Category: ideas

At least not the way Richard Dawkins theorized them. That was a metaphor, whether Dawkins realized it or not.

“It isn’t that people don’t think language education important. It’s that they don’t think it’s possible.”

“Ghost names on the marquee could include everyone from Joan Rivers, who died last year, to George Carlin, Bob Hope, Rodney Dangerfield and Milton Berle.”

While “information technology has vastly expanded access to information, a major challenge remains: How do you figure out what kind of information each child needs, when, and in what way? Not surprisingly, Silicon Valley is home to an unusual number of schools devoted to solving this problem.”

“Does God have to be part of our understanding of the universe? No. But if scientists tell the public that they have to choose between God and science, most people will choose God … Meanwhile, many of those who choose science find themselves without any way of thinking that can give them access to their own spiritual potential. … What if we thought this way about God? What if we took the evidence of a new cosmic reality [i.e., dark matter and dark energy] seriously and became willing to rule out the impossible? What would be left?”

“Almost everything we humans do collectively spawns an emergent phenomenon. … Economies, governments and the media are all emergent phenomena – like an ant colony. They follow new and complicated rules that often cannot be derived from the behavior of the parts that make them up. They are real and have immense power over us, but they are not human or humanlike, even though they arise from human activities.”

If “something new has to have emerged from the staggering complexity of all humanity’s aspirations, interacting”, then what phenomenon, exactly, “just has to have emerged. Human life and culture? What do we gain (a leg up in the religion wars?) by calling that God?”

“The melancholy Jacques in As You Like It declares that, ‘All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players.’ Macbeth cries, ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,’ and Prospero sighs, ‘the great globe … shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.’ … But the metaphors themselves aren’t the problem. It’s the bitter taste we’ve baked into them.”

“The device uses a technique called neurofeedback. This has been around since the 1960s, but traditionally, the EEG equipment needed to practice neurofeedback was limited to research centers and specialized clinics. Now, devices like the Versus are bringing the technique into the homes of corporate executives, elite athletes like Walsh, and others.”

“This approach to business is sometimes called the “Hollywood model.” A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-­term, project-­based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-­term, open-­ended jobs that can last for years, even a lifetime.”