Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, given a purely physical beginning, everything else – chemistry, biology, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, values, understandings, even science – follows on by natural processes. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. We do not understand every step in this process, naturally, but we can be reasonably confident of its overall shape and confident, too, that any remaining gaps that can be closed will be closed only by more understanding of the same broad kind that we already have.Nagel wholly rejects this picture. He denies that our consciousness can be explained in terms of our animal make-up; he thinks it very implausible to suppose that life can be explained as emerging from physical and chemical processes; he doubts that a process of random genetic mutation coupled with natural selection can explain the abundance and complexity of life. He proposes, instead, that there should be an alternative that makes ‘mind, meaning and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in an account of what there is.’
The Kalinin K-7 heavy bomber
Inuit Genealogy (via @vruba), explained by John Fass:The diagram above is a genealogical diagram made in the mid 1950s by anthropologist Jean Malaurie, the first of its kind. It’s a hand made radial drawing, Malaurie has a whole series of them in his apartment in Paris, along with his extensive personal archive of research materials including photos, films, notebooks, drawings.Fass is working on a “a research project related to Canadian and Greenland Inuit.” In relation to that project, he has also written a paper titled “Designing for Slow Technology: Intent and Interaction” [.pdf]:
I argue in this paper for the value of adopting some specific design approaches when creating slow technology, how to create long lasting relationships with technology, and how to design reflective or slow digital interactions. The problem I have addressed is how to design for long lasting technologies with changing users. My approach is informed by activity theory, which provides a theoretical and methodological perspective while design principles inform ideas of process, structure and interaction. The contribution to HCI is in the view of slow technology as demanding a unique set of design skills.
For the young man, the voices came on the wings of other sound. When he was driving, he would hear voices from the other cars. When he stood on the pavement and a car drove by him, noise sloughed off the car’s backside like water and resolved into voices, like a bubbling stream of jeering, laughing words. When the room was noisy, individual sounds would break off and form themselves into voices. When the room was quiet, he heard less, but a muffled echo would become a man in the other room. When he moved his leg, his leg could speak to him. When his stomach grumbled, it became an angry reprimand. The voices were like the aftertrace of color images, as if he waved his hand upon the air and left language in its wake. Horrifying language: words which sneered and drawled. He knew these voices were voices, symptoms of an illness, but they sounded real to him, and he could not dismiss the possibility that they were people. No one knows why people hear voices, psychotic or otherwise, but at least part of the story is that those who do read patterns into ambiguity, one reason that people hear voices in cars and find God on the bus. But I have never before met a man who could thrum his fingers into voice and feel that as he moved the air became dense with words.
If being a Digital Cultural Entrepreneur doesn’t work out, there are non-digital possibilities
As will be seen in the above article, my friend Clive Bell is a fathead and a voluptuary. This a very comfortable sort of person to be, and very friendly and easy and pleasant to talk to. Bell is a brainy man out of training. So much the better for his friends; for men in training are irritable, dangerous, and apt to hit harder than they know. No fear of that from Clive. The layer of fat on his brain makes him incapable of following up his own meaning; but it makes him good company.A man out of condition muscularly not only dislikes rowing or boxing, but cannot conceive anyone liking them. A man out of condition mentally not only dislikes hard thinking, but cannot conceive anyone enjoying it. To Falstaff, Carpentier is an object of pity. To Clive, Einstein is the most miserable of mortals. So am I.
He is mistaken as to both of us. Intellect is a passion; and its activity and satisfaction, which can be maintained from seven years old to 107 if you can manage to live so long, are keenly pleasurable if the brain is strong enough for the exercise. Descartes must have got far more pleasure out of life than Casanova.
As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the rightsholder. They negotiate this individually with each record label, at terms not made public. I’m happy to make ours public, however: It is the going “indie” rate of .005 cents per play. (Actually, when I do the math, that rate seems to truly pay out at .004611 cents– I hope someone got a bonus for saving the company four ten-thousandths of a cent on each stream!) We didn’t negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like ours, it’s take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of “Tugboat”, Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.I say theoretically, because in practice Spotify’s .004611 cent rate turns out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscription held by the user, and so on. What’s more, try as I might through the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by the BMI. Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify for streams of “Tugboat” in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.