Vaya! Sergio acaba de prestarme un DVD con 4 gigas de literatura en Español, es desbordante, demasiado. Nuestro futuro mediatico es la saturacion al borde del colapso.
Por lo pronto, encontre por fin esta cita que tanto busque otrora:
La teorÃa dualista fue la primera religión galáctica. Desde su concepción en el mundo
central de Rolf, se erguÃa ante los hombres con la altivez de un monte, tan distanciada de
las cosas mundanas como un cerro de Plutón. ReconocÃa la vida y el final de la vida;
reconocÃa el frÃo de la noche y la longitud de su resistencia; reconocÃa la brevedad del dÃa
y su belleza. SabÃa que más allá de toda alegrÃa se extendÃa un telón de algo demasiado
cruel para llamarlo pena, demasiado noble para llamarlo desdicha; que la carne era una
exhalación que duraba un minuto, pero que en ese minuto, ese tiempo para la acción,
radicaba toda la verdad existente.
Era una religión galáctica, difÃcil de comprender y
desalentadora cuando se comprendÃa, y por esa razón fue adoptada por los auténticos
adultos de esos tiempos. No les ofrecÃa ningún fulgor más allá de la tumba, ni hablaba de
las áureas voces de otras esferas; no otorgaba recompensas por la virtud ni castigos por
la debilidad. No tenÃa tabernáculos. Nadie decoraba sus altares con flores, nadie recitaba
sus fundamentos con música altisonante. Pero su austera verdad infundÃa hondura y
fortaleza en el corazón.
Brian W. Aldiss, Galaxias como Granos de Arena
Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident—there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.
I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.
Local Red Cross ads1 (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year:
They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.”
1 Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.
Me conmovio tanto la despedida de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su hermano que se la lei a mi mama unas horas mas tarde, traduciendola al hablar. Le impresiono mucho y me pidio inmediatamente que la tradujera en forma al Español. Eso he hecho. Espero que quien no tenia la oportunidad de leerla lo haga.
He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.
We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).
Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.
Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,
and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.
I’ve been walking a lot lately, walking and driving, and I’ve seen more people in the last 2 weeks than in the past 2 months. What never fails to surprise me every time I pay attention is the multiplicity of their circumstances. What troubles that sad woman in the car behind me? That man right there is obviously cheating her wife. The father on the coffetable at my side talks to his daughter and son about graduation trips, money, leisure, the future, whatnot. That well-off lady over there, the one sipping her coffee and chatting with her friends, doesn’t know her two tweens are being stabbed to death right now by the ex-boyfriend of her eldest daughter.
I read somewhere, Savater I guess, about a dying old lady who, confined to bed, comforted herself thinking that, somewhere, someone was making love at that very moment. I couldn’t find that particular quote (there go 3 hours), but my quest wasn’t entirely fruitless. I chanced upon the same thought carried to the extreme: a (looong) list of right-now happenings. It’s often quite tacky (cursi)—Andrea’d love it—but surprisingly original at times (specially at its many gay moments).
