Silentio

This is the incredible thing about NASA (and science in general come to think of it) even "failure" can mean great success.

There are about 3 billion people on Earth to whom your statement doesn't necessarily apply: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/397-eliminating-...

TMZ is a pretty terrible source but the NYT is reporting this as well: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson...

I'm just wondering, if I ate a Chimpanzee would it be considered cannibalism? I'm not sure H. Sapiens sapiens eating H. Neanderthalensis is much different from H. Sapiens sapiens eating Pan troglodytes.

Also, I'm not clear on whether the stigma against cannibalism is mainly based on social pressure or stems from our biological programming.

I agree that Preview's annotate feature works well. Still, there something about the physical process of underlining words that helps me connect ideas together as I'm reading.

The only problem with digital copies like this is that I can't underline. Maybe it's just the habit of underlining, but I can't read as well (academic reading) when I can't underline key points, specific words, and particularly interesting passages.

Great article. I've always wondered why so many games this gen are boring brown and gray. Playing through Fallout 3 makes this readily apparent.

The other thing I'd like to see change is the complete overuse of bloom shader effects.

Great advice. Sometimes I only get down a single sentence that pops into my head, but a killer sentence can make an entire essay for me.

Totally agree. I don't have an iPhone (can't afford a data plan at the moment) but want one. Something feels wrong about being locked in to any one carrier for service though. My main PC isn't locked into anything. As long as the market I live in gives me choices of internet service providers, I get to choose. Does anyone know if we'll see a more open environment in cellphone service (data, voice, etc) in the near future?

I don't care if it's fake. "Bung" is too funny.

What you say is true, as far as I know. It is entirely possible to share the culture of the people who one lives nearby and yet practice a different religion. It is also true that this has been going on for a long time. In the case of the spread of Abrahamic offshoots (Islam and Christianity), a couple of thousand years. In this sense religious expression has always been fluid. However, I think that is different than viewing religion as an object. It is a modern move to split culture into many different categories: public, private, family, government, religion, education, medical, etc, etc. This way of understanding and ordering the world is a particularly Western (some might say Germanic) form.

Furthermore, there are languages that still survive to this day that have no word for "religion" as such, something I talk elsewhere in this thread. This says to me that in some cultures religion cannot even be conceived of as separate from culture because the language does not provide the imaginative capacity to understand it that way.

So, always fluid, yes. Separable, I don't know.

I don't think so. I do think there is a problem when we view other cultures from the outside, and when we focus only on the "fancy" aspects of culture because it's more interesting than how people arrange their bedding, or whatever.

However, I think you are focusing too much on religion as ritual specifically. Yes, indigenous Americans, for example, have certain rituals, rites, and special events that stand apart as specific expressions of their unique culture. If those rituals seek to connect the individuals who participate in them, and the community as a whole to an "ultimate reality" or an unseen world, we in the west call it a religious ritual. Most indigenous American people (all, as far as a I know) do not even have a word for "religion," however, so the mundane and the "fancy rain dance" are each simply forms of culture with no defining boundary.

>There's a difference between culture and religion.

That's an interesting statement. Only in the West, and only in the last few hundred years can religion be conceived of as a discrete object, separate from culture.

Indigenous American and Hindu culture, for example, have traditionally had no such division between religion and culture. With the rise of global capitalism we may be starting to see a secular/nonsecular divide in traditionally Hindu areas (India, duh) but this is a very modern development.

edit: I should say, none of the above necessarily negates anything you said. I just think it's interesting.

edit number 2: Also, the above could also be further illuminated in a short description of the differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Worth checking out each concept on Wikipedia if y'all are interested.

Nice post. I really like your writing style.

Damn, I guess I will.

The idea that the wealthy started from nothing and ascribing their wealth to the "hard work" of building from nothing is romantic, but ultimately it's a fantasy. No doubt much individual hard work goes into building a fortune, but the fortune itself owes much more to the labor of thousands, if not millions, of workers, right down to the janitor who sweeps the floor, than it does to the individual who had the next big idea. Labor certainly has more to do with wealth than capital itself.

Inequality is embedded in capitalism. When the invisible hand moves capital from one place to another, it does not only give, it takes away. For someone like Bill Gates to give as he does, he has to have taken away (you might prefer "created") in the first place.

It may be muck-stirring, but I am less interested in saving the world than I am in understanding the ideological assumptions implicit in, for instance, Gates's actions, and the systems that allow those actions to take place. To leave the muck unstirred, to forget it exists, is to live in a world that does nothing but support conventional wisdom, excludes alternatives, and limits debate. The useful question is not, "is this True or not," but rather, "what would it mean if it were true."

Finally, if Zizek is a conspiracy theorist, was Hegel, was Marx?

Slavoj Zizek's thinking on violence is worth quoting here:

"The two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros. The cruel businessman destroys or buys out competitors, aims at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade to achieve his goals. Meanwhile, the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind quaintly asks: 'What does it serve to have computers, if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?' In liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries "help" the underdeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the underdeveloped" (Violence 22).

Gates "give away your wealth, billionaires. It's fun!" rhetoric focuses only on subjective violence - violence, as Zizek writes, "which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses," etc. The "do-this-now-its-fun" call distracts attention away from the systematic violence nestled at the root of capitalism. Zizek writes, and I think he's right, that Gates call for a friendlier robber baron "signals a sad predicament of ours: today's capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own. It needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction" (24).

That is not to say that Gates money will not do some good. I imagine it will do and has done. However, I do think it is a distraction from the real issue, which is the massive global economic exploitation necessary to produce Gates's wealth in the first place.

I've had the same experience you have. My biggest problem with Hulu, though, is that I don't think they want you watching it on your TV. Or, they'd rather have you watching shows on TV (via cable, over the air, etc), and Hulu is only for the computer. This is unfortunate. I can see myself watching a lot more television if I could access Hulu on, for example, my Xbox 360.

I saw a kiosk at the mall selling these. I didn't stop to take a look, but I've never seen a kiosk at the mall with so many people crowded around it.

Does MS make any money on search?

I ask because I wonder if they are trying to kill/replace/be the next Google at all. Obviously Steve Ballmer would love for MS to knock off Google at the head of search, but it would be nice for their search offering to be profitable first, wouldn't it? Or maybe I just don't understand business.

I was going to say the same thing. Open floor plans are too distracting for me.

I wonder if, simply by making this statement, Google takes a step toward making it true?

On Hacker News, definite yes. Other sites, not so often. But I am not moved to comment on other sites as often as I am here.

Can't agree with you more. To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods.

Interesting, too, that the author pairs harmony and beauty as having "intrinsic" value. We <i>might</i> think of beauty as intrinsically valuable but, once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable. Which brings me to my next point.

To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?

I guess I'm not a big fan of moral philosophy.

Google may have a monopoly on search, however, it hasn't come to that monopoly via anticompetitive actions, as far as we know. At least, no one has reported on any. Furthermore, as I think Gruber pointed out not too long ago, Google isn't selling search, it's selling advertising.

Conceiving of the human as "social animal" rather than individualized monadic unit may be new, but the evidence for the human as socially constructed being is not. From our very first experience as infants we are engaged in social relationships with our primary care giver that lays the groundwork for who we will become. It can be said that it is impossible for any human to escape her community, for she <i>is</i>, in a sense, her community. See Heinz Kohut for more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Kohut

This presents and interesting answer to the following:

>> That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.

Sometimes one might need to get away from the buzz of the other's communication to listen to the community we carry around in our heads.

As for Monasticism: While a completely individual monastic lifestyle has been practiced, it is rare in the history of Western monasticism. Also, as I said above, an individual withdrawing from human contact does not mean she is not in "community." Medieval Christian monastic communities, for their part, were just that, "communities." Monks in these communities lived together and depended on one another for survival. And while they did feel the urge (maybe more properly understood as a 'call') to separate themselves from the community at large, they normally did not cloister their communities far away from urban population centers and were often an integral part of the Medieval economy.

Even the "Desert Fathers," one of the earliest forms of Christian Monasticism, though often viewed as making a radical break from their society, distanced themselves from society in general but not from all humans specifically. Furthermore, these communities depended heavily on links back to the community they had originated from for food, water, and the prayer they thought necessary to exist in the harsh climate of the dessert.

I would go so far as to say that Monasticism, though it does necessitate an intentional distancing of oneself from society at large, is actually a form of a radically <i>social</i> community not experienced by most humans. I think the same can be said about colonialists and rural farmers. Individuals in both of these groups can be said to depend heavily on support from the other for their survival.

Finally, urban existence can be a very lonely for many people. Industrialization and urbanization both create a feeling of what Max Weber termed "anomie." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie In the history of colonization especially, I would think one thing colonists sought to escape was not social interaction with other humans, but the felt sense of anomie created by living amongst too many humans at once in an oppressive environment. Seen this way, colonists, monks, and farmers all escape from environments hostile to the human "social animal" and arrive in an environment more suitable for the social interaction we cannot help but crave.

Footnote: I should add that I know there are rich traditions of monasticism other than Christian monasticism but I'm not qualified to speak on them.

I have the smaller version of that couch (Ikea) and I can attest to the fact that it is a uncomfortable piece of shit. But it was cheap.

By the HAL9000 thing, I assume you mean it does everything it can to protect the integrity of its mission and attempts to kill the crew.

I think they've taken away one of their best features. This goes to show that very often people and organizations do not understand what makes their product great, something budding startup starters on HN would be wise to consider. One must be mindful of even (or maybe especially) the small things that give your product heart.

I was thinking the same until I got to the end of the post:

>Don’t worry about building the next Google or making lots of money, because you’ll probably fail. But the lessons you learn and the connections you make will be worth it.

The general spirit of the piece is good.