fun. Nobody understood they were looking at a steam engine. Hence, the Industrial Revolution didn't start for another 1700 years. In 1267 Roger Bacon wrote about "a child's toy of sound and fire and explosion made in various parts of the world with powder of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal of hazelwood." That description of firecrackers is one of the earliest European references to gunpowder. Toys make sense as early adoptions of a new technology. Parents will pay to make their children smile.
Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs “Often, I’ve looked back at papers I’ve written on Adderall, and they’re verbose. They’re belaboring a point, trying to create this airtight argument, when if you just got to your point in a more direct manner it would be stronger. But with Adderall I’d produce two pages on something that could be said in a couple of sentences.” Nevertheless, his Adderall-assisted papers usually earned him at least a B. They got the job done. As Alex put it, “Productivity is a good thing.”
Transition movement - Jos on pakko peruuttaa yksinkertaisempaan elämään, sen tulisi tapahtua järjestelmällisesti ja suunnitellusti. Vertaa: The Outquisition
Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an “elegant descent” from that peak. We can consciously plot a path into a lower-energy life — a life of walkable villages, local food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world — which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our era’s threats with a spirit of “elation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror” behind most environmental activism.
