9,047 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2021
    1. Through an inner structure of recursive links and semantic pointers, a card index achieves a proper autonomy; it behaves as a ‘communication partner’ who can recommend unexpected associations among different ideas. I suggest that in this respect pre-adaptive advances took root in early modern Europe, and that this basic requisite for information pro-cessing machines was formulated largely by the keyword ‘order’.

      aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

    2. In § 3, I explain that to have a life of its own, a card index must be provid-ed with self-referential closure.

      In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

      This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

    3. Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.

      Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

      Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

    4. Over these two centuries, an in-creasing impatience for the ancient art of memory based on the use of imagi-nation could be detected in the academic milieu.

      Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.

      What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?

    1. If you try to export the document in an internet-compatible format like HTML, you get a mess.

      I've noted elsewhere that despite the reputation of WYSIWYG editors' tendencies for handling HTML, modern mainstream Web development practices are so bad today that just typing a bunch of junk into LibreOffice and saving as HTML results in one of the most economical ways to do painless authoring of Web content...

    1. been intensified by his long residence in the tropics

      The theme of the exotic and more specifically the fear of the foreign can be seen throughout this short story. Mr. Roylott is seen to have become violent because of the influence of his time in a foreign land. The connection of this character and his time spent in India gives the reader the idea that his savage and violent nature was due to his time in a foreign area, portraying the foreign to be something to fear.

    1. oh by the way did i tell you it's hard like probably it's it's also really hard but i really don't want to stop here on a on a low note

      This is a great video on the reality of open source software. Open source hardware also faces similar funding issues.

      As long as open source is fundamentally dependent on the private sector, it will exist within at best a parasitic relationship. To truly develop an autonomous open source model requires a structural change in funding that allows it to stand alone and apart from corporate sponsorship.

      This is a classic chicken-and-egg situation. We want people to sponsor us, but many of those people also work for the private sector. Governments and NGOs may sponsor us, but they also depend on private sector for tax and donation revenues.

      This requires a much deeper discussion that unpacks the fundamental assumptions that underpin our economic, social and political systems. The structural challenges of funding open source exposes the constraints of our current system.

      Unless we examine the fundamental assumptions by which our current civilization operates, we cannot make the structural changes that would enable open source to reach its full potential, which is maximum access to shared intellectual and material resources for the benefit of all.

    1. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
    1. A sharp rise in reported active volcanoes immediately post-WW II was followed by another steep increase in the early 1950s that has no obvious relationship to historic events.

      'No obvious relationship to historic events' is blatantly inaccurate here. The US military was active in the Pacific for the entirety of this time frame reestablishing the power in the Pacific US colonies. It naturally would follow that volcanic activity would be reported at higher rates as military vessels were combing the area.

    1. De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization by Vincen-tius Placcius. It offers an overview of contemporary procedures, instruc-tions on regular excerpting, and an extensive history of the subject. Placcius expressly warns against a loose form of indexing as pursued by Jungius. 38
      1. Placcius 1689, p. 72.

      Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.

      In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)

    2. Gessner, however, examines every single book meticulously to gather complete specifi cations of format, title, authors (provided they are named or discoverable), place of publica-tion, and year of publication. 7 Then he appends a content description. Hence, Konrad Gessner can rightly count as the father of the modern bibliography.

      Having catalogued works in his Bibliotheca Universalis (1545, 1548) using author, title, format, place and year of publication, Konrad Gessner could be considered the father of modern bibliography.

    1. Extinction Rebellion has been at the forefront of a fundamentally new message which is if a government doesn't change, it's your right and as we've identified, your duty, if you're not going to be complicit, 00:34:43 to go into a rebellion a nonviolent civil disobedience against the government in order to fundamentally reduce carbon emissions. It's not actually that complicated, Is it? If you ask the average person who controls the economy, right? They know it's the banks, the big banks, right? And we had the banks, I think they did it pretty deliberately ten years ago. 00:35:12 They pulled our chain and we had the most massive transfer of wealth that the world has ever seen the bank bailout, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. We're seeing the same thing now with covid and the banks have got to be behind it, right? If the banks wanted and decided that emissions have to decline from today 00:35:36 fast in a matter of years, the banks can do it, right? Because the banks hold the strings. All governments now are in a massive amount of national debt . we have an axis of evil if you want, we have the big banking corporations. We have the big fossil fuel corporations and we have the compliant government.

      The big three institutions making up the climate axis of evil: banks, governments and dirty energy.

      While XR does this, it is also possible to apply pressure on another front, a bottom-up, rapid, citizen-led transformation effort.

    1. In this study, we drew on sociocultural notions of agency – where individual actions are entwined with community goals. A community is comprised of people with shared and individual goals, in their environments, in the midst of a historical context (Wenger 1998Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Due to this web of relationships with people, environment, and history, people do not act autonomously, but according to possibilities within the community. Such possibilities for agency are negotiated over time; actions that strengthen ties to the community constitute investments in the self that in turn, have outcomes for the community as well (Peirce 1995Peirce, B. N. 1995. “Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning.” TESOL Quarterly 29: 9–31. doi:10.2307/3587803. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). The financial metaphor in using the word investment is critical – it connotes spent effort that yields dividends. These dividends emerge immediately and over time.

      This helps me consider communities of practice, and unpacking the relational aspects - agency within a context, not autonomous, informed by the context and others. Is there a tension with "groupthink", how to value the diversity in a group, and build stronger not weaker, not defaulting or regressing to a mean?. How do we build a group to be more than the sum of the parts. how does the community work to enhance practice.

  2. Nov 2021
    1. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick . . .”

      It's a bit funny and ironic to think that the communal/peaceful Skywoman would use such a Western-centric phrase like "short end of the stick", which as I understand it has an economic underpinning of a receipt by which the debtor and the lender used marked sticks that were broken apart with one somewhat shorter than the other. When put back together the marks on the stick matched each other, but the debtor got the shorter end. (Reference: Behavioral Economics When Psychology and Economics Collide by Scott A. Huettel; what was his source?)

      Compare with etymologies expanded upon here:

      The Long Story of The Short End of the Stick by Charles Clay Doyle. American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 96-101 (6 pages), Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/455954

      Which doesn't include the economic reference at all.

    2. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember,”

      The Western word "ceremony" is certainly not the best word for describing these traditions. It has too much baggage and hidden meaning with religious overtones. It's a close-enough word to convey some meaning to those who don't have the cultural background to understand the underlying orality and memory culture. It is one of those words that gets "lost in translation" because of the dramatic differences in culture and contextual collapse.

      Most Western-based anthropology presumes a Western idea of "religion" and impinges it upon oral cultures. I would maintain that what we would call their "religion" is really an oral-based mnemonic tradition that creates the power of their culture through knowledge. The West mistakes this for superstitious religious practices, but primarily because we can't see (or have never been shown) the larger structures behind what is going on. Our hubris and lack of respect (the evils of the scala naturae) has prevented us from listening and gaining entrance to this knowledge.

      I think that the archaeological ideas of cultish practices or ritual and religion are all more likely better viewed as oral practices of mnemonic tradition. To see this more easily compare the Western idea of the memory palace with the Australian indigenous idea of songline.

    1. er the years, writers (and speakers) have experimented with numer- ous images in expressions with the same general structure and probable meaning as worse end of the staff and short end of the stick

      Not mentioned here is the idea of the "fuzzy end of the lollipop" as heard (twice?) by the character Sugar Kane Kowalczyk played by Marylin Monroe in Some Like it Hot (United Artists, 1959).

      It's the story of my life: I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJbqwCTURI

      The urban dictionary has an unsourced reference for Abraham Lincoln as the source, but I'm loathe to believe it without more direct sourcing.

    1. Thiruvengadam, R., Awasthi, A., Medigeshi, G., Bhattacharya, S., Mani, S., Sivasubbu, S., Shrivastava, T., Samal, S., Murugesan, D. R., Desiraju, B. K., Kshetrapal, P., Pandey, R., Scaria, V., Malik, P. K., Taneja, J., Binayke, A., Vohra, T., Zaheer, A., Rathore, D., … Garg, P. K. (2021). Effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 infection during the delta (B.1.617.2) variant surge in India: A test-negative, case-control study and a mechanistic study of post-vaccination immune responses. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00680-0

    1. we have a very 00:38:26 unwieldy process of more than close to 200 countries with very stark differences sometimes and very different starting points so i think all of this doesn't really 00:38:39 make a good sort of negotiation process and if we if we go to the next cup my sense is that the process is extremely slow and we are 00:38:50 more or less at say setting ourselves up for failure but also you know we are going to one cup after another we with a great sense of a predictability of something that we know it's not going 00:39:03 to work at the pace at which it needs to work

      countries negotiating may not be as effective as working at the individual / civil society level to appeal to the wealthy demographics, who are responsible for the lions share of emissions.

    2. contrasting 00:28:28 climate change against uh the kobe 19 pandemic is very revealing while both of them are now considered to be a crisis and they are very different in nature 00:28:40 the pandemic is an immediate threat and the government failure to respond to the the kubernetes pandemic is in the eyes of the constituencies 00:28:54 a real failure and and they will uh lose their future votes and because of this failure for these politicians while climate change is more of a 00:29:07 creeping uh risks it's coming slowly it is a crisis and uh and it's also everybody's crisis right then this is a a typical 00:29:21 collective action problem failure to come up with the funding for addressing climate change in the eyes of the local and domestic 00:29:33 constituencies is not considered to be such a bad thing so uh and then a lot of politicians will choose to be a free writer on this then 00:29:45 uh you know what happens and we all understand this too well will be the tragedy of the comments i think the it's really the nature of the this uh two problems to crisis are very different 00:29:58 and this is really really the talent the i think the ultimate talent for the human beings to when it comes to solve this collective action problem

      The speaker points out that covid-19 is perceived as a more immediate threat, while climate change is less directly perceivable as a immediate threat. It takes place graduallyl over time. Climate change is a tragedy of the commons because a lot of individual leaders choose to free-ride.

    3. until we have a full political understanding of the business and 00:27:11 importance of managing the climate crisis we're not going to get this and that understanding means we're actually all in this boat together it is true that the developing nations are likely 00:27:25 to suffer much more than the developed nations but nevertheless we are talking about a future for humanity that is looking very bleak if we draw a comparison with the 00:27:37 really poor management of this covet 19 pandemic i would say once again there the governments of the world did not understand that if they had acted quickly we could well have seen this 00:27:51 pandemic over in a few months and instead we saw the governments of the world all acting independently and really all over the place there's no real political understanding 00:28:03 and until we get that i think we're really not going to get the action that's needed

      Climate change interventions need global teamwork. The lack of global cooperation in handling the covid pandemic stretched a problem that could have been resolved in a matter of months to years. Climate change is suffering the same lack of global collaboration and coordination.

    1. Many studies have been undertaken on the value of unpaid domestic and care work, which is also non-market, non-transactional and not included in formal economic accounts. Similarly, the unpaid care work for the wider community is missing off the balance sheet. Both are essential for the functioning of the economy that is counted.In Australia, this was estimated to be almost half of the country’s GDP, with those statistics from over twenty years ago. More recent statistics for the state of Victoria reveal a similar picture.

      These studies illustrate the huge under appreciation of the value contribution of the commons and work not showing up on GDP, the dark matter of GDP.

    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

      Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

      Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

      Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

      People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

      The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

      Southernization of the Church

      Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

      Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

    2. “southernization of the Church.” Some of the distinctive cultural forms present in the American South—masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism—have spread to other parts of the country, he said. These cultural attitudes are hardly shared by every southerner or dominant throughout the South, but they do exist and they need to be named. “Southern culture has had a profound impact upon religion,” Alexander told me, “particularly evangelical religion.”
    1. Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

      This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

      Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

      This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

      This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

    2. https://site.pennpress.org/material-texts-2021/9780812236422/textual-situations/

      This looks interesting for a later time...

      Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers by Andrew Taylor

      Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland. But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus.

      Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland, Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France, and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders.

      Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

    1. Finally, I think Actions are great for animations, because you will definitely need to apply the same logic to many different elements. One of my favorite examples are FLIP animations, where a change in DOM position can be animated. For example shuffling a list of items. I will not dive deep into the topic in this article: I've written about some techniques in this article about FLIP animations in React and in this article about how to create spring animations with Web Animation API. Although they are not about Svelte, at the end of the day it all boils down to manipulating the HTML element directly. And Svelte Actions are a great place to do it.
    1. role of school as a community

      According to teachers, distance learning should be based on a school's strategy where everyone is equally committed and responsible for students

      1. how to structure to resolve equality
      2. equality after overcoming disparities
      3. securing equality will remain a permanent concern
    2. conclusion, which educational administration globally is shoveling under the rug. 20 years ago, it was calculated an hour of F2F teaching equals 1 1/2 hour of online teaching. currently, with the influx of technology, it must be calculated more generously. 

      the value of online learning versus F2F

    1. For if I wait out the uncomfortable night by the river,I fear that the female dew and the evil frost togetherwill be too much for my damaged strength, I am so exhausted, and in themorning a chilly wind will blow from the river; 470 but if I go up the slopeand into the shadowy forest,and lie down to sleep among the dense bushes, even if the chill andweariness let me be, and a sweet sleep comes upon me,I fear I may become spoil and prey to the wild animals.’

      There's something about the description here that reminds me of the closing paragraph of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of the Species (p 489):

      It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, [...]

      Both authors are writing about riverbanks, life, and uncertainty.

    2. e spoke, and the river stayed his current, stopped the waves breaking,and made all quiet in front of him and let him get safelyinto the outlet of the river.

      An example of a figure calming waters in myth.

      cross reference: Moses and the parting of the Red Sea

      To what dates might we attribute these two texts? Which preceded the other? What sort of potential cultural influences would the original had on the subsequent?

      Also cross reference the many deluge/flood stories in ancient literatures including Genesis 6-9, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.

    1. POC vs MVP: What to Choose to Build a Great ProductDmitryCEOMVPHomeBlogEntrepreneurshipPOC vs MVP: What to Choose to Build a Great ProductPublishedNov 10, 2021UpdatedNov 11, 202115 min readWhen it comes to creating a new product or implementing a new feature, you need to test it first. The best way to do so is to check your idea with the appropriate steps. There are several software product stages: PoC, prototype, MVP, etc. What is the difference between proof of concept vs. MVP? Why are these stages essential? When should you build a Minimum Viable Product? This article focuses on two fundamental approaches that help test your idea quickly and create a successful solution.

      When it comes to creating a new product or implementing a new feature, you need to test it first. The best way to do so is to check your idea with the appropriate steps. There are several software product stages: PoC, prototype, MVP, etc.

      What is the difference between proof of concept vs. MVP? Why are these stages essential? When should you build a Minimum Viable Product?

      This article focuses on two fundamental approaches that help test your idea quickly and create a successful solution.

    1. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

      The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

      Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

      CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

      This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

      We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

      Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

      Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.

    1. “(T)he 2020 election revealed that, at least with respect to an administration’s senior most officials, the Hatch Act is only as effective as the White House decides it will be. Where, as happened here, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, then the American public is left with no protection against senior administration officials using their official authority for partisan political gain in violation of the law,” it reads.

      Why can't it act and prosecute with the new administration?

      https://apnews.com/article/presidential-elections-election-2020-elections-778951007a888c1f2af6babbb198634b

    1. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

      Certainly this modern inquisition is a more gentle one than the original Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

      Is this a supporting data point on the continuum of decreasing violence for Steven Pinker's decline of violence thesis?

      Is the totality of what we may be giving up worth it for the greater overall comfort for society?

    2. Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.

      This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

      This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

    3. In The Whisperers, his book on Stalinist culture, the historian Orlando Figes cites many such cases, among them Nikolai Sakharov, who wound up in prison because somebody fancied his wife; Ivan Malygin, who was denounced by somebody jealous of his success; and Lipa Kaplan, sent to a labor camp for 10 years after she refused the sexual advances of her boss. The sociologist Andrew Walder has revealed how the Cultural Revolution in Beijing was shaped by power competitions between rival student leaders.

      Note the power here of Applebaum providing very specific and citable examples.

      The specificity is more powerful than the generality of these sorts of ills which we know exist in these regimes.

    1. Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

      I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

      Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

      Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

      A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

      An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

      A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.


      A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.


      What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.


      Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.


      How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

      The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)


      Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.


    1. Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”

      This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.

      Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.

      A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

      The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.

      Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.

      We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html

      Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.

      Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:

      "Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

      But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.

      To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.

      Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.

      Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.

      At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.

    1. Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32

      Hence, High Net Worth Individual Divestment (HNWID) is definitely an important future strategy.

    1. There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

      Are there possibly any physical artifacts in physical archaeology that may fit into the structure of the thesis made by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies?

      What would we be looking for? Small mnemonic devices? Menhir? Standing stones? Wooden or stone circles? Other examples of extended ekphrasis similar to that of the shield of Achilles?

      cf: Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

    1. Could the Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow Guide Us Now? by Teju Ravilochan (contributing editors: Vidya Ravilochan and Colette Kessler) https://gatherfor.medium.com/maslow-got-it-wrong-ae45d6217a8c

      Apr 4, 2021

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>David Dylan Thomas</span> in Come and get yer social justice metaphors! (<time class='dt-published'>11/05/2021 11:26:10</time>)</cite></small>

    1. I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

      I love that Dave has started a list of these useful social justice metaphors.

      I got side tracked by the idea this morning and submitted a handful I could think of off the top of my head.

      • Baseball fence
      • Parable of the Polygons
      • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

      I'm curious if there are any useful ones in the neurodiversity space? I feel like I need more of these myself.

  3. Oct 2021
    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-papers-democracy-election-zuckerberg/620478/

      Adrienne LaFrance outlines the reasons we need to either abandon Facebook or cause some more extreme regulation of it and how it operates.

      While she outlines the ills, she doesn't make a specific plea about the solution of the problem. There's definitely a raging fire in the theater, but no one seems to know what to do about it. We're just sitting here watching the structure burn down around us. We need clearer plans for what must be done to solve this problem.

    2. Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right.

      Nice to see someone else essentially saying something along the lines that "free speech" is not the same as "free reach".

      Traditional journalism has always had thousands of gatekeepers who filtered and weighed who got the privilege of reach. Now anyone with an angry, vile, or upsetting message can get it for free. This is one of the worst parts of what Facebook allows.

    1. ual, this study examines the relationship of the extent of power concentration to urban renewal success. The ratio of managers, proprietors, and officials to the employed labor force measures the concentration of power, and success in urban renewal is represented by arrival of cities at the execution stage in that pro- gram. The relationship is found to be statistically significant and remains so under a series of controlled observations

      Quant study that examines the concentration of community power on the success of urban renewal projects.

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    1. Both more fundamental than the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and more expansive in scope, the problem of integration/unification is also central to the problem of the origin(s) of life.

      Could anthropological and philosophical linguistics be included in this trans-disciplinary analysis? I think language also plays a central role, as we are already sophisticated language users by the time we consider the possibility of raising this kind of question.

    2. Granted, how a natural entity can have interiority, i.e., subjectivity, is a hard problem, but if the question of integration and unification is not identical to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Chalmers 1995) it is also inseparable from it and surely a presupposition of the very possibility of interiority. Nor would even an understanding of how subjectivity could be resident to a single cell tell us how consciousness could become an integrated unity across many cells. If we assume consciousness is a physically based phenomenon, and that it draws upon the activity of various parts of the brain, let alone constituent cells, then we must face our deficits in understanding how the experience of a unified consciousness is realized at the level of an integration of some cells but not others albeit in the absence of evident, non-arbitrary, physical boundaries.

      This is a very salient point. The experience of consciousness of a (multicellular) human being is the experience of a biological superorganism. While normativity may apply to the both single and multi-cellular beings by extension, we cannot infer from that alone that our experience of consciousness has an analog at the cellular level.

    1. Its life out of its center enters into a relationship to it; the reflexive character of the centrally represented body is given to itself. Although the living being on this level is also absorbed in the here/now, lives out of the center, it has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself -- and this makes it an I. (pp. 269-70)

      The "I" is born when the living being has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It notices itself.

    2. For Plessner, the living boundary is both a liminal zone that mediates between organism and the outer medium, itself being neither, and yet also an enactively self-defining and enforcing circumference and outer-limit. The organism moves outward in the expansion and assimilation of its liminal zone and moves inward, taking the outer within, re-establishing itself and reasserting its perimeter. The living boundary already introduces a subject-object status that prefigures for Plessner the overcoming of dualisms between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority. The living boundary is an on-going enactment of an exteriority that it defines and yet also reaches into and assimilates and of an interiority that is both sustained and transformed. The motive force of the dynamic living state is this double aspectivity of its existence and the dialectical tension which drives it forward.

      Plessner defines the interiority and exteriority condition of a living organism, giving a biological context for the hard problem of consciousness.

    3. Pace Dilthey, Plessner's "Levels" is not about interpreting historical contingencies, nor about the more familiar evolutionary sedimentation of frozen accidents, but rather is about looking to establish transcendental conditions (or categories) of biotic possibility that he refers to as "modals of the organic." As with Hegel he challenges us with a proposed logic of life always mobilized by dialectical tensions, albeit not on the basis of any form of idealism and bereft of a Hollywood ending. For Plessner, that which is both the sine qua non of the living state and that generative 'principle' from which organic modals can be derived is the on-going performance of a self-positioning boundary, and it is highly unlikely that anybody has ever thought as deeply about the implications of what this means.

      "Modals of the organic" are the levels at which emergent qualities at the higher level cannot be explained from the lower level, and give rise to the highest constitutive level, human consciousness.

    1. export interface QueueInterface {   count(): number;   dequeue?(): any;   enqueue(...args: any): void;   flush(): any[];   reset(): void;   setFifo(fifo: boolean): void;   setLifo(lifo: boolean): void;   truncate(length: number): void; } export class queue {   protected elements: any[];   protected fifo = true;   constructor(…args: any) {     this.elements = […args];   }   count() {     return this.elements.length;   }   dequeue?(): any {     if (this.fifo) {       return this.elements.shift();     }     return this.elements.pop();   }   enqueue(…args: any) {     return this.elements.push(…args);   }   // Like dequeue but will flush all queued elements   flush(): any[] {     let elms = [];     while (this.count()) {       elms.push(this.dequeue());     }     return elms;   }   setFifo(fifo = true) {     this.fifo = fifo;   }   setLifo(lifo = true) {     this.fifo = !lifo;   }   reset(): void {     this.truncate(0);   }   truncate(length: number) {     if (Number.isInteger(length) && length > -1) {       this.elements.length = length;     }   } } export default queue;
    1. When we practice active hope, when we look at what people are doing, and we share those stories with others and talk about what we can do together, then we realize that the boulder is already at the top of the hill and is rolling down in the right direction, and has millions of hands on it. It’s just not going fast enough.

      This statement is right on. It has now become a question about the RATE of system change we can achieve to avoid a degraded future. The faster we act, the less degraded it will become.

    1. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

      Bauhaus

      The Tower of Babel

      When I first read this manifesto, I had immediate associations with the Tower of Babel. The cathedral project of global neoliberal capitalism began as a socialist utopian project in the Weimar Republic as Germany’s first experiment in democracy. The democratic experiment failed when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933.

      The experiment continued in the United States of America as the Bauhaus diaspora spread the ideas of modernism to the art, design and architecture academies around the world.

      The World Trade Center in New York City embodied the vision of modern architecture that Walter Gropius had been exploring at the Bauhaus, defining the trinity of building materials of the modern world: steel, glass, and concrete.

      When the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, the modernism movement came to an abrupt end. Ever since, we have been living in a distinctly postmodern world.

  4. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible foras much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twicethe emissions of the poorest 50% (2).

      this suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.

      Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,

      A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it accelerate transition.

    1. Plenum: A Collective Story of Regeneration

      Last year, as artists in the Design Science Studio, Ilaria Forte and I were discussing a possible collaborative project called Plenum: A Collective Story of Regeneration. Rather than attempt to create a new narrative, we would collect and document the experiences of people who are experiencing the effortless action of nature’s systems in the process of regeneration.

    1. To date, there is no single accounting of how much money flowed from the slave economy into coffers of American higher education. But Wilder says most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery. He suspects that many institutions are reluctant to examine this past. "There's not a lot of upside for them. You know these aren't great fundraising stories," Wilder says. Some people say that institutions must do more than make apologies and rename buildings. They insist that scholarships and other forms of monetary reparations are due. And others argue that whatever colleges and universities are doing to acknowledge their slave-holding past — a campus memorial to slaves, for example — is motivated by public relations and does nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality. Brown University was the first to confront its ties to slavery in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to investigate. "What better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth, and to tell the full story?" she says.

      This is important research to do so as not to conveniently forget the past. If all were equal today, that would have happened as the proper outcome of proactive, widespread and impactful recognition of the injustice of the past. Inequality has persisted, transmuted into structural inequality, especially manifesting in economic legacy of inherited wealth. It could be interpreted as unconducive for fundraising, but so can opaqueness of a proactive strategy.

    2. "The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."

      In this way, the past seeps into the present. This is a literal example of the legacy of structural inequality.

    1. I recently found this book at Value Village while exploring the non-fiction books section. What caught my eye was the back cover’s reference to Sallie McFague. I learned about Sallie McFague from Tripp Fuller’s podcast, Homebrewed Christianity, when she died. He dedicated an episode to her influence. Her name also came up in conversation with Sophia at the Faith, Arts + Culture course at Bez Arts Hub.

      When I read the title of the article, *The World as God’s Body,” I decided to purchase the book. I have been exploring this theme as it relates to the Gaia hypothesis in articles such as, A Prayer for the Earth.

    1. he person describing his or her “life world” dis- covers new relationships and patterns during the interview; the researcher who occasionally “summarizes” or “re- flects” what has been heard is, in fact, condensing and interpreting the flow of meaning.

      as interview progresses, the informant may create new meaning as recounting of memories...

    1. Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer. (n.d.). Our World in Data. Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer

      is:webpage lang:en COVID-19 graph case death Germany Sweden UK Afghanistan Africa Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua Barbuda Argentina Armenia Asia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo Costa Rica Cote d'ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia Democratic Republic of Congo Denmark Djobouti Dominica Dominician Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Europe Europian Union Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon Gambia Georgia Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mashall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North America North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Oceania Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philipines Poland Portugal Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South America South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor Togo Trinidad Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turks and Caicos Islands Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates USA Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican Venezuela Vietnam World Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe test vaccine chart map table data case fatality rate mortality

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  5. Sep 2021
    1. This fundamental truth (expressed in economic notation as r > g, or "return on capital is greater than economic growth") means that "meritocracy" is a lie: the richest people in a market economy aren't the people who do the best work, it's the people who started off rich.

      Thomas Piketty's r > g shows that meritocracy is a lie in that the richest people aren't the ones that do the best or most productive work, but simply those who start of rich.

    1. At the most foundational level, everything in the world is named: dwarves, elves, fortresses, fell beasts, books, artifacts, lands, and even the world itself are all given custom names, often in fictional languages complete with English translations.

      if it's important to someone, it's got a name. It's fun, but Tolkein's extensive use of incomprehensible names was always an unpleasant challenge for me.

    1. 2015, c. 3, s. 108(E)

      Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Act, 2014, SC 2015, c 3, https://canlii.ca/t/52m35, s. 108(E) amends the English version of IRPA s. 16(3) to read:

      Evidence relating to identity (3) An officer may require or obtain from a permanent resident or a foreign national who is arrested, detained, subject to an examination or subject to a removal order, any evidence — photographic, fingerprint or otherwise — that may be used to establish their identity or compliance with this Act.

      Previously it had read:

      Evidence relating to identity (3) An officer may require or obtain from a permanent resident or a foreign national who is arrested, detained or subject to a removal order, any evidence — photographic, fingerprint or otherwise — that may be used to establish their identity or compliance with this Act.

    1. I've got serious reservations about this Gerst fellow. His answers are too vague and contain too many bald assertions. The form of his answers fits what I've noticed to be a "style" of regressives seeking to promote obsolete traditions and social norms.

      Granted, it's difficult to present precise information in "interview format" articles like this one, but education is too important to get get wrong - again.

    1. Competent scientists do not believe their own models or theories, but rather treat them as convenient fictions. ...The issue to a scientist is not whether a model is true, but rather whether there is another whose predictive power is enough better to justify movement from today's fiction to a new one. Steve Vardeman, 1987. Comment. Journal of the American Statistical Association 82 : 130-131. [kw]

      easier said than done

    1. Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.

      Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.

    2. there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

      The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.

    3. the global elite (i.e. both global managers and the global super-rich) must be regarded as transnational for three main reasons, as Sklair (1997) outlines.

      Mapping out where they are is a useful exercise in order to identify the wealthy communities they may live in. Of course, citizens who live long enough in an city, town or community get to know where the affluent parts of town are.

      Of course many of the super elite live in exclusive homes far away from population centers. Wealth buys geographic exclusivity snd seclusion from prying eyes.

    1. playing house

      This is how I feel about most people's personal websites. Few people have homepages these days, but even for people who do, even fewer of those homes have anyone really living there. All their interesting stuff is going on on Twitter, GitHub, comments on message boards...

      Really weird when this manifests as a bunch of people having really strong opinions about static site tech stacks and justifications for frontend tech that in practice they never use, because the content from any one of their profiles on the mainstream social networks outstrips their "home" page 100x to 1.

    1. Documents of the time

      This would be a good place to have one or two illustrative primary documents inserted.

      One of the most well known is:

      Description of a Slave Ship. London: Printed by James Phillips [for the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade], 1789. Two broadsides.

      A digitized copy of the original can be found here: https://dpul.princeton.edu/wa/catalog/qj72p788s

      along with some additional context here: https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2020/05/28/teaching-the-slave-ship/

    2. The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.

      Told from this perspective and with the knowledge of the importance of the theory of First Effective Settlement, is it any wonder that America has grown up to be so heavily influenced by moral and mental depravity, over-influenced by capitalism and religion, ready to enslave others, and push vice and drugs? The founding Virginians are truly America in miniature.

      Cross reference: Theory of First Effective Settlement

      “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” — Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.

    1. re had evolved, which the propagandists of discipline regarded with dismay. Josiah Tucker, the dean of Gloucester, declared in 1745 that "the lower class of people" were utterly degenerated. Foreigners (he sermonized) found "the common people of our populous cities to be the most abandoned, and licentious wretches on earth

      Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority ... Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty.

      This sounds eerily like some of the same sorts of fears, uncertainties, and doubt that middle America has about our bigger cities. Though I'll note that broadly they feel like they're the party of "liberty" now.

      This is an interesting data point in the long-running contention between the city and the countryside that seems to dominate large swaths of human history.

    2. Voice is lost

      Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale? Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Tale (poem)

      There's a link here to shepherds and a bardic tradition. In some sense, shepherds have lots of time to kill during the day and thus potentially tell stories. But they're also moving around their environment which also makes it easier for them to have used songline-like methods for attaching their memories to their environment.

      How far back might this tradition go in our literate culture?

      I also wonder at the influence of time on oral traditions as the result of this. Lynne Kelly describes calendrical devices in a variety of indigenous settings in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies for potential use in annual spaced repetition. What about the spaced repetition within daily cycles of regular work as described in this paper with respect to shepherds, fishing communities, and crofting?

      The daily cycle of life may have been a part of the spaced repetition for memory.

      How might we show this?

      A quick example that comes to mind is the French children's song Alouette, Gentille Alouette which details how one kills, cleans, and dresses a chicken for cooking.

    1. I've been wanting to read Zinn, so perhaps this is a good place to follow along? A sort of pseudo book club perhaps?

      It's interesting to see Dan struggle with an obvious listicle article in Forbes as an authoritative source. This example is a great indicator that Forbes online has created far too much of a content farm to be taken seriously anymore. From what I've seen of it over the past several years it's followed the business model of The Huffington Post before Huffington sold it and cashed out. My supposition is that Forbes is providing a platform for people to get reach and isn't actually paying those writers to create their content.

      Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlnYt9NOUAw

    1. This is the theory of the extended mind, introduced more than two decades ago by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. A 1998 article of theirs published in the journal Analysis began by posing a question that would seem to have an obvious answer: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” They went on to offer an unconventional response. The mind does not stop at the usual “boundaries of skin and skull,” they maintained. Rather, the mind extends into the world and augments the capacities of the biological brain with outside-the-brain resources.

      https://icds.uoregon.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Clark-and-Chalmers-The-Extended-Mind.pdf

      Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

      There seems to be a parallel between this question and that between the gene and the body. Evolution is working at the level of the gene, but the body and the environment are part of the extended system as well. Link these to Richard Dawkins idea of the extended gene and ideas of group selection.

      Are there effects to be seen on the evolutionary scale of group selection ideas with respect to the same sorts of group dynamics like the minimal group paradigm? Can the sorts of unconscious bias that occur in groups be the result of individual genes? This seems a bit crazy, but potentially worth exploring if there are interlinked effects based on this analogy.

    2. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

  6. www.library.upenn.edu www.library.upenn.edu
    1. How have chance survivals shaped literary and linguistic canons? How might the topography of the field appear differently had certain prized unica not survived? What are the ways in which authors, compilers, scribes, and scholars have dealt with lacunary exemplaria? How do longstanding and emergent methodologies and disciplines—analysis of catalogs of dispersed libraries, reverse engineering of ur-texts and lost prototypes, digital reconstructions of codices dispersi, digital humanities. and cultural heritage preservation, and trauma studies to name a few,—serve to reveal the extent of disappearance? How can ideologically-driven biblioclasm or the destruction wrought by armed conflicts -- sometimes occurring within living memory -- be assessed objectively yet serve as the basis for protection of cultural heritage in the present? In all cases, losses are not solely material: they can be psychological, social, digital, linguistic, spiritual, professional. Is mournful resignation the only response to these gaps, or can such sentiments be harnessed to further knowledge, understanding, and preservation moving forward?
    1. “The scroll is written in code, but its actual content is simple and well-known, and there was no reason to conceal it,” they write in the Journal of Biblical Literature. “This practice is also found in many places outside the land of Israel, where leaders write in secret code even when discussing universally known matters, as a reflection of their status. The custom was intended to show that the author was familiar with the code, while others were not.”

      Ancient scribes sometimes wrote in code even though the topics at hand were well known as a means of showing their status.

    1. Bigger is better.

      Research shows that high-resolution monitors make thinking easier. This also seems true of classrooms which use large posters and maps as teaching aids at lower grades.

      Why don't we use these methods as we grow older?

      When used in mnemonic traditions, one can use vast spaces to create memory palaces that become thinking vistas within the brain. How can we better leverage these effects while still maintaining the effectiveness of focused journeys?

    2. Valorize motion, not sitting still.

      I wonder how much of our genetic programming is based on centuries of evolution with humans moving around their landscapes and attaching their memories to them?

      Within Lynne Kelly's thesis about stone circles, henges, etc. most of the locations have roads and entryways into them which require movement much less the idea of dancing and singing attached to memory performance as well.

    1. Update API usage of the view helpers by changing javascript_packs_with_chunks_tag and stylesheet_packs_with_chunks_tag to javascript_pack_tag and stylesheet_pack_tag. Ensure that your layouts and views will only have at most one call to javascript_pack_tag or stylesheet_pack_tag. You can now pass multiple bundles to these view helper methods.

      Good move. Rather than having 2 different methods, and requiring people to "go out of their way" to "opt in" to using chunks by using the longer-named javascript_packs_with_chunks_tag, they changed it to just use chunks by default, out of the box.

      Now they don't need 2 similar but separate methods that do nearly the same, which makes things simpler and easier to understand (no longer have to stop and ask oneself, which one should I use? what's the difference?).

      You can't get it "wrong" now because there's only one option.

      And by switching that method to use the shorter name, it makes it clearer that that is the usual/common/recommended way to go.