53 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2024
    1. we kept looking at the a couple of assumptions and it was assuming almost a linear journey of we're going to take the power and the money from the elites and we're going to put it in the hands of the community and the peoples and what we know throughout history is many different social movements over the past hundreds of years have endeavored to make that shift. But unless we actually get down into the deeper thought forms that underlie power and domination themselves, we're not actually in a cold, liberatory kind of framework

      for - quote / key insight - must interrogate the deeper thought patterns else - we risk repeating simplistic linear transition social movements that have failed over the past centuries - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023

  2. Nov 2024
    1. One of the quotes I will use to open the paperback book is this, from Herman Melville's poem 'Clarel': Come, thou who makest such hot haste To forge the future—weigh the past.
  3. Oct 2024
    1. Day by day,night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless.

      She is finally letting go of her past -- which is what kept her so complacent and able to survive. But it means she is moving on. She wants to keep him in her memory like she did with Luke, but she has moved on finally.

    2. infinitely sad: faded music, fadedpaper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longerpossible. Without warning I began to cry.

      She finally understands that the past is something gone and fictionalised, something she had been stuck in but has already disappeared - especially with the child picture, especially now she has Nick rather than fantasizing about Luke

  4. Sep 2024
    1. Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as ifI'm nothing more than a woman of sand,

      As time has gone past, she is washed away, as she resides in the past. In her night, and she is continually losing herself. Seeing the change in her daughter, it disrupts her storyline, her discipline in her mind.

    Tags

    Annotators

  5. Jul 2024
    1. For some reason, Microsoft decided to use the MS Word HTML rendering engine in Outlook 2007 to 2013 (desktop version) – this was even worse than the IE5/IE6 rendering engine which I believe was used in Outlook 2000, 2002 and 2003! As most large corporate businesses force their staff to use a version of desktop Outlook that hasn’t been updated in years, email is stuck in this hell of being held back in worse-than-IE6 web.
    1. easter island

      for - progress trap - archeology - Easter Island

      progress trap - archeology - Easter Island - The archeology tells the fascinating story of the progress trap that Eastern Island ancestors created. - Easter Island is desolate and only 64 square miles total - It is located 2,000 miles (3218 km) from the nearest landmass of South America - Archeologists trying to piece together the stone monoliths of Easter Island found pollen samples in the crater lakes on the island, proving that the place was once a thriving forest - By the time the first Europeans landed (the Dutch) on Easter Island, it was just grassy hills - How did it go from a lush forest land to a grass land? - The layers of pollen samples told a story - The aboriginal polynesians that the Dutch explorers encountered arrived about 1,000 years earlier - They cut down the forest, grew their population and used trees in many ways, including to transport the huge stone monoliths that paid respect to their ancestors - The original people multiplied then separated into separate warring tribes - The environment was devastated as the logging destroyed the forest and all the abundant ecosystem that provided for their sustenance - This created severe erosion and the soil became impoverished - The tribes collapses into warfare and cannibalism

      progress trap - Easter Island - Sumeria etc - lesson - don't romanticize our ancestors - Human groups have continuously sabotaged themselves through overexploitation and lack of foresight - Progress traps have been a constant part of our species for a long, long time

    2. the idea that this can go on forever is where the myth of progress gets 00:04:00 dangerous because

      for - quote - myth of progress - Ronald Wright

      quote - myth of progress - Ronald Wright - (see below) - although the idea that this can go on forever is where the myth of progress gets dangerous - because there have been many times and places in the human past, - not even necessarily in our own cultural tradition - among other civilizations where there have been great periods of - expansion and - prosperity - and everybody started to get the idea that life was getting better and better - but usually those those periods of rapid expansion are done and nature pays the bills for that

      Comment - history repeats when we forget the lessons of that part. - Historians are so important right now to remind us of past lessons

  6. Jun 2024
    1. (16:30) I finally get the holistic view of time...

      The future dictates (or should) our present beliefs, mindsets, thoughts, etc. which therefore changes how we view the past, its meaning. So when we change our vision of the future, our present mutates, and therefore the meaning of the past too.

      When we in the present change, we alter the meaning of the past and gain new possibilities for the future.

      When the meaning of our past changes, it is because of a change in the present and potentially the future.

      In this way, all of time (past, present, future) exists at the same time.

  7. Apr 2024
    1. [Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.

      In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

      Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.


      30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.


      Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

  8. Feb 2024
    1. Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

      Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

      If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

      No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

      (Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

  9. Jan 2024
    1. by far the most illuminating to me is the idea that mental causation works from virtual futures towards the past 00:33:17 whereas physical causation works from the past towards the future and these two streams of causation sort of overlap in the present

      for - comparison - mental vs physical causation - adjacency - Michael Levin's definition of intelligence - Sheldrake's mental vs physical causation

      key insight - comparison - mental vs physical causation - mental causation works from virtual futures to past - physical causation works from past to future - this is an interesting way of seeing things

      adjacency - between - direction of mental vs physical causation - Michael Levin's definition of intelligence (adopting WIlliam James's idea) and cognition and cognitive light cones of living organisms:: - having a goal - having autonomy and agency to reach that goal - adjacency statement - Levin adopts a definition of cognition from scientific predecessors that relate to goal activity. - When an organism chooses one specific behavioral trajectory over all other possible ones in order to reach a goal - this is none other than choosing a virtual future that projects back to the present - In our species, innovation and design is based on this future-to-present backwards projection

  10. Dec 2023
    1. we are certainly special I mean 00:02:57 no other animal rich the moon or know how to build atom bombs so we are definitely quite different from chimpanzees and elephants and and all the rest of the animals but we are still 00:03:09 animals you know many of our most basic emotions much of our society is still run on Stone Age code
      • for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

      • comment

      • insights

        • evolutionary paradox of modernity
          • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
          • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
          • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
          • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
          • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.
      • Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

        • fight and flight response
          • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
        • cancer
          • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
            • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
        • children afraid to sleep in the dark
          • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
        • obesity
          • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
            • like squirrels storing away for the winter.
  11. Nov 2023
    1. sumption of decreasing virulence with time is a double-edged sword in NativeAmerican disease history. Recent Native Americans have extreme susceptibility to oftenacute infections such as influenza and tuberculosis (Indian Health Service 1999; Koenig1921; Matthews 1886). Although, as detailed later in this paper, many factors, includingsocio-economic conditions, diet, and other concurrent infections, could be contributing tothis incidence, these factors seem to pale by comparison with disease history. Essentially,current incidence rates account for the absence of crowd infections prior to Columbus andabsence explains the present incidence rate

      .

    2. se diseases, once introduced, severelywinnowed Native American populations.

      .

    3. Since the mid-twentieth century it has been widely accepted that Old World populationsintroduced infectious diseases to Native Americans beginning with the Columbianvoyages of AD 149

      .

  12. Sep 2023
    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

  13. Aug 2023
    1. It is not unrealistic to forsee the costs ofcomputation and memory plummeting by orders ofmagnitude, while the cost of human programmers increases.It will be cost effective to use large systems like ~. forevery kind of programming, as long as they can providesignificant increases in programmer power. Just ascompilers have found their way into every application overthe past twenty years, intelligent program-understandingsystems may become a part of every reasonablecomputational environment in the next twenty.
  14. Feb 2023
    1. warfare
      • Comment
      • Observation
        • it is known that warfare is a significant source of technological innovation
        • this can be explained by evolutionary biology
        • our instruct for survival is strongest in ( inter-species) conflict
        • such is the deep irony of human progress
        • now, in the Anthropocene, humanity is waging another war for survival, caused by our war against nature
      • we can characterized this war as a war against past ignorance
    1. You are presented with traces of your past thoughts, each Zettel bringing something back to life within you, lighting up some parts of your brain that start to remember those trains of thoughts the memory had sorted away.

      traces of your past thoughts feels closely related to Vannevar Bush's associative trails

    1. The humanities are the process of pres-ervation and appropriation of that pastness, a process thatrequires specific skills acquired through practice, as all skillsare.
  15. Nov 2022
    1. Topic: Communication with the Zettelkasten: How to get an adequate partner, junior partner? – important after working with staff becomes more and more difficult and expensive. Zettel’s reality

      The best and most challenging communication partner you may experience is a version of your past self. A searchable set of notes is the closest approximation of this one is likely to find.

  16. Sep 2022
    1. one of the i guess stranger or slightly scarier conclusions proposed by the scientists in the study is that a lot of the signs we see in the geological history of the planet kind of resemble what we are now observing in 00:08:49 the anthropocene the period when humans started to dominate the globe or basically how the modern climate change to some extent actually resembles a lot of sudden changes that did happen in the last few millions of years with one 00:09:03 specific type of an event currently still unexplained by scientists often referred to as hyperthermals the sudden increase in temperature that usually lasts for a few thousand years but happens in a very short period of time 00:09:15 and currently doesn't have a very definitive explanation but one very well known example we explored in the past in one of the videos should be in the description known as p-e-t-m paleocene using thermal maximum the event that 00:09:28 happened approximately 55 million years ago when the global temperature suddenly increased by 5 to 8 degrees celsius or 9 to 14 degrees fahrenheit just to then drop suddenly within a few thousand years and there's been quite a lot of 00:09:41 explanations for what might have happened maybe an asteroid collision that released huge amounts of co2 gas or a lot of other gases that usually warm up the planet maybe volcanic eruptions doing the same but at the moment there's 00:09:53 just not enough clear evidence specifically craters or any volcanoes that were produced during this time to suggest any specific explanation on the other hand all of these observations kind of resemble what's happening to the planet right now as well and so trying 00:10:06 to figure out exactly what caused these warming conditions is one of the potential ways we could start assessing the hypothesis and try to answer these some of the difficult questions also likewise any kind of alloying industrial 00:10:17 civilization should maybe produce very similar effects on their planet as well at least that's what the modern science expects but what are some of the questions we can ask ourselves in regards to the history of our planet in 00:10:29 order to see how viable the hypothesis is well first of all generally speaking the geological record of our planet is usually very incomplete and it becomes even more difficult to study it as you go back in time for example today we 00:10:42 know that only about three percent of the entire surface of the planet has any kind of urban activity on the surface or basically anything that would potentially resemble modern technology and so the chance for a lot of these cities to survive for thousands or even 00:10:55 millions of years is exceptionally low which also means that within just a few thousand years the chance for discovering these techno fossils for some future humans living here is also going to be pretty low as well you can 00:11:08 kind of see that there are some bottles here and a lot of other leftovers but all this is going to disappear in time turning into nothing but almost completely indistinguishable sediment and for any major city to leave any mark 00:11:20 inside the sediment it really depends on where it's located if it's located on the subsiding plate it might eventually become sediment and get locked inside rock leaving behind certain marks but if 00:11:31 it's on the rising plate or if it's somewhere in the middle everything here might eventually be eroded with time by different types of rain and wind especially as the rain becomes more acidic leaving pretty much nothing 00:11:43 behind on the other hand when it comes to things like for example dinosaur fossils we usually discover one fossil for every 10 000 years with the footprints of dinosaurs being even more rare but even though humans have been on 00:11:56 the planet for at least 300 000 years the civilization that we're used to has only been around for just over a few hundred years and technically even less than that and so the chance for something from our modern civilization 00:12:09 to turn into a fossil that can be discovered in the future is actually super low and so right now there's a really big chance that after a few million years everything we take for granted is going to look like this and 00:12:21 so the natural question here is how do you then tell if any intelligent species ever existed on the planet like we do right now well we might be able to distinguish certain sedimentary anomalies even present in the sediment 00:12:34 today and then combine this with observations of various hyperthermals or any other major changes in the temperature that don't seem to have any other explanation for example all the technofossils are going to leave behind 00:12:46 a very specific isotopic ratio that's extremely difficult to find in nature including of course residues of carbon that doesn't exist in nature such as various microplastics these should linger for quite a while there should 00:13:00 also be geological record of a major extinction event that doesn't really have any good explanations also signs of unusual chemicals that are generally not produced in nature either for example things like cfcs or more 00:13:13 specifically various types of transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission which obviously all the chemical signs we're currently living on the planet by doing a regular stuff 00:13:24 by being ourselves and so we kind of expect something similar could have happened in the past there could have been another species that was basically exploiting the planet and as a result left some signs of this in the 00:13:37 geological record but that's of course assuming that any civilization is going to have a lot of very specific needs in terms of energy and a lot of civilizations are going to eventually result in similar types of pollution 00:13:49 naturally a pretty big assumption but it's really the only assumption we have right now in order to figure out if this hypothesis has any merit but even here there's still a major problem if this type of a civilization has not existed 00:14:02 for longer than let's just say a few hundred years the chance for it to even leave any kind of a mark and that includes the fossil mark is still pretty low and even things like microplastics or things like transuranium elements 00:14:15 might have already mixed with a lot of other stuff or disappeared completely especially if this happened a long time ago and so if these ancient civilizations ever existed and if they managed to somehow change the planet in the past the signs of their existence 00:14:28 would still be extremely difficult to discover with the only signs left after millions of years really just being various types of isotopes that could still be out there in the sediments on the planet

      !- in other words : the natural gelogical earth processes could render the artefacts of previous advanced civilizations untectable

  17. Mar 2022
    1. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey.
    1. I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail

      an inversion of how black people lack liberty in the past in the present, black people have the power to report white people to the police, and white people can be prosecuted

    1. I was struck by what the Kenyan representative 00:38:12 to the UN Security Council said when this erupted. The Kenyan representative spoke in the name of Kenya and other African countries. And he told the Russians: Look, we also are the product of a post-imperial order. The same way the Soviet empire collapsed into different independent nations, also, African nations came out of the collapse of European empires. 00:38:39 And the basic principle of African politics ever since then was that no matter what your objections to the borders you have inherited, keep the borders. The borders are sacred because if we start invading neighboring countries because, "Hey, this is part of our countries, 00:39:03 these people are part of our nation," there will not be an end to it. And if this now happens in Ukraine, it will be a blueprint for copycats all over the world.

      This is a case of the past rearing its head to the present.It's a hard pill to swallow.

  18. Sep 2021
    1. ut each time I am there I return instantly to those six weeks as if they were only the other day, and I slow down and point to Mrs. Croft's street, saying to my son, Here was my first home in America, where I lived with a woman who was a hundred and three. "Remember?"

      Life stories and experiences make every person unique. They are so important, that you can even pass them on.

    2. Bengalis

      In England, the narrator stays in his own cultural context as much as possible. There is almost no British influence or interest in English culture shown by him.

    3. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have

      He starts apreciating everyday things

  19. May 2021
    1. But in the dark world of HTML email, where the motto is "code like it's 1996" because Outlook uses the rendering engine from MS Word and Gmail removes almost everything, every method for making two elements overlap that I can think of is unsuitable due to poor client support
    1. Embedded CSS: This style is becoming more popular with the rise of mobile and responsive emails. Embedded CSS codes are determined in one place of an email, generally in the <head> section as a <style>. Some email servers still strip the information out of this section, which can cause display problems.
    1. Although a lot of email development is stuck in the past, that doesn’t mean we can’t modernize our campaigns right along with our websites. Many of these tips can be baked right into your email boilerplate or code snippets, allowing you to create more accessible HTML emails without too much thought.
    1. Email require their own flavor of HTML and CSS. Want to have rows or columns in your layout? You'll have to use <table> tags—a method long buried by web developers. There's also no support for external stylesheets, element position styling, and so on...
  20. Feb 2021
  21. Sep 2020
    1. Tetzcotzingo

      Context Texcotzingo was located next to the capital city of Texcoco, served as the imperial summer gardens, and was resplendent with all the royal paraphernalia of the time, including the imperial and courtesan residences; it also had a genuinely exceptional water supply. However, Tetzcotzingo must also be seen as a sacred/hedonistic space, an agricultural space, a kind of political statement or emblem, a space for performance, and land works. Texcotzingo was created and designed by Nezahualcóyotl in the 15th century. These imperial gardens were used to collect and display specimens of plants and animals for an exhaustive understanding of the entire Aztec Empire and the cultivation of medicinal plants. It was conceived as a place for sensual indulgence and as a recreation of paradise. Dedicated to Tláloc, the god of rain, these gardens were designed and built with sculptures depicting Aztec mythology, including the celebration of sacred numbers. Texcotzingo was the outstanding achievement in the brilliant career in the landscape architecture of one of the Aztec empire’s most powerful kings, Nezahualcoyotl. Texcotzingo was not just a botanical garden, but it was the family dynasty’s own sacred and recreational retreat, their columbarium for ancestral remains and living map of their domain. This imposing hill overlooking the city and imperial capital, Texcoco, was also a triumph of hydrological engineering which brought water from the adjacent lower slopes of Mount Tlaloc, “the holiest mountain of pagan Mexico,” via a massive aqueduct and then sent it downslope, flowing through channels and pools, cascading in waterfalls over the king’s extensive gardens and highlighting the sculptures gracing them. Finally, the water-fed the terraced farm fields that bordered the lower edge of the royal pleasure park. (Evans n.d.) The Aztecs have a divided sympathy of their culture because of the relationship with their bloody sacrificial rites. Even though a lot of many botanical gardens landscape design based on a format made by the Aztecs and many of species were nurtured by them. The eastern side of the hill was dominated by two major features: an aqueduct terminus and its receiving pond. This landscape got several features that represent not only a technical side but also several philosophical statements. Evans, Susan Toby. The Garden of the Aztec Philosopher-King. Pennsylvania: PennState College of Liberal Arts, n.d. Evans, Susan Toby. Aztec royal pleasure parks: conspicuous consumption and elite status rivalry. Pennsylvania: PennState College of Liberal Arts, n.d.

  22. May 2020
    1. Yong, S. E. F., Anderson, D. E., Wei, W. E., Pang, J., Chia, W. N., Tan, C. W., Teoh, Y. L., Rajendram, P., Toh, M. P. H. S., Poh, C., Koh, V. T. J., Lum, J., Suhaimi, N.-A. M., Chia, P. Y., Chen, M. I.-C., Vasoo, S., Ong, B., Leo, Y. S., Wang, L., & Lee, V. J. M. (2020). Connecting clusters of COVID-19: An epidemiological and serological investigation. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, S1473309920302735. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30273-5

  23. Dec 2018
    1. The Indeterminacy of the Past: Multiple Times, Multiple Voices The third methodological theme concerns ihe f1asl as indetc,rr,1inate. 10 We are constantly revising our knowledge of the past in light of new developments in the present.

      Visibility can be obtained by peeling back the history of the infrastructure -- how it began, how it was added to, how it changed/adapted over time.

      Looking back in time also provides an opportunity to consider how different people/perspectives influenced the infrastructure. Who was vocal? Who was silent? Who was silenced?

  24. Jul 2018
    1. ast. Moving from a quantitative time to a qualitative one, the Printer Clock tells time through the activities of others and the variety of pictures reveals the multiplicity of rhythms within that

      Qualitative time as a way to express a new present in some one else's past.

  25. Mar 2018
  26. Nov 2017
    1. In entering on this field, the commissioners are aware that they have to encounter much difference of opinion as to the extent which it is expedient that this institution should occupy.

      There are indeed many oppositions to anything. And of course a lot to this important issue of establishing a university. It is rather interesting to see in this report some of the rooted mindsets and values that used to be the norm for the society. Things like the uselessness of learned science and dispute over private and public education are really different from what we currently hold true: we currently value heavily on science and applied science. These differences show the trace of evolution in our society, either in a good or a bad way. It is the most important information we can get—the background knowledge that set the tongue for the past views or opinions. Moreover, since this university was erected in the long history, values or visions have been changing and need to continuously change to follow the globe. Otherwise, we will fall behind and lose our competitiveness as a global force. -- Haoyu Li

  27. Oct 2016
  28. Jul 2016
  29. Oct 2013
    1. These three kinds of rhetoric refer to three different kinds of time. The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that he advises, for or against. The party in a case at law is concerned with the past; one man accuses the other, and the other defends himself, with reference to things already done. The ceremonial orator is, properly speaking, concerned with the present, since all men praise or blame in view of the state of things existing at the time, though they often find it useful also to recall the past and to make guesses at the future.

      Rhetoric and time: past, present, and future.

  30. Sep 2013
    1. For of the three elements in speech-making -- speaker, subject, and person addressed -- it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech's end and object. [1358b] The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator's skill are observers. From this it follows that there are three divisions of oratory-(1) political, (2) forensic, and (3) the ceremonial oratory of display.

      I like how he divides these categories into past, present, and futures.