lol

There's something to be said about practical living - where you spend more time acknowledging what's around you than what's in your head. But to what extent? Is practical living the antithesis of creativity and imagination? I wonder.

Heh. Nice quote!

and that's wrong because?

These two lines don't really jibe. Turning to measurement and moving from handicraft to engineering is good because it allows more people in. It's no longer based on the whims of a few.

On the other hand, not all design is profit over beauty. Comparing that is like saying everything is Walmart. No, some things are still < your local goods store >.

I daresay it wasn't overnight and it wasn't some magic that happened. More people needed design. So more people learned it and more people made tools and more used those tools. That's why someone had to come up with a metric of how to judge good design. Something like this has always happened in every industry - first, it's a 'feeling' of what's right and what's wrong. Then it becomes more formalized and that formalization leads to democratization and higher availability to the masses.

Tolstoy says in War and Peace that it' seems easy to look back at history and analyze wars and say that this or that reason caused such a victory or defeat. But that's not right or correct. This article showcases just as much. It says that individual soldiers did defect, but elite units and heavy equipment units did not. Why did they not? Why did neither entire battalions not small groups of soldiers run off with weaponry? I do not see that addressed here. I do see sheer numbers, but it does not address whether the rebels were just less equipped or perhaps less trained? Lesser numbers do not always lead to loss.

Doesn't this deserve to be quoted from the original source?

I'd say fire not only extended evenings, but also created social circles. First, because everyone had to sit in a circle (hah! Silly me!) but also because fire was not able to conquer all of the darkness that encompassed the general area, so it cleared a zone, an area in which social life mingled and eventually got ingrained into our evolution.

Individual contentment comes at the cost of society fulfilling the social contract. That leads to a situation that perhaps, a content and 'simple' person in the first world may be more so than someone in the third world. But I've picked up this reading from somewhere in between, so this is a half-baked thought. I'll come back to it later.

I'm a lifelong student. This can enable me to create a WordPress page of everything I read/study/annotate on the web.