The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after [...]
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It’s great to do “meaningful work” and have “meaningful dialog” and make “meaningful contributions.” But do you really know what it means? It’s often just a synonym for “good” — which can be , um, good — but at its worst it merely means that something “feels good” or “resembles good.” When it’s done right, [...]
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The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event. Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu [...]
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… to write a commencement speech. Ok, it’s kind of lame of me to presume to hand out “assignments.” I’m sure most people have a lot more pressing things to do. Or do you? I mean, 2009 seems to be the year of slowing down and living meaningfully — or at least trying to — [...]
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I love this “essay on idling,” by Mark Kingwell, in this weekend’s Globe and Mail. For those who don’t know, Kingwell is Canada’s cool philosophy professor: media darling, sometime columnist (including a stint as the token progressive for the National Post), he writes for a popular audience on wide-ranging subjects (politics, happiness, architecture, booze), and is still [...]
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While dallying with my wording of a comment on a post about Google Chrome at Written Inc, I accidentally coined the term “Borgward” (not entirely a new term) which means “approaching Borg-ness,” which means moving towards a Borg-like singularity. This is all very, very tongue-in-cheek. Borgward is a stupid word that’s amusing on a childish [...]
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[Originally written in March, 2007... It was the first complete & coherent thing I wrote outside of school. It's far from well-written, but the background behind everything I do is in here... somewhere (it demonstrates more than it articulates).] Contents: i. A Résumé, a story about itself, a creative consummation… ii. Common points of reference / [...]
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The first thing that I think of when posed this question is that the question itself has two meanings: “What is the meaning of the word life?” and “What is the meaning of what the word life refers to?” Obviously we need to take care of the first question (if that’s possible), before we can [...]
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