Manso

More than 4.5 billion people currently own a mobile phone, and within the next decade, that number will reach 90 percent of the global population. So when Clinton speaks of “a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” she is not describing some messianic attempt to impose American technological solutions on the rest of the world. She is talking about the world as it soon will be — and in many ways already is.

Not Shannon and Shannon (Redux)

I’m going through old things and found this little sketch from Shan. I blogged about it in August, 2007, when she drew it. Here’s the story…

This morning Shannon tried to explain her next hair cut. She drew it and showed me:

Then she took the paper back and said, “no wait, that’s not me…here,” and handed me this:

I love Shannon.

When you see strawberries being sold for $1 a box, picture the kind of labor it takes to pick those strawberries and the kind of chemicals it takes to produce those kinds of strawberries without hand weeding.

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.

Many games involve compulsion, and studies that compare the partial reinforcement techniques of slot machines and psychological manipulations to videogames stretch back to the mid-1980s. In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) frequently have been accused of doing little more than compelling players to keep playing; amounting to “brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money”…

…as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

What was a really major bad idea about the Garden City was you take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world that you make without the old world. And Mumford fell for that and the whole “this is the twentieth century” thing. The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism