[about the information on the web]”The pace, the vast wealth of information coming from all directions — how the heck can you keep up when it comes at you like this? Yes, it seems too much to assimilate,”
“Watch a child play a computer game or surf the Internet — truly child’s play. How parochial of us to assume that just because our imprinted minds can’t keep up, that fresh new minds won’t be able to either. We are amazingly adaptable, which is why we survived — our progeny will not only adapt, they will excel.
“However, we need to give them the right tools. We need to teach them to think critically and objectively — teach them to grasp scientific methodology and embrace technological literacy.
“Unfortunately our society does a very poor job of this. The future of the human race is too important to leave to politicians and corporations. A scientifically educated global population will help us focus on the truly important problems, such as energy — arguably the most important crisis we as a species will face — instead of wasting efforts on petty squabbles for short term economic and political gain.”
“Watch a child play a computer game or surf the Internet — truly child’s play. How parochial of us to assume that just because our imprinted minds can’t keep up, that fresh new minds won’t be able to either. We are amazingly adaptable, which is why we survived — our progeny will not only adapt, they will excel.
“However, we need to give them the right tools. We need to teach them to think critically and objectively — teach them to grasp scientific methodology and embrace technological literacy.
“Unfortunately our society does a very poor job of this. The future of the human race is too important to leave to politicians and corporations. A scientifically educated global population will help us focus on the truly important problems, such as energy — arguably the most important crisis we as a species will face — instead of wasting efforts on petty squabbles for short term economic and political gain.”
Doesn’t information itself have a liberal bias?
TV: The Colbert Réport: 27 Nov 2006
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them. As it is, the act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.
Article: Epigrams in Programming
In describing today’s accelerating changes, the media fires blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.
The fewer data needed, the better the information. An overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.
Book: The Callahan Touch - Spider Robinson
In the past, people would stare into the fire for hours when they wanted to think. Or stare at the sea. The endless dancing shapes and patterns would reach far deeper into our minds than we could manage by reason and logic. You see, logic can only proceed from the premises and assumptions we already make, so we just drive round and round in little circles like little clockwork cars. We need dancing shapes to lift us and carry us, but they’re harder to find these days. You can’t stare into a radiator. You can’t stare in the sea. Well, you can, but it’s covered with plastic bottles and used condoms, so you just sit there getting cross. All we have to stare into is the white noise. The stuff we sometimes call information, but which is really just a babble rising in the air.
Book: The Salmon of Doubt
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dansmind86 /
catholicism, civilization, history, information, religion, sociology
#1944
I dont know about philosophy of Mayans, we have very little information due to the efficiency of the spanish conquistadores, and uh, well mostly their priests, who burned all the books. They had hundreds of thousands of books, and there’s three left, and one of them has these venus calculations… just imagine our civilization reduced to three books.
Speech: from a 1979 lecture in New Zealand
I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.
The worst thing in the world is when records are destroyed. The destruction of the Alexandrian Library and also the destruction of the great libraries in Rome. Those were terrible things, and one was done by the Christians, but there’s no difference between them when they’re working for propaganda purposes.
You can’t be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he’ll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.
Book: “A Hacker Manifesto” by McKenzie Wark, [126]
Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
I blog because information is energy. I absorb it, maybe add to it and pass it on.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
Book: “Neuromancer” by William Gibson
Whenever my brain receives information, it spiders out into all of the possibilities.
Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh, she is information.
Book: “Idoru” by William Gibson