“quote collages”
69 posts under this tag.
All three of them long (9,000 words average), all three of them remarkable. Favorite to least-favorite-but-still-remarkable,
Unhappy Meals
By Michael Pollan
January 28, 2007
What should we eat?
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
..A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Darwin’s God
By Robin Marantz Henig
March 4, 2007
How can we explain belief in God?
Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.
In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.
“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”
The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?
Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
From 0 to 60 to World Domination
By Jon Gertner
February 18, 2007
A look at Toyota.
By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.
A French noblewoman, a duchess in her 80s, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfier’s balloon from the palace of the Tuilleries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. ”Oh yes,” she said, ”Now it’s certain. One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead.”
Una noble francesa, una duquesa en sus ochentas, al ver el primer ascenso del globo de Mont-golfier desde el palacio de las Tulerias en 1793, se dejo caer sobre los cojines de su carruaje y lloro. ”Oh si,” dijo, “Ahora es seguro. Un dia aprenderan como mantener viva a la gente por siempre, pero yo ya he de estar muerta.”
Posted in a comment by Thomas Buckner to that famous letter of Eliezer Yudkowsky to his brother Yehuda ELZR. No idea about its accuracy. Interestingly, I don’t care one whit.
(Used the Wikipedia trickELZR to translate TuilleriesWP into Spanish—neat!)
Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.
One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here’s one approach to thinking about it: I’ve been fascinated by the potential for “Post-symbolic Communication” for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality.
We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it’s hard to specify a timeframe.
Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and
interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.
Why bother? It’s a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people—so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting.
An alternative to abstraction might arise—the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word “house” you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it’s a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word “house” means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this “fuzzy” collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different.
If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here’s another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?
The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.
“I’m not saying making money and doing the right thing are mutually incompatible, I’m saying that making money is doing the right thing.”
“You can’t lie your way to the truth; you can’t government your way to a free market.”
 There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera MechanismWP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).
Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten TrackAM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.
Ayn Rand’sWP, ELZR Atlas ShruggedAM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.
The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.
This was originally appended to the original lonelygirl article some weeks ago. I’m moving it to the blog stripELZR itself because I doubt anyone noticed it.
It’s frighteningly fast how the avant-garde becomes the status quo. Not long ago Google was an underdog. It is now unarguably a behemoth. (“Google is the weather.”EEM) Two months ago it payed 1.65 billion for YouTube, the new media underdog. Now lonelygirl15, YouTube’s first star, has made the cover of this month’s Wired. And her article, The Secret World of Lonelygirl, is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how it all started. From Jessica Rose’s misgivings about the shady project, to her browseresque beauty, to lonelygirl’s origin as the alter ego of a commune-raised, bullied boy.
Jessica Rose was suspicious and frankly a little pissed off. She had come to this organic-tea shop to discuss what she thought was a feature film called Children of Anchor Cove. Now Beckett and Flinders had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and, clearly pleased with themselves, told her that they wanted her to play the lead in what they billed as the future of entertainment. For free. It was an Internet-something-or-other –- she wasn’t listening. They were also going to “hire” another actor to play a character named Daniel. It sounded a lot like porn.
It was exactly what her acting coaches at Universal Studios’ film program had warned her against: unkempt producer-types hawking shady deals.
When he got to college, Flinders [cocreator of lonelygirl] dreamed up an alter ego—an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.
There’s something about Jessica Rose that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window. That’s not to say she isn’t pretty off camera—she is—but every step she takes closer to the cam multiplies and enhances her looks. It’s a face made for the browser screen.
[Miles] Beckett was at home trying to decompress. He had been working as an urgent care doctor to pay the rent and was exhausted. Between filming and editing the Lonelygirl15 series and dealing with severed fingers and dog bites at the hospital, he wasn’t sleeping much. It didn’t help that Goodfried called at 2 am.
”Miles, it’s time you quit being a doctor,” he said. “We just passed 200,000 views.”
Within 48 hours, the video had half a million views. Goodfried knew that to be considered a success, a cable television show needs to get between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers. “My Parents Suck …” had vaulted into that territory.
Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. ”You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.”
This Web series not only looks different, it’s made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree’s universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can’t write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.
Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: ”It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.”
Techguru Esther DysonWP, EDGE (who, I just learned, is Freeman DysonWP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
If there was one fragment from Richard Dawkins’s Why There Almost Certainly Is No God that startled me, and that has continued to do so for over a week, is this counterfactual.
 [Stephen Jay] Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.
This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment’s thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference..
To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA [‘non-overlapping magisteria’, Gould’s “argument”], imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists’ DNA out of hand: “Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium.” Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.
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