Category: ideas

“Uneven technological development is a staple of science fiction because it implies a society, and a government, that has lost its way or has mistaken priorities,” Hicks said, “And as a result unjustly divides technological resources, or uses those resources to control the populace in inappropriate ways.”

“Nothing quite like it, in fact, ever has arisen in the Chicago area, and no one knows for sure exactly how the place will operate. The learning curve will begin Monday, when students begin pouring into a most unusual complex that dares to combine classrooms, performing arts spaces, movie theater, rehearsal rooms, art gallery and you-name-it.”

“What were the good old days of technology? Have we increased the work day with our efficient smart phones? I ask this as my smart phone plays music and my tablet is open with Twitter streaming.”

Asking scholars – and others – to annotate an online text of James Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 means it might become more than something for historians to glance at. “It’s sort of the users manual to the Constitution. You’re not going to make it sing. But can you make it at least speak?”

“It was the ‘magical conspiracy between opium, tuberculosis and God’ that inspired Keats’s great odes, Shelley’s laments, Schiller’s ballads, Novalis’s mysterious hymns, Chopin’s nocturnes, Murger’s brilliant vignettes of Bohemian life and countless other treasures of Romantic literature, music and the arts.”

“The new social science of complex networks is addressing a different kind of problem, a deeper and potentially more important one. This research is concerned less with how to construct teams to maximize their creativity than with the question of what kind of society maximizes everyone’s creativity.”

“God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.”

“Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God as fundamental to their religious commitment. The philosopher John Gray, however, has recently been arguing that belief in God should have little or nothing to do with religion.”

“The secret thread running through the SXSW Interactive conference is one that, once noticed, is seen propagating throughout everything from politics to comedy, social media strategies to street parties, all the way to the very laws of thermodynamics.”

“Sovereignty and power are shifting. Before the internet, these notions were controlled by nation states. But companies like Facebook are the sovereigns of cyberspace. Facebook exercises power by shaping the way you interact with the world … [but it is] setting rules that are ultimately based on commercial considerations, not on the rights and civil liberties of users.”