Friday, December 31, 2021

'Wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day'

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness... E.B.White

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/wind-the-clock-for-tomorrow-is-another?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Monday, December 27, 2021

The same purpose

July 2016


Dear Juliet


Hello, little sister.


You don’t know me. I am a very old grandfather from South Africa nearing the end of my journey on earth while your journey—on another continent many miles away—is just beginning. We may never meet on earth, so I thought to send you a secret. Well, it’s not really a secret because we should all know it. So I don’t mind if you tell everyone else.


Did you know that all people belong to one family, the human family? That although we may look nothing like each other, live in separate homes, practise our own cultures, subscribe to different religions—and some of us have more money than others—we are all sisters and brothers of God’s family?


You and I, and everyone else, were born with the same purpose. For love, for goodness and for one another.


God Bless You.


Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu


Cape Town, South Africa


https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/you-and-i-and-everyone-else-were?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Read the syllabus

Professor Put Clues to a Cash Prize in His Syllabus. No One Noticed.
Tucked into the second page of the syllabus was information about a locker number and its combination. Inside was a $50 bill, which went unclaimed.

Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wanted to test whether any of his students fully read the syllabus for his music seminar.

Of the more than 70 students enrolled in the class, none apparently did.

Professor Wilson said he knows this because on the second page of the three-page syllabus he included the location and combination to a locker, inside of which was a $50 cash prize.

"Free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five," read the passage in the syllabus. But when the semester ended on Dec. 8, students went home and the cash was unclaimed.

"My semester-long experiment has come to an end," Mr. Wilson wrote on Facebook, adding: "Today I retrieved the unclaimed treasure."
...

Friday, December 17, 2021

Ah, Another Beautiful Morning—Time to Ruin It by Immediately Opening My Phone

Ah, would you look at that—another beautiful morning, with the sun’s first rays casting a warm glow on my bedsheets. As I wake from restful slumber, I peer out my window and—yes, it’s looking like another perfect day! Time to ruin it by immediately opening my phone and reading about everything that’s happening and everything that everyone is saying.


What’s that smell? It’s coffee! Brewed fresh, it’s here to bring me back, to ground me. I sip slowly, appreciating the still moments in life. Then I open Twitter and my day is over...


https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/ah-another-beautiful-morning-time-to-ruin-it-by-immediately-opening-my-phone?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Arthur C. Clarke's self-fulfilling optimism

Today is the birthday (12.16.1917) of science fiction author Arthur C[harles] Clarke (1917) born in Minehead, Somerset, England (books by this author). He was known as one of the “Big Three” of sci-fi, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. His best-known work is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

He was also an inventor. He developed an early-warning radar system during World War II, proposed a satellite communication system as early as 1945, and served as the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society on two occasions.

In 2007, on his 90th birthday, Clarke recorded a video in which he says goodbye to his friends and fans. In it, he said: “I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we’ve learnt something from the most barbaric century in history — the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization.” He died of respiratory failure three months later. WA

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Walking does no harm

Walking is man's best medicine.
-Hippocrates
(https://twitter.com/gregmortenson/status/1470198621651886080?s=02)

Morning air

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Twenty-six

Older daughter turned that age yesterday. Today, the first day of the rest of her life, is full of promise. The rest, Susan Neiman quite rightly insists, is best.

"Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealize the stages of youth. Watching the wide-eyed excitement with which babies face every piece of the world, we envy their openness and naivety, while forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stick-figure. The most pernicious bit of idealization is the very widespread view that the best time of one’s life is the decade between sixteen and twenty-six, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. That’s due to hormones, and evolutionary biologists will explain that it happens for a reason. But your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one’s life as the best one, we make that time harder for those who are going through it. (If I’m torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times of my life that, they all tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it. Few things show this better than the progressive transformation of the Peter Pan story. In the original novel, grown-ups are simply dull: Mr Darling’s knowledge is confined to stocks and shares; his only passion is being exactly like his neighbours. By the mid-twentieth century the character is slightly menacing, an authoritarian who could become a tyrant so easily that the same actor could play father and pirate. By the end of the twentieth century, the grown-up had become ridiculous. In Hook, Steven Spielberg’s disturbing twist on the story, Peter Banning is an object of contempt. Grown-ups are still boring and rigid, but they are now so pitiful that teenagers are right to mock them. The variations on the story reflect the decline of the image of adulthood itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century, growing up looked merely dreary; by the end it looked positively pathetic. This book will discuss the ways in which our understanding of the way the world is, and the way it should be, are furthered – and hindered – by different kinds of experience. It will argue that being grown-up is itself an ideal: one that is rarely achieved in its entirety, but all the more worth striving for."

Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age" by Susan Neiman: https://a.co/iDa2pvg

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Back to Chocorua

 

 

Phil Oliver
Thanks for taking me back to Mt. Chocorua, I was there in 2010 for a conference marking the centenary of philosopher William James's death (and of course celebrating his life). James's summer home was there, he loved the mountain and environs and rode the train up from Cambridge as often as he could. His home, he said, had fourteen doors "all opening out"... An old realty listing: https://www.movoto.com/chocorua-nh/1434-chocorua-mt-hwy-chocorua-nh-03817-890_4504819/


KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News