Infinite Future

Paul Saffo Opined About the Internet in 1995 - Here We Are 14 Years Later

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:01:59 +0100

It’s a very consistent pattern in this business that collectively as a society and as individuals we all suffer from what I call macro- myopia. A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short-term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long-term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short-term impact of this stuff [the Internet] will be less than the hype would suggest but the long-term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today.

Reality

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:54:09 +0100

See through things. Reality is an illusion. The real things are invisible and can only be felt. Live in the now at least some part of the day. Realize that everything is a miracle. You included.

"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick..."

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:38:00 +0200

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!”

- Randy Pausch

linked geo data

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:16:10 +0200

linked geo data:

embryonic project with tremendous potential

"Sometimes it seems there is a set of people for whom the semantic web is the only graph which they..."

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:12:04 +0200

“Sometimes it seems there is a set of people for whom the semantic web is the only graph which they would consider, and another for whom the document tree (or graph if you include links) is all they would consider. But it is important to recognise the difference.”

- http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDF-XML.html

Photo

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:34:35 +0200

Transformation

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:46:14 +0100

Every few hundred years in Western Civilization, there occurs a sharp transformation … Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world, and the people born can’t even imagine the world in which their grandparents live and into which their own parents were born.

We are currently living through just such a transformation.

The Man in the Arena

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:26:34 +0200

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, April 1910

"If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors..."

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:43:00 +0200

“If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me.”

- Osho

Don't believe anything

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:00:04 +0200

Don’t believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities. The things that seem most absurd, put under ‘Low Probability’, and the things that seem most plausible, you put under ‘High Probability’. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every subject, then your brain activity stops entirely, which is clinically considered a sign of death, nowadays in medical practice. So put things on a scale or probability, and never believe or disbelieve anything entirely.

— Robert Anton Wilson

Breathless hearts

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:44:00 +0200

When our Conceptual Minds are “blown away” by the vast panorama of Mythic Intelligence, it’s up to us to re-stabilize our psychology by integrating the new outlook. The Mythic reveals the relatedness-of-allliving-things… much like the DNA codes the language of universal life. To the degree our concepts (of the world & ourselves) are obliterated by the impact of universal truths, we are obliged to adjust our thinking to include their reality, if only to put our minds at peace. If we attempt to ignore what we know to be true, well find out how long we can live a lie and maybe even suffer in the paranoid tradition of thinking the Universe to be an evil, threatening place to be… missing out, of course, on the Incredible Benevolence of Synchronicity. Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. Realizing this can put our “analyzer” on hold, our interpretive mind on “ga-ga” and our hearts on breathless.

Teachers

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:52:31 +0200

Gas Station Attendants, Grandmothers, Stumbling Drunks, Astronomers, Cats, Landladies, Ferns, Newscasters, Mozart, Hardcore Punk Music, Madmen, Crystals, Children, Presidents, Indian Chiefs, Movie Stars, Plumbers, Telephone Operators and the list goes on forever. It’s all Spiritual and the Teachers are everywhere. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this.

Dream Hunter

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:24:49 +0200

Dream Hunter

RAW

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:25:15 +0200

OK, so at what point is Wilson kidding and at what point is he serious?

“The older I get, the less seriously I take anything,” says Wilson. “The Chinese say the wise become Confucian in good times, Buddhist in bad times and Taoist in old age. I’m old enough to be a Taoist. I don’t see anything very seriously.” Not even, as it turns out, mortality.

“I know I’m going to die sometime soon: five weeks, five months, five years,” says Wilson. “I don’t know, maybe 50 years if stem cell research moves along. But I don’t know and I don’t care. And I can’t take it seriously anymore. If George Bush is president of the free world, who can take anything seriously?

Men and women as friends

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:12:10 +0200

Billy Crystal (Harry Burns): You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Meg Ryan (Sally Albright): Why not?
Billy Crystal (Harry): What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Meg Ryan (Sally): That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Billy Crystal (Harry): No you don’t.
Meg Ryan (Sally): : Yes I do.
Billy Crystal (Harry): No you don’t.
Meg Ryan (Sally): Yes I do.
Billy Crystal (Harry): You only think you do.
Meg Ryan (Sally): You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Billy Crystal (Harry):: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Meg Ryan (Sally): They do not!
Billy Crystal (Harry): Do too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): They do not.
Billy Crystal (Harry): Do too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): How do you know?
Billy Crystal (Harry):Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Meg Ryan (Sally): So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Billy Crystal (Harry): No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Billy Crystal (Harry): Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Meg Ryan (Sally): Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Billy Crystal (Harry): I guess not.
Meg Ryan (Sally): That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

Risks

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:52:54 +0200

We start running risks when we get out of bed in the morning. Risks are good for us, they bring out the best that’s in us. They brighten the eye and get the mind cooking. They put a new shiny look on our days. Human beings should never be settled, it’s ok for chicken, cows and cats, but it’s wrong for human beings. People start to die when they become settled. We need to keep things stirred up.

Mythogenetic Moment

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:18:00 +0200

Joseph Campbell had a term for the nodal moment or temporal vortex: he called it themythogenetic moment. On the first page ofCreative Mythology, he signaled the 12th century as the last great mythogenetic moment in the history of Western civilization. … Campbell felt passionately that the transition into the 21st century could be a mythogenetic moment morally and spiritually equivalent to the 12th century, and possibly even resonant with it.

— source

"Dream the dreams and then be foolish enough to make your dreams come true. That may not work for..."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:49:00 +0200

“Dream the dreams and then be foolish enough to make your dreams come true. That may not work for everybody, but it did work for me. It was sort of the approach I used - it never was rational and it never made total sense.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun

"You don’t solve all of the problems before jumping into a new situation. You just sort of..."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:47:00 +0200

“You don’t solve all of the problems before jumping into a new situation. You just sort of believe in yourself enough to say: I’ll figure it out… one way or another! And I did figure it out… It wasn’t easy, but it all worked out.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun

"We were building a team for a Zero Billion dollar company."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:41:39 +0200

“We were building a team for a Zero Billion dollar company.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun