Absalom, Absalom!
And if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be back out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for roots and such--the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn't even know any difference between despair and victory, Henry.
Kafka's The Trial: College Football Edition
[Undefeated University of Cincinati Quaterback Zach] Collaros was 20 when he was cited for presenting a fake ID to get into a bar near the main campus. Completing the diversionary program, ordered Oct. 5, would allow him to have the case dismissed and the record sealed. Otherwise, he could face as many as 180 days in jail.
Bouchard told Collaros, now 21, that skipping the program isn’t like “blowing off a math class” and that he needs to grow up.
Bouchard said afterward that he expected Collaros to quickly take the first step in the program — an interview about life history and any issues with substance abuse. A defendant also must pay $200 and attend an eight-hour class on underage drinking. (ESPN)
Into the Uncanny Valley | SEED
In the West, there is often a Frankensteinian stigma attached to artificial intelligence, but Mori offered Japan a much different perspective. In The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, published in 1974, he wrote, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.”
Do blind people hallucinate on LSD? | Mind Hacks
This is precisely the type of question I am asking myself all the time …
IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat | Ars Technica
C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.
Bringing a High-Tech Eye to Professional Kitchens | NYT
He said double-blind taste tests proved that the same tasty results could be achieved by steaming and then rubbing some of the fat on the outside.
Unauthorized Index of Going Rogue | Slate
When Sarah Palin’s 413-page autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, hit stands Tuesday, readers discovered the governor’s most mavericky move yet—that the book lacks an index. So Slate has compiled its own. Just print out this index, paste it into the back of your copy, and start skipping around! (And yes, the page numbers are real.)
The Value of Nature and Old Books
The rationality people get all over the Lux/Seedz thing. (The comments as much as the post.)
There is no such thing as “nature.”
1. People have attitudes about “nature.”
2. There may not be an absolute nature-thing, but there is probably not an absolute anything-thing; meanwhile I would guess that ‘nature’ can remain useful to describe a space or force relatively unaffected by the rise of humans.
Fair enough on #1, though recursive. As for #2 … One of the more interesting things that I’ve read about nature lately is Bruno Latour’s critique of mononaturalism (see free book here), which argues that the genealogy of the concept of nature is really a genealogy of the concept of politics—i.e., what people generally mean by nature is that place where politics must stop—and that this usually serves to simply hide the grounding of said politics in a supposedly non-political domain.
Thus, I think that it would be more productive to begin speaking of natures than to adopt a sliding-scale of human effects. As Murray Bookchin says:
There is no part of the world that has not been profoundly affected by human activity—neither the remote fastnesses of Antarctica nor the canyons of the ocean’s depths. Even wilderness areas require protection from human intervention; much that is designated as wilderness today has already been profoundly affected by human activity. Indeed, wilderness can be said to exist primarily as a result of a human decision to preserve it. Nearly all the nonhuman life-forms that exist today are, like it or not, to some degree in human custody.
If there’s no anything-thing, does this mean we just go with more useful? Also, I like trees. Needed to be said.
The Value of Nature and Old Books
The rationality people get all over the Lux/Seedz thing. (The comments as much as the post.)
There is no such thing as “nature.”
Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers' Big Problem: Energy | DISCOVER
While accounting for just 2 percent of our body weight, the human brain devours 20 percent of the calories that we eat.
Early chocolate was produced sweetened cakes and sold as a spice. Until the later half of the 19th century, it was primary served as what we know of as hot chocolate. My block of American Heritage chocolate is about 5 oz of pressed cocoa, delicately spiced with anise, red pepper, nutmeg, orange and cinnamon.
(via Four Pounds Flour: Retronovated Recipes: Chocolet Puffs)
Et in Arcadia Ego; or, On Reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
… or The Evening Redness in the West
And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? … His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.
Paradoxically enough, a book like this renews my faith in the possibilities of the world, that there is such a thing to encounter out there as this—that it was even sitting tucked away on my very own bookshelf, waiting, a potentiality waiting to be actualized. I don’t know what rough thing such a book lets loose in the world, something terrible and awesome, in the rooted meaning of those words. It certainly makes the whole mythos of the West tremble and come unmoored, in the looseness of which new histories of life and America become possible.
The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.
It is interesting, too, at the height of the arms race, in 1985, McCarthy writes a book prohphetic of an already apocalyptic human soul, but in 2006, when violence has come to seem more local and endemic, if no less brutal, McCarthy writes a book about the apocalypse of the world. Like all good authors, his mirrors are slightly awry, and we see our own images askew in history and place—as if the end of history, in ashes, was really about the ultimate destiny of the human soul, what makes it human beyond violence, in violence, enduring, but mayhap not forever.
This you see here, these ruins … do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again.
One wonders if Judge Holden, survives into the desolation after this possibly final war, and if in it he simply see the echoes of other desolations past, dim rumors of the deserts of Texas, Mexico, California, the sutured frontier opened again where some wild chaos spills out to confront the too-easy, too-fragile truth of the present…
Or is the truth of his immortality what he represents from the essence of the human, its mindless, eternal violence.
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Charlotte Whitton | The Quotations Page
Maybe it’s the Nietzschean in me, but I really, consistently appreciate the ‘Quote of the Day’ widget. If only people spoke more often in aphorisms…
MGMT, “Kids” … a decent song, sure, BUT NOT AT 5:00 AM!
Look, neighbor, I understand, you’re young and drunk, it’s been a long and thrilling night out on the town, the world’s awash in a sea of possibilities. But. But, really. Really. No more loud music at 5:00 a.m. There are other people in the world.
Though, to be fair, the last neighbor that lived right above me would do the same thing upon occasion, except her and her drunk friends would also sing and dance along.
Times Agrees With Wikipedia
Check out this very subtle “fuck you” from the New York Times in this article about German courts trying to censor Wikipedia.
First Graf:
Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.
Last Grafs:
In a written response to Mr. Stopp, Wikimedia questioned the relevance of any judgments in the German courts, since, it said, it has no operations in Germany and no assets there.
“We’ll see,” Mr. Stopp said in an interview. In an e-mail message after the interview, he wrote, “In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients’ names in your article.”
I guess their lawyer will be unhappy with the way the article turned out.
—Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent | NYTimes
