KindleClippings

kindle.txt

Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2445  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 07:54 PM

They plunged toward the boundary sheet of the ergosphere.
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2640  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 09:26 PM

“peribarythron.”
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2709  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 09:45 PM

“Esty. S for space, T for time.”
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2762-64  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 09:50 PM

“Anybody comes through Port Athena gets the course, skyscraper.” “Sky what?” “Ancient term. Means you’re unnecessarily tall.”
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2764-65  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 09:50 PM

“Ugly word for it. Seems to me you’re too short.” “A few days of forehead-bashing on doorways will provide useful instruction.”
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 234 | Loc. 3586-87  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 11:05 PM

<Esty weather. The space-time responding to the addition of more infalling matter. Redesigning itself self-consistently.>
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3596-98  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 11:11 PM

<Do not struggle. Your language does not have the concepts. The esty is a space-time kernel embedded into another space-time, which in turn is curved by the black hole. The esty is a stable dip in this overall curvature. A well. A refuge.>
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3650-51  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 11:15 PM

<I gather that a construction in esty shares the property of being in anxious equilibrium with the property of duration.>
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Furious Gulf (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 3685-86  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 11:18 PM

<Do not ascribe intention to physical law. Your skin became wedded to the esty. It began to diffuse into the occurrencespace which this substance is.>
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Reductionism (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 27-29  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 06:21 PM

The key idea of the heuristics and biases program is that the mistakes we make, often reveal far more about our underlying cognitive algorithms than our correct answers. 
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Reductionism (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 80-81  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 06:31 PM

Your homework assignment is to write a stack trace of the internal algorithms of the human mind as they produce the intuitions that power the whole damn philosophical argument.
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 136  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 06:37 PM

Sensory Modality.”
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 368-69  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:03 PM

We're interested in Bayesian-style belief-updating (with Occam priors) because we expect that this style of thinking gets us systematically closer to, you know, accuracy, the map that reflects the territory. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 396-97  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:07 PM

"X is rational!" is usually just a more strident way of saying "I think X is true" or "I think X is good". 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 405-7  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:11 PM

It is written:  "The first virtue is curiosity."  Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Bookmark on Page 31 | Loc. 468  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:23 PM


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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 468  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:23 PM

you should not ignore something just because you can't define it. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 471-73  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:25 PM

With all that said, we seem to label as "biases" those obstacles to truth which are produced, not by the cost of information, nor by limited computing power, but by the shape of our own mental machinery. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 483-84  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:27 PM

"Biases" are distinguished from errors that arise from damage to an individual human brain, or from absorbed cultural mores; biases arise from machinery that is humanly universal.
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 515-17  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:38 PM

For an event to be evidence about a target of inquiry, it has to happen differently in a way that's entangled with the different possible states of the target. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 517-18  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:38 PM

(To say it technically:  There has to be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry, relative to your current state of uncertainty about both of them.)
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 524-28  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:40 PM

If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind.  Some belief systems, in a rather obvious trick to reinforce themselves, say that certain beliefs are only really worthwhile if you believe them unconditionally - no matter what you see, no matter what you think.  Your brain is supposed to end up in the same state regardless.  Hence the phrase, "blind faith".  If what you believe doesn't depend on what you see, you've been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 532-33  | Added on Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 07:43 PM

rational beliefs are contagious, among honest folk who believe each other to be honest. 
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 246-50  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 01:08 PM

“We regret.” “You did this?” “No. A mechanical form, termed the Mantis.” “And who’re you?” “That would be impossible to say.” “Is this Mantis after me, too?” “I will protect you.” “You didn’t do a great job for Carlos.” “I arrived here slightly late.” “Slightly?” “You must forgive errors. We are finite, all.” “Damn finite.”
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 589-90  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 01:36 PM

—distilling order from life’s rough jumble, that was what he had always hungered for, hyperbolic grace, to merge cleanly with life, not split the world into subject and object, no observer/observed,
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 594-95  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 01:36 PM

atoms in concert, the old dim dualities of mind and matter lapping against the fragile yet inexorable momentum of this instant—
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1303-4  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 11:39 AM

“Some integrative graviton sensors, a field generator which can deliver a terrawatt at ten kilohertz acoustic . . . and a Causality Engine.”
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1653  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 12:05 PM

“Carnivorous curiosity,”
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1713-17  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 12:46 PM

“The point of making a wormhole sprout out of a Lane is that you really can’t do it by yourself,” Nikka told him. “Takes astronomically too much energy, or more accurately, density of energy. The best we can do is ripple the esty surface, find a weak spot—a place where the Casimir force is substantial.” “Who was Casimir?” Angelina asked. “Who cares? He saw that in a true vacuum, there would be a force, one you could harness.”
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1744-47  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 12:51 PM

mass curved space-time, but the inverse was still a surprise: compacted esty behaved like matter. Rendered as mass, events themselves were squeezed into slabs. Their endings brought forth explosive energies: literally, the end of history, for in these detonations data burst into phosphorescent energy, its true equivalent. The esty confirmed the final triumvirate of physics, one side of which Einstein had got right: mass was like energy was like information.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1759-61  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 12:52 PM

Stochastic. Not a word he liked, too pedantic, when all it meant was chaos, disorder, the fitful randomness of life and esty. Their gravitationally transduced energy propelled their wedge of local esty through the worm in jolting, stochastic motions.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2026-27  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 03:10 PM

Given enough time, matter would seek its own kind, smacking into greater and greater stars. But the stars would die, guttering out as blunt thermodynamics commanded, always seeking maximum disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ruled.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3318-19  | Added on Friday, August 19, 2011, 04:53 PM

Nature does not err, for she makes no statements.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 4807  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 03:46 PM

He used that to rest and reinvent himself.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 331 | Loc. 5075  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 04:11 PM

If you imply that I am simply more terms in a linear sequence, the issue has eluded you.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 341 | Loc. 5216  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 04:22 PM

People escaped their own mortality through laughter and connection, the two great consolations.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 348 | Loc. 5335-38  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 04:34 PM

“I appreciate the extra effort.” Nigel studied it. “Good sim.” “An inappropriate word,” it said, hovering in air. “I was trying to be polite.” “Category error.” “How so?” “Politeness occurs between peers.” “Ah.” And we aren’t. Not by a Phylum or two.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 349 | Loc. 5352-56  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 04:35 PM

Time universal and sidereal, time atomic and ephemeral time borne on and time halted.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 366 | Loc. 5604  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 05:08 PM

But those organisms with minds themselves are the energy sources for higher orders: self-replicating patterns of information.
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 5704  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 05:18 PM

“Outside my conceptual space?”
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 385 | Loc. 5903-4  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 05:38 PM

<You are two-handed, two-legged. Your minds favor dichotomies.>
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Sailing Bright Eternity (Gregory Benford)
- Highlight on Page 403 | Loc. 6168-69  | Added on Sunday, August 21, 2011, 06:01 PM

“But there’s a finite lifetime to it all. Stars run down. The center cannot hold. Nobody’s going to be sailing bright eternity.”
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Single Combat (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 511-12  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 03:26 PM

the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass.
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Single Combat (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 512-14  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 03:29 PM

But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.
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Wild Country (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1111-12  | Added on Thursday, August 25, 2011, 07:08 PM

"The need may yet arise,"
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Wild Country (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1143  | Added on Thursday, August 25, 2011, 07:15 PM

agronomist,
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Wild Country (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1152-54  | Added on Thursday, August 25, 2011, 07:18 PM

During that time he concluded that Maazel's attaché case contained some kind of comm set with a readout visible or audible to him only; that he, Sorel, had underestimated the speed with which these clever bastards could analyze new information;
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Wild Country (Dean Ing)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1691  | Added on Thursday, August 25, 2011, 08:24 PM

You mind if I cultivate my coffee while we talk?
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 633  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:21 PM

The more complex an explanation is, the more evidence you need just to find it in belief-space. 
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 703-4  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:34 PM

Take a moment to marvel at this, for it is indeed marvelous.
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 721  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:37 PM

But, if you imagine a billion worlds - Everett branches, or Tegmark duplicates
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 18-20  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:43 PM

People should get smarter at a rate sufficient to integrate their old experiences, but not so much smarter so fast that they can't integrate their new intelligence.  Being smarter means you get bored faster, but you can also tackle new challenges you couldn't understand before. 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 24-27  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:44 PM

Timothy Ferris:  "What is the opposite of happiness?  Sadness?  No.  Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness...  The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom...  The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'...  Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things."  (Existential Angst Factory.)
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 28  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:44 PM

Any particular individual's life should get better and better over time.  (Continuous Improvement.)
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 30  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:44 PM

(Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises.)
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 43-45  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:45 PM

Human minds should not have to play on a level field with vastly superior entities.  Most people don't like being overshadowed.  Gods destroy a human protagonist's "main character" status; this is undesirable in fiction and probably in real life.  (E.g.:  C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Iain Banks's Culture.) 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 76-77  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 10:47 PM

In general, tampering with brains, minds, emotions, and personalities is way more fraught on every possible level of ethics and difficulty, than tampering with bodies and environments. 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 166-68  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:06 AM

The transhumanist philosopher David Pearce is an advocate of what he calls the Hedonistic Imperative:  The eudaimonic life is the one that is as pleasurable as possible.  So even happiness attained through drugs is good?  Yes, in fact:  Pearce's motto is "Better Living Through Chemistry".
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 199-200  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:09 AM

I can only analogize the experience to a theist who's suddenly told that they can know the mind of God, and it turns out to be only twenty lines of Python.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 236-37  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:11 AM

I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of "getting rid of work" would be better reformulated as "removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 309-11  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:19 AM

Even if you encounter a variant of the Rubik's Cube - like a 4x4x4 Cube instead of a 3x3x3 Cube - or even a Rubik's Tesseract (a 3x3x3x3 Cube in four dimensions)
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 328-29  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:21 AM

We are interested only in the borderland between triviality and impossibility - problems difficult enough to worthily occupy our minds, yet tractable enough to be worth challenging. 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 536-37  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:53 AM

And the sensory bandwidth between you and the computer's pseudo-world is relatively low; and the information passing along it isn't in quite the right format.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 544-46  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:54 AM

And there's the sense of touch that indicates the wind on your skin; and the proprioceptive sensors that respond to the position of your limbs; and the nerves that record the strain on your muscles.  There's a whole strip of sensorimotor cortex running along the top of your brain, that would be much more intensely involved in "real" running.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 587  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 09:57 AM

I want a sensory modality for regular expressions.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 651-54  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 10:11 AM

A Friendly AI doesn't have to be a continuation of existing trends.  It's not the Machine.  It's not the alien force of technology.  It's not mechanizing a factory.  It's not a new gadget for sale.  That's not where the shape comes from. What it is- is not easy to explain; but I'm reminded of doc Smith's description of the Lens as "the physical manifestation of a purely philosophical concept". 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 971-72  | Added on Monday, September 05, 2011, 02:03 PM

Lob's Sentence contains an exact recipe for a copy of itself, including the recipe for the recipe; it has a perfectself-model.  Does that make it sentient?
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 776-77  | Added on Saturday, September 17, 2011, 09:00 PM

The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 924  | Added on Sunday, September 18, 2011, 07:08 PM

Skaffen-Amtiskaw.'
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1595-97  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 01:02 PM

aggres-sive terraforming policies...' 'That's sort of...' he burped, 're-decorating a planet, right?' Sma closed her eyes briefly. 'Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it's ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1601-2  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 01:02 PM

'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious compu-ters and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value;
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1670-73  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 01:10 PM

When you sleep beside a head full of images, there is an osmosis, a certain sharing in the night. So he thought. He thought a lot then; more than he ever had, perhaps. Or maybe he was just more aware of the process, and the identity of thought and passing time. Sometimes he felt as though every instant he spent with her was a precious capsule of sensation to be lovingly wrapped and carefully placed somewhere inviol-able, away from harm.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1723-24  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 06:08 PM

'Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar.'
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2017-20  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 06:31 PM

Zakalwe, Sma thought, was like a kid in a toy store. He was selecting gear and loading it onto a pallet which Skaffen-Amtiskaw was guiding after the man, down the aisles of racks and drawers and shelves all stuffed and packed with projectile weapons, line guns, laser rifles, plasma projectors, multitudinous grenades, effectors, plane charges, passive and reactive armour, sensory and guard devices, full combat suits, missile packs, and at least a dozen other distinctly different types of device Sma didn't recognize.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2045-48  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 06:34 PM

'Micro Armaments System, Rifle,' the drone narrated. 'It's... oh, look, Zakalwe; it has ten separate weapon systems, not including the semi-sentient guard facility, the reactive shield components, the IFF-set quick-reaction swing-packs or the AG unit, and before you ask, the controls are all on the wrong side because that's the left-hand bias version, and the balance - like the weight and the independently variable inertia - are fully adjustable. It also takes about half a year's training just to learn how to use it safely , let alone competently, so you can't have one.'
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2288-91  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 10:10 PM

he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2291-94  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 10:10 PM

And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that every-thing could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2317-18  | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 10:11 PM

Laugh, that was the only answer, the only reply that couldn't be bettered or itself laughed down; the lowest of the low of common denominators.
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Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 660-61  | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2011, 06:22 PM

In the better (IMHO) versions of Solomonoff Induction, the computer program does not produce a deterministic prediction, but assigns probabilities to strings. 
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3630-32  | Added on Saturday, September 24, 2011, 02:46 PM

To sit, in splendour, is the highest articul-ation of power. The rest come to you; lower, often bowing, frequently backing off, sometimes prostrate (though that is always a bad sign, said the Culture's blessed statistics), and to sit, to be made less animal by that evolutionarily uncalled-for posture, signified the ability to use.
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 353 | Loc. 5404-5  | Added on Monday, September 26, 2011, 03:06 PM

No gentleman of breeding, he thought, almost dreamily, ought to begin a sentence with the unfortunate word "but"...
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Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 5756-58  | Added on Tuesday, September 27, 2011, 04:42 PM

It stripped away the layers of the man's brain with its own senses; cortex, limbic, thalamus/cerebellum, it moved through his defences and armaments, down his thoroughfares and ways, through the stores and the lands of his memories, searching and mapping and tapping and searing.
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Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 211-14  | Added on Tuesday, September 27, 2011, 05:00 PM

“with its archaic civilization and its unique environment, offers a freak culture which has been too long neglected by our social scientists, except as a difficult exercise in local government. I have every expectation that the next year or two will bring about revolutionary changes in some of our supposed fundamental concepts of social evolution and human history.” 
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Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 654  | Added on Friday, September 30, 2011, 07:56 PM

“All knowledge is my province.
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The Rest Of The Robots (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 511  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:19 PM

The Bureau of Robotics
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The Rest Of The Robots (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 541  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:22 PM

We're ahead in force-field research or in hyperatomics,
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The Rest Of The Robots (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 667-68  | Added on Monday, October 17, 2011, 04:19 PM

that we tossed our country away for the sake of a subtle line of reasoning that encouraged donothingism.
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The Rest Of The Robots (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 677-79  | Added on Monday, October 17, 2011, 04:20 PM

How to advance robotics. The major specific subheading under that will be: How to develop a receiving device for the electromagnetic fields of the cerebral cortex that will be sufficiently delicate to distinguish between a protoplasmic human brain and a positronic humanoid brain."
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 50-51  | Added on Thursday, October 20, 2011, 08:26 AM

It would be a human being with artificial parts, but it would be a human being. But what about the brain?
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 64-66  | Added on Thursday, October 20, 2011, 08:27 AM

The ultimate cyborgs are those in which the body and brain don't match. That means we can have two classes of complete cyborgs: a) a robotic brain in a human body, or b) a human brain in a robotic body.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 155-56  | Added on Thursday, October 20, 2011, 08:35 AM

“fractionated,  retrograde, hypnosis-resistant psychogenic amnesia”—whatever that meant.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 261-62  | Added on Monday, October 24, 2011, 05:25 PM

the Key to Perihelion,
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1015-19  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 10:51 PM

As they walked, they got their first look at the long, three-stage mole device that dug the underground tunnels and left a fully equipped, functioning platform system behind. This segment was not being used because it had not been connected to the main system elsewhere; otherwise, the mole device would have been underground and out of sight. It also simultaneously mined ores for construction and other uses,  according to a foreman robot whom Derec questioned. It seemed to be a modified version of a gatelike device he had seen sifting the asteroid in search of the original Key for the Avery robots,
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1025-28  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

Pale, colored lights crossed his vision from his left,  suggesting monitor readouts. He supposed they were medical equipment of some kind, and turned his head to the left, expecting it to involve considerable effort and discomfort. Instead, he moved easily and comfortably, though he found wires, now, under his cheek, that connected his head to the equipment by his side.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1065  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 11:06 PM

“This is Human Medical Research 1.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1074-78  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 11:07 PM

Then he looked down and saw the blue-skinned texture of his own legs. At first, he simply didn’t understand. He wondered why his legs were encased in this stuff. When he reached out to touch one of his legs, he saw his hand and arm for the first time, made of the same unfamiliar blue substance. Then, suddenly understanding what had happened, he looked at his other robotic arm and then down at his chest. In growing panic, he clapped his blue hands against his torso and then ran them across the new contours of his face.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1080-82  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 11:08 PM

The monitor lights jumped as they noted the impact. “I’m a robot. I can’t believe this. I’m a robot. “ “We wish you to understand something,” said Surgeon 1. “The First Law required this development, under the circumstances of our finding you.”
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1085-86  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 11:08 PM

“We do not have knowledge here of human thoracic and abdominal organs. Our medical library is inconsistent and uneven.
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1089-90  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 11:09 PM

“We have transplanted your brain into one of our humanoid robot bodies because we could not repair yours.”
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Cyborg (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2099-2100  | Added on Monday, October 31, 2011, 09:22 AM

“Brain damage would require a great deal of trauma,” observed Surgeon 2. “His cranial protection was especially designed for him, as demanded by the First Law, and is highly effective.”
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Perihelion (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 39-40  | Added on Wednesday, November 02, 2011, 01:51 PM

a multiplication and intensification of sense-perception, an incredible extension of the will.
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Prodigy (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 260  | Added on Wednesday, November 02, 2011, 02:17 PM

reinforced curiosity integral
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Prodigy (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 484-86  | Added on Wednesday, November 02, 2011, 10:51 PM

Every day that something unexpected happens, however small and ultimately insignificant, is a day devoid of boredom. Evidently a continuous newness of experience is important for the continued mental health and well-being of a human individual.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 394  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 06:33 PM

“He who is abandoned is an abandoner,”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 513-14  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 06:45 PM

“I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 525-26  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 06:47 PM

He was already starting to show the admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment, that would mark him for the rest of his life.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 564-66  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 06:51 PM

He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 695-97  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 09:39 PM

He actually got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 831-32  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 09:52 PM

“He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” she recalled. “That’s a strange combination.”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 866-67  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 09:56 PM

Be Here Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert.
==========
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 877-78  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 09:57 PM

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 886-89  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 10:00 PM

He and Kottke enjoyed playing a nineteenth-century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board and pieces and cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out where their opponent’s pieces are.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1102-10  | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 10:52 PM

Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it. Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.
==========
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1126-28  | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 10:53 PM

also led him to undergo primal scream therapy, which had recently been developed and popularized by a Los Angeles psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. It was based on the Freudian theory that psychological problems are caused by the repressed pains of childhood;
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1216-17  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 05:16 PM

Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces,
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1249-52  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 05:25 PM

Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with him to college and then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their final issue” Jobs recalled, “was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1253  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 05:26 PM

the nexus of the counterculture and technology,”
==========
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1599  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 10:38 PM

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Bookmark on Page 132 | Loc. 2021  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:14 PM


==========
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2190-92  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:55 PM

It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2206-7  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:59 PM

The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev.
==========
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2228-29  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 04:04 PM

He was self-aware, but that didn’t always modify his behavior.”
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Goliath (Scott Westerfeld)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 425-26  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 06:21 PM

“Full marks for stating the obvious!”
==========
Goliath (Scott Westerfeld)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1948  | Added on Sunday, November 13, 2011, 10:39 PM

Darwinist technology.”
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 161  | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 11:20 PM

into twin realms of presumed philanthropic mystery and Cabinet.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 172-73  | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 11:26 PM

Behind them, anthropomorphically upright, forelimbs outstretched in the manner of a cartoon somnambulist, came a moth-eaten ferret.
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Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 181  | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 11:31 PM

unpeopled,
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 197-98  | Added on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 12:57 PM

The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.”
==========
Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1534  | Added on Wednesday, November 23, 2011, 11:02 PM

the omnipresent misery
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 238-39  | Added on Monday, December 12, 2011, 10:03 PM

Their bodies, apparently humanoid under white satin and sequins, were long, Modigliani-slender, perilously upright, paws crossed piously in the manner of medieval effigies.
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Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 388  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 11:33 AM

gifted with a useful crudeness of mind, an inbuilt psychic callus.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 398-99  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 11:35 AM

To press the button and wait for the lift. She put her face close to the iron cage, to see the lift rise toward her, atop it some complex electromechanical Tesla-node no designer had even had to fake up, the real deal, whatever function it might serve.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 455  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 11:42 AM

He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 537-39  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 11:46 AM

everything from repeated massive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a “paradoxical antagonist.” This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1090-93  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 02:18 PM

“He liked Banksy. Identified with him. They’re both from Bristol.” “But he wasn’t a graffiti artist.” “I think he thought he was. Just not with paint.” “With what?” “History,” said Hollis.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1514-15  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 02:42 PM

She liked the way it looked more than how it tasted. How would it taste, she wondered, if it tasted the way she thought it looked?
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Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2500-2501  | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 09:18 AM

scrawling graffiti on the secret machineries of history.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2529-30  | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 09:22 AM

nonexistent Node, the phantom digest of digital culture.
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 3340  | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 10:38 AM

“These true computers are the root code. The Eden.”
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3344-45  | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 10:38 AM

Fialka cipher machine, Soviet clandestine pocket-sized nonelectronic burst encoder and keyer. You are interested?”
==========
Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3433-35  | Added on Wednesday, December 21, 2011, 09:09 PM

The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity.”
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Zero History (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 266 | Loc. 4066-68  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 08:26 PM

It had always seemed too monolithic, though to some older scale of monolith. Too few hiding places. A lack of spaces in between. It had been turning its back on people like himself for centuries, and made him feel like a rat running along a baseboard devoid of holes.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 105-6  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 09:21 PM

The sound of an exploding skull is a deep bass boom that sucks every other sound into itself so that for a moment after the blast there is only a very pure silence.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 185-90  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 09:34 PM

Long QT Syndrome. A dry, form-filler’s name. It should be called Cardio-shock; Sheer Heart Attack; like a title you would give to the kind of freak-show TV documentary featuring a nine-year-old boy with a bizarre and potentially fatal heart condition. Patterns of chaos flow across Can’s heart. Potassium and sodium ions clash in wavefronts and graphs of fractal beauty like black tulips. A shock can disrupt those synchronized electrical pulses. A single loud sudden noise is enough to stop his heart. The shriek of a car alarm, the clang of a shutter dropping, the sudden blare of a muezzin or a popped party balloon could kill Can Durukan. So Şekure and Osman have devised a tight, muffling world for him.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 190-94  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 09:41 PM

Odysseus, ancient sailor of these narrow seas, plugged the ears of his crew with wax to resist the killing song of the Sirens. Jason, a subtler seafarer, drowned them out with the lyre-work of Orpheus. Can’s earplugs are inspired by both those heroes. They are smart polymer woven with nanocircuitry. They exactly fit the contours of his ears. They don’t drown out reality. They take it, invert it, phase shift it and feed it back so that it almost precisely cancels itself. Almost. Total precision would be deafness. A whisper of the world steals into Can’s ears.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 247-48  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:07 PM

Can finds flocks within flocking, flows within flows, strange currents, fractal forms, self-organizing entities. Mr Ferentinou has taught him to see the blood beneath the world’s skin: the simple rules of the very small that build into the seeming complexity of the great.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 254  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:09 PM

Can pulls the smartsilk computer out of his pocket, unfolds it and opens the haptic field.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 312-14  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:29 PM

Georgios Ferentinou thinks this Easter he might visit the shrine of Aghia Panteleimon. He has no belief; faith is beneath his dignity but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 314  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:33 PM

Eskiköy, Aghia Panteleimon
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 358-59  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:48 PM

Georgios Ferentinou never saw economics as the Dismal Science. To him it is applied psychology, the most human of sciences.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 359-60  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:52 PM

There are profound human truths in the romance between want and aversion; delicate beauties in the meshing intricacies of complex financial instruments
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 372-73  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:53 PM

the power of aggregation. The mass decides.
==========
The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 375  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:57 PM

extended the free market principle to terrorism.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 389-91  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 11:00 PM

Kudos: the artificial currency of Georgios Ferentinou’s Terror Market. A light, odourless virtual money, but not without value. Kudos are not points in a game. They can be exchanged for other virtual-world or social networking or online-game currencies, some of which can be converted up into real world, pocketable cash. 
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 408-9  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 11:02 PM

Cohesion, alignment, separation. Three rudimentary rules; the well of complex liquid beauty.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 411  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 11:03 PM

distant tintinnabulations
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 605  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 11:27 PM

demotic Greek of the Oxyrhynchus,
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 614-15  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 11:27 PM

Sephardim,’
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 922  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 07:58 PM

beautiful abstract weave of statistical regressions and complexity algorithms
==========
The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 989-90  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:06 PM

A library full of books that are never read is not a library. He lets the words erase themselves, letter by letter. This library has only one book, but it is every book in the world.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1264  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:44 PM

‘Ceylan-Besarani Transcriber,’
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1280-85  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:46 PM

‘All human music ever written fits into your appendix,’ Aso says. ‘Every book in every library is a few millimetres of your small intestine. Every detail of your life can be recorded - and replayed. That’s maybe the size of your stomach. You can live other people’s lives. Talents and abilities and new skills can be downloaded and stored permanently. Not like now where it wears off as the nano is purged from the system. The Besarani-Ceylan transcriber writes it into the cells of your body. You want to play the piano? It’s yours. You want to memorize a play, or you want to learn every test case in the law library? Foreign languages, home plumbing, programming code, physics, chemistry, you’ve got them.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1296-97  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:46 PM

‘We’ve made ten thousand euro worth of modifications and upgrades - it’s a Refiğ Brothers custom overclock; that’s almost five hundred terraflops Rpeak.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1422-23  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 09:00 PM

Suicide bombers, female or male, deliver diatribes of social justice and transformation and promises of Paradise.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1430-31  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 09:01 PM

Strange is that grain of order in the seethe of randomness. Strange is information.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1739  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 09:46 PM

heterodox ideas.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1747-48  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 09:47 PM

The Street of a Thousand Earthquakes, Alley of the Chicken that Thought It Could Fly, Avenue of the Bushy Beard, the Street of Nafi of the Golden Hair.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1886-87  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 01:14 PM

The energies contained here excite the djinn; they boil and deliquesce, shifting from vapour to fluid in gushes and plumes of silver
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2089  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 01:30 PM

A city witch lives there; an urbomancer, a psychogeographer.
==========
The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2094-95  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 01:31 PM

For wanderers and meanderers and stumblers-over of trifles, historians of the spirit of place, psychogeographers, Kuzguncuk is perfect.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 2103-6  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 01:33 PM

discovered that a better living could be made just walking the city’s streets charting mental maps, recording how history was attracted to certain locations in layer upon layer of impacted lives in a cartography of meaning; delineating a spiritual geography of many gods and theisms; compiling an encyclopaedia of how space had shaped mind and mind had shaped space through three thousand years of the Queen of Cities.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2853-54  | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, 01:45 PM

of looking at economics in the social sphere rather than as a mathematical abstraction or a product of individual psychology, may be more fruitful for the real world. After all, a market is ultimately a social construct, isn’t it?
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2987  | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, 02:12 PM

‘Evidence based economics.’
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3007-8  | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, 02:13 PM

the new subject of non-linearity, of how mathematical predictability can cascade into randomness, into chaos; and Thomian catastrophes, where one state of behaviour suddenly collapses into its antithesis.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3008-9  | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, 02:14 PM

He talked about the irrationality of rational actors and experiments in economics, of expectation and paradox and non-zero sum games.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3172-73  | Added on Thursday, December 29, 2011, 09:31 AM

She’s interested in how over centuries city architecture affects the social and mental spaces people inhabit.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3502-3  | Added on Thursday, December 29, 2011, 05:28 PM

‘Is this crowdsourcing?’ Can asks. He learned the word from Mr Ferentinou. He likes the idea; throw a question out into the world, someone - or everyone - will answer.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 3900-3902  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 10:38 AM

Analysts run algorithmic programmes of searing complexity, looking for statistical patterns and premonitions in the prices of stock. Raiders mount financial skirmishes into the dark to discern what might be for sale, how much and at what price. Some apply thermodynamics, looking for localized, minute decreases in the overall entropy of the dark market to game the price.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 4055-56  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 10:52 AM

‘I am a connoisseur of spontaneous outbreaks of the marvellous,’
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 4058  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 10:52 AM

‘Seers of the strange and marvellous.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 4144-45  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 11:07 AM

the intellectual intoxication she experiences from opening a new manuscript or unwrapping an unseen miniature and knowing that she stands on the edge of the incomprehensible,
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 5087-88  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 12:33 PM

The spot markets are juddering, a fractal Brownian motion of tens of thousands of AIs automatically placing and filling orders. The spots have always been the natural home of the speculator; get in, make the money, get out quickly.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 334 | Loc. 5117-18  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 12:36 PM

thousands of tiny barely-intelligent bots that crawl the regional news and community networks. All knowledge is local.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 335 | Loc. 5124  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 12:37 PM

Perfect information is a rumour, perfect rumour is information.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 5576  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 01:25 PM

As electronics and biology move closer and closer together, we’ll print things from proteins and semizotic
==========
The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 5588-89  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 01:26 PM

It’ll be quieter than it is now. A lot of communication will be done directly, mind to mind.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 5648-49  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 02:39 PM

‘You don’t love crows, you admire them. They exploit our capacity for chaos. Forget polar bears or whatever kind of tuna we’re supposed to care about this month; crows are the bellwethers of what we’re doing to the planet.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 5662  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 02:41 PM

Mental Mappings and Desire Lines: the Psychological Geography of Economic Landscapes
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 380 | Loc. 5826-28  | Added on Friday, December 30, 2011, 03:09 PM

Knowing without knowing, I think there are lots of ways that can happen. Maybe there are chemicals we sense but never register. Maybe it’s electrical. I think we get thousands, millions of bits of information every day that we’ve lost the ability to read or that we filter out because there’s just too much stuff to be conscious of.
==========
The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 470 | Loc. 7194-97  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 06:48 PM

I want to spend as little time as possible around geeks, techno-hippies, nano-fairies and idiots who wear goggles. The administrative headquarters of Turquoise Nanotech - we’ve decided that’s the name, by the way, you can retain Ceylan-Besarani, or Besarani-Ceylan or whatever the hell you want to work it, for the transcriber when you get it - will be here.’
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 477 | Loc. 7302-3  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 06:56 PM

You can’t take away half his world and expect him not to want to explore the absence, not to push his intelligence and faculties into the forbidden.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 481 | Loc. 7362-63  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:30 PM

That steady blue line the beat of your heart. That grainy, pulsing ghost is your heart. It keeps going and going and going, without rest. You are amazed at that.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 481 | Loc. 7375-77  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:33 PM

It’s much more complex than that but it’s what this nano-plastic spider sitting on his chest is doing and what the smaller, smarter one will do when they put it into his chest and it wraps its spindly legs around his heart. It will be the new tech that’s not quite machine and not quite living. Protein computing, she calls it, though Can suspects that the doctor doesn’t understand it either. But she has a plan.
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The Dervish House (Ian Mcdonald)
- Highlight on Page 486 | Loc. 7446-54  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:39 PM

This is an atom of carbon bonded to four hydrogen atoms; star-forged, hurtling through the gas pipeline beneath the Bosphorus towards Europe. This is a Mellified Man, sleeping on a bed of honey until the trumpet of Israfil wakes him. This is three men dead and cold in an army morgue. This is the Little Virgin of St Pantaleimon’s spreading her protecting veil over the twenty million souls of Europe’s greatest city. This is lovers in a rented room washed by the sound of the sea. This is the Storm of the Turning Windmills, singing in the lines of the skysails, licking the water of the Bosphorus to restless cat-tongues. This is the secret name of God, written across Istanbul in letters too great and yet too small to be comprehended. This is the stir of djinn and rememberings, which are not as different as humans think, in the twilight of Adem Dede Square, outside the old dervish house. This is the turn, this is the whirl, this is the dance that is woven into every particle of the universe. This is the laughter of Hızır the Green Saint. This is Istanbul, Queen of Cities, and she will endure as long as human hearts beat upon the earth.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 272-73  | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2012, 06:04 PM

And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 325  | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2012, 06:10 PM

Compartmentalization,
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 623-24  | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2012, 07:31 PM

It flips open in all its wikified hypertextual glory, full of long medical terms that fail to signify, beyond the words “Sildenafil” and “Ritonavir.” “Um. Bear with me a moment while I come up to speed? I need to look this up—”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1027-28  | Added on Sunday, January 08, 2012, 09:41 PM

And in the presence of Secret Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on, because this is not your ordinary S. cerevisiae; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1151-52  | Added on Monday, January 09, 2012, 09:31 AM

Before you set off, you downloaded a map and memorized a series of left/right branches and waypoints—it’s an archaic skill called “orienteering”—so you make good time, despite the lack of navaids.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1302-4  | Added on Monday, January 09, 2012, 09:50 AM

But part of what we do is abstract social-network analysis on waves, IM, email, phone calls—looking for indicators of pathological communications patterns. If you can track who’s talking to who, you can work out which parts of an organization work together, and see emergent patterns of behaviour.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1305  | Added on Monday, January 09, 2012, 09:50 AM

agent-assisted NLP and transitive clique identification
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1852  | Added on Monday, January 09, 2012, 11:26 PM

Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2213  | Added on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 08:14 PM

There really is a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2213  | Added on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 08:15 PM

There really is a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2215-17  | Added on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 08:21 PM

The replacement prescription sits heavy in your pocket, reassuring, a chemotaxic anchor pulling you closer to the harbour of high-functioning quasi-sanity.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2505-6  | Added on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 09:06 PM

recruits executive-calibre material from among the unfairly-discriminated-against neurodiverse.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2505-6  | Added on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 09:06 PM

The Operation proactively recruits executive-calibre material from among the unfairly-discriminated-against neurodiverse.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2912  | Added on Sunday, January 15, 2012, 05:12 PM

glassy-eyed as his portable panopticon of cameras and data specs.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2959-61  | Added on Sunday, January 15, 2012, 10:09 PM

They’ve got speech-to-text software and natural language analysers, proximity- and probability-matching tools controlled by teleworkers in off-shore networks—a mechanical turk—to make tag clouds out of everything you say within earshot of one of their mikes. It may not be true AI, but it can flag up inconsistencies if you’re lying.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 234 | Loc. 3585-86  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:32 PM

You whip out your disposable pad, haul down your desktop from the botnet-hosted cloud once again, fire up the amusing little VoIP gateway app disguised as a board-game, work your jaw to wake your skullphone, and subvocalize. “Hello, Able November here.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3619-20  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:39 PM

A double-domed doctor of artificial intelligence.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3621-22  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:40 PM

“Target acquisition, son. Do try and follow the plot: The victims are all involved in customer-relationship management. That, and the attack vector relies on combinatorial enhancement of precursor situations
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 3623  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:40 PM

There’s some network analysis voodoo as well, but I never got my head properly around that neo-Bayesian queuing-theory shit.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 3636-37  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:41 PM

a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 244 | Loc. 3732-34  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 05:53 PM

These are street performers, constructing the dialectic of urban civilization—the watcher and the self-consciously watched. Here’s a human robot in silver spray paint and make-up, twitching to archaic German synthrock.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3804-8  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 06:04 PM

Here is your office: heart of a spider-web, wrapped around a hardused Eames recliner, keyboard sitting on an articulated arm to one side, headset to the other. All the walls are covered in 3D screens except for one, a bare metal surface studded with radiation sensors, air vents, and crossed by exposed pipes and cable trays. There’s a tatty epaper poster gummed across it, sagging in the middle: It shows a constantly updated viewgraph schematic of global bandwidth consumption, fat pipes sprawling multi-hued across a dymaxion projection of the planet, pulsing and rippling with the systolic ebb and flow of data.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 3820-22  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 06:05 PM

“This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.)
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 3835-39  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 06:09 PM

“What we weren’t expecting: cheap grid computing for pharmaceutical companies solving protein-folding problems. A Chinese automobile company using a botnet to evolve the design of their latest car using genetic algorithms fed with data from consumer surveys. Artificial-intelligence researchers renting the same botnets that spammers rely on to train their spam filters. Who knew? It is a, a soup of virtual machines boiling out on the darknet, coordinated through channels that our targets operate from corrupted routers in the State Telephone Company hosting centres in Karakol.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 254 | Loc. 3883-84  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 06:15 PM

discriminating human-content communications from non-metacognitive signals; can we take the discrimination further, reliably, and derive objective data about internal emotional states?”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 3922  | Added on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 09:17 AM

the panopticon singularity
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 4009-10  | Added on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 09:35 AM

“He’s an expert on the emergent behaviour of distributed oracular systems—whatever they are—and I want you to go pick his brains.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 4127-32  | Added on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 06:13 PM

In a nutshell: When you or I are confronted with some choice—say, whether to buy a season bus pass or to pay daily—we make our decision about what to do by using a frame, a bunch of anecdotes and experiences that help us evaluate the choice. You can control how people make their choices, even to the point of making them choose differently, if you can modify the frame. There’s a whole body of research on this field in cognitive psychology. Anyway: Choice architecture is the science of designing situations to nudge people towards a desired preference. You might want to do this because you’re marketing products to the public—or for public policy purposes: There’s a whole political discourse around this area called libertarian paternalism, how to steer people towards choosing to do the right thing of their own free will.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 4154-57  | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 04:45 PM

Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience . . . in the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 4172-74  | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 05:05 PM

“Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 288 | Loc. 4406-7  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:11 AM

via analytical cognitive neurobiology and synthetic neurocomputing.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 288 | Loc. 4411-12  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:12 AM

Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 4431-33  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:14 AM

the artificial sea-gull would ipso facto resemble a biological one, behaviourally . . . then they assumed it could bootstrap itself onto progressively faster hardware or better-optimized software, refining itself.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4436-37  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:14 AM

“Doesn’t work, of course. There isn’t enough headroom left for exponential amplification, and in any case, nobody needs
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4441-42  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:15 AM

Nobody wants to be confronted by a psychotic brain in a box—what we really want is identity amplification.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 4447-48  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:15 AM

“ATHENA is one of a family of research-oriented identity-amplification engines
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 4448-51  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:16 AM

It’s not all academic; for example TR/Mithras. Junkbot.D and Worm/NerveBurn.10143 are out there now. They’re malware AI engines; the Junkbot family are distributed identity simulators used for harvesting trust, while NerveBurn . . . we’re not entirely sure, but it seems to be a sand-boxed virtual brain simulator running on a botnet, possibly a botched attempt at premature mind uploading . . .”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 4453-55  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:16 AM

ATHENA’s our research platform in moral metacognition.” “Metacognition?” “Loosely, it means we’re in consciousness studies—more prosaically, we’re in the business of telling spam from ham.”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 4459-60  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 09:17 AM

Bluntly, we’re only human; we can’t tell the difference between a spambot and a real human being anymore without face-to-face contact. So we need identity amplification to keep up.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 294 | Loc. 4503-6  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 12:52 PM

We’re trying to find a way to, shall we say, enforce communal standards without turning the corner and ending up with a panopticon singularity, ubiquitous maximal law enforcement by software—nobody wants that, so we’re looking for something more humane. Crime prevention by automated social pressure rather than crime prosecution by AI. But
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4834-35  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 01:20 PM

Fumes of cyanoacrylate smoke rise from a fingerprint blower in one corner; blue laser light flickers as another robot systematically scans the dimensions of the room.
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4852  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 01:21 PM

“Correlation does not imply causation,”
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 333 | Loc. 5101-2  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 01:35 PM

(Organized crime: fucking 1920s shit invented by bootlegging immigrant fucktards in the slums of Chicago and New York and the other big cities with the help of their ’Ndrangheta homies, and so easy that by the 2020s even a bunch of crack-snorting surfer-dude VCs from California could master it.)
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Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
- Highlight on Page 336 | Loc. 5147-49  | Added on Thursday, January 19, 2012, 01:41 PM

ATHENA sees everything with our video eyes, civilizing and tracking and nudging and naming and shaming. The panopticon misses nothing.
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3322-23  | Added on Friday, January 20, 2012, 02:04 PM

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns.
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Cryoburn (Lois M. Bujold)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 50-51  | Added on Sunday, January 22, 2012, 12:14 PM

Miles refused to let what was left of his mind be diverted in an attempt to count them, even by a statistically valid sampling-and-multiplication method.
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Cryoburn (Lois M. Bujold)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 602-3  | Added on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 11:25 PM

"I don't know how anybody can stand to drink that stuff." "It's a taste you acquire when you're older. Rather like an interest in girls."
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Cryoburn (Lois M. Bujold)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 826-28  | Added on Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 08:42 PM

As Yani maundered on, Miles was thrown back in memory to his own grandfather. General Count Piotr Vorkosigan, planetary liberator, un-maker and re-maker of emperors, and cause of a lot of that history that Yani had missed, had sired his heir late in life, as had Miles's father, so that it was more nearly three generations between grandfather and grandson than two.
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Cryoburn (Lois M. Bujold)
- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2430-31  | Added on Friday, January 27, 2012, 12:23 AM

"My time is not infinitely elastic."
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Cryoburn (Lois M. Bujold)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2685  | Added on Friday, January 27, 2012, 02:09 PM

Need more data, dammit, was an old mantra of his, almost comforting in its familiarity.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 147-49  | Added on Friday, February 03, 2012, 08:15 AM

People aren’t perfect decision makes by any means. Individuals make a tremendous number of mistakes, but on the whole the distributed decision making power of the masses is more effective at moving society towards greater welfare than the decisions made by a small elite.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 217-19  | Added on Monday, February 06, 2012, 02:24 PM

The hard work of genetically engineering these higher organisms is getting the new gene into the cells. To do this one needs a gene vector – a way to get the gene to the right place.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 219-20  | Added on Monday, February 06, 2012, 02:24 PM

Most researchers use gene vectors provided by nature – viruses. In some ways, viruses are an ideal tool for ferrying genes into a cell, because that’s already one of their main functions.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 289-92  | Added on Monday, February 06, 2012, 02:30 PM

This is a key difference between drug therapy and gene therapy. Drugs sent into the body have their effect for a while, and then are eventually broken up or passed out. Gene therapy, on the other hand, gives the body the ability to manufacture the needed protein or enzyme or other bodily chemical itself. The new genes can last for a few weeks or can become a permanent part of the patient’s genome.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 298-99  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 08:51 AM

Insertional vectors make more or less permanent changes to your genome.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 337-39  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 08:56 AM

With integrating gene vectors, it looks like it will be possible to give a person just a single injection and have that injection increase their red blood cell count, their aerobic fitness, their endurance, for life.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 576-80  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 11:31 AM

We’ll see this same pattern again and again throughout this book. Every technology we’ll talk about can be used to heal or to enhance. And in every case the early adopters are those who have the most to gain and the least to lose. In some cases those first transformed men and women have benefited tremendously. In others they’ve suffered side effects. Yet in every case they’ve helped teach us more about the human mind and body – leading to better, safer techniques that can heal millions of other sick and injured.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 581-82  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 11:32 AM

Ironically, one of the most obvious responses to safety concerns about enhancements – to ban the enhancement techniques – is counterproductive.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 705-8  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 04:22 PM

Kandel’s company, Memory Pharmaceuticals, and Tully’s company, Helicon Therapeutics, are both working on new drugs that work similarly to Rolipram but which can be taken as pills instead of injections, and which don’t have the nasty side effects. Both drugs – MEM 1414 and HT-0712 – are just entering human trials.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 787-89  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:24 PM

the gene for proenkaphalin, a pain-killing molecule naturally found in the body. The mice whose bodies produced more proenkaphalin showed a higher pain threshold than genetically normal mice.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 800-802  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:27 PM

Researchers already know that vasopressin is involved in human romantic bonding. Along with oxytocin, it’s one of the brain chemicals associated whose levels increase over the course of a romance.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 807-8  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:27 PM

monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) are associated with thrill-seeking and novelty-seeking behavior.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 808  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:27 PM

We know that a particular kind of serotonin receptor, the 5HT2-C receptor, is involved in a variety of spiritual experiences.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 814-16  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:29 PM

As a species we’re in the process of figuring out what makes us tick. The next step – a step tens of millions of consumers will pay for – is to turn that knowledge into products that allow us to sculpt our own minds.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 825-28  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:30 PM

People with better memories and quicker minds will earn more money and produce more for others. Any technique that increases the human ability to learn, to think, or to communicate is going to produce economic returns. It will increase our ability to solve problems, to make scientific breakthroughs, to build better products, and so on.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 847-50  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:50 PM

Polls on attitudes towards genetic engineering, for instance, find that while only about 20 percent of Americans approve of the use of genetic techniques to create desired traits in children, 63 percent of the population of India approve, as do a whopping 83 percent of those polled in Thailand. While those numbers are specific to genetic engineering, they suggest something of the fundamental attitude towards enhancement.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 899-902  | Added on Tuesday, February 07, 2012, 07:55 PM

Second, spending on biotech enhancements is likely to obey a law of diminishing returns. That is to say that someone who can spend ten times as much on an enhancement isn’t going to get ten times the result. They’re likely to get much less than that. The biggest gains are going to come from relatively small amounts of spending. Everything beyond that will produce only small refinements.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1084-87  | Added on Thursday, February 09, 2012, 10:32 AM

The only reason to fear such a stratifying effect of biotech enhancements is their potential for rapid and dramatic effects. If biotech and neurotech enhancements increase earning power faster than they drop in price, they could lead to runaway stratification. In this case, governments should act.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1190-92  | Added on Thursday, February 09, 2012, 10:29 PM

“Worms have 100 million nucleotides in their genome approximately. If you change one of those, one of the letters, one of the 100 million letters of the genetic alphabet, you get a doubling of life span. If you change two of the letters, if you change one letter in one gene, one letter in another gene, you'll get a tripling of life span.”
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1344-45  | Added on Saturday, February 11, 2012, 03:41 PM

In mice, removing a gene called p66shc seems to make the cells of the mice more resistant to free radicals, and also lengthens life by about 30% with no obvious side effects.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1406-7  | Added on Saturday, February 11, 2012, 03:49 PM

One of the most interesting effects of caloric restriction is what researchers call compressed morbidity – a shortening of the period of ill health at the end of life.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1999-2000  | Added on Sunday, February 12, 2012, 12:15 PM

When it comes time to read your genes, enzymes stretch out parts of your DNA. Every time one of your cells divides, your entire genome must be stretched out and read. The process takes about fifteen minutes.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2544-49  | Added on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 11:42 AM

Something even more surprising happened next: in some trials, the monkey stopped using the joystick at all. It let its own hand drop to its side, and relied solely on the neural interface to control the robot arm. According to Nicolelis, “the monkey suddenly realized that she didn't need to move her arm at all. Her arm muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback. Such findings tell us that the brain is so amazingly adaptable that it can incorporate an external device … as a natural extension of the body. "
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2661-63  | Added on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 08:39 PM

You might even be able to play that kind of sensory recording back for someone else, turning the experience you had into a set of nerve impulses that could be sent into their brain, allowing them to experience at least the sensory parts of an event from your perspective.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2680-83  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 05:50 PM

It also suggests that our imaginations might be useful as input devices for computers. For example, you might imagine a picture and send it to your computer, capturing it more quickly and accurately than you could by drawing it out with your hand. The computer might not even have a video screen. It might simply project the image back into your visual cortex, giving you instant feedback and allowing you to sharpen and modify the picture you’re working on inside your head.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 2751-53  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 05:57 PM

The brain’s serotonin neurons are concentrated in a place called the Raphe Nucleus. From there they send out long projections into dozens of other parts of the brain. Just one electrode attached to the Raphe Nucleus could trigger those serotonin neurons to release their serotonin. This would have a strong euphoric effect.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2813-16  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 06:05 PM

While human trials are still years away, Berger and Deadwyler are already talking about the possibility of augmenting human memory – making it easier for us to learn new facts or recall things learned long ago. If we can understand how the brain files things away into memory, their reasoning goes, we can improve on the process. We may even be able to file away a copy of the memories on a computer or other outside device, enabling perfect storage of our memories for decades to come.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 2827-28  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 06:06 PM

infotemporal cortex
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2934-38  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 10:59 PM

Neural interfaces have such low bandwidth because they’re built on decades-old technology. For most of the field’s history, it’s been populated by neurosurgeons and neurobiologists – scientists who understand the brain, but aren’t on the cutting edge of electronics. Over the last few years, researchers with backgrounds in computer science and electrical engineering have entered the field of brain-computer interfaces. They’ve brought with them the latest expertise in fabricating circuits and a goal of greatly increasing the number of connections implants make with the brain.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2939-41  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 11:00 PM

Researcher Ken Wise at the University of Michigan, for example, is producing implants fabricated like microchips. Wise’s lab is just finishing their 1024-channel wireless implant. It measures just 3 millimeters on a side and communicates wirelessly through the skull at 1.5 megabits per second. German firm Infineon is working on a neuro-chip that can connect to 16,384 neurons at a time.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2973-77  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 11:04 PM

Birbaumer and Wolpow’s research seems to be pushing EEG about as far as it can go. Beyond about a hundred electrodes, the scalp is completely covered. What’s more, because any electrical signal from a neuron has to pass through the skull and scalp (and usually many other neurons) before reaching an electrode, EEGs produce at best very general information about what’s going on inside the brain. With EEG it’s impossible to get the kind of precise information about specific neurons and patterns of neural firing that you can get from inside the brain. For that reason, most brain computer interface researchers think EEG won’t go much farther than it’s gone already.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2984-91  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 11:06 PM

Despite the limitations of EEG, and fMRI, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of a non-invasive interface. Researchers are pursuing many different avenues, including picking up the magnetic fields of neurons, shining infra-red lasers through the outermost layers of the brain to pick up changes in opacity caused by neural firing, and even more exotic methods. In early 2003 scientists used an advanced microscope that fires light into its target to take pictures of single neurons. The technology is fairly bulky and can only see a tiny area at a time, but future generations will likely shrink and increase in ability. Researchers have also used something called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to change the activity of neurons the brain. By applying a magnetic field just outside they skull, they can temporarily scramble the electrical signals in a small part of the brain. After the magnetic field is gone, brain activity in the affected area returns to normal.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 3029-40  | Added on Thursday, February 16, 2012, 11:12 PM

In 2002, Rudolpho Llinas proposed a way to use the principles of endovascular surgery to tap into millions of neurons at once. Llinas is one of the elder statesmen of brain science. He helped pioneer the study of how neurons function, serves as the editor in chief of the journal Neuroscience, and is the chair of the NYU department of the same name. He has a reputation among his colleagues for cool-headedness. Llinas’ idea, which the NSF has provided a grant to explore, is that we use an existing network of passageways that reaches every neuron in the brain — the network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that supply blood to these neurons. In Llinas’s proposal for a neurovascular brain-computer interface, a probe is inserted into an artery in the body and guided up to the brain via magnets outside the body, much as it would be in any endovascular procedure. The probe is actually a collection of a million or so much smaller wires, each roughly a tenth of micrometer thick. As the probe is threaded through the brain’s vascular networks, the flow of blood and gentle guidance from the magnets separates the wires from each other, allowing them to be carried into a million arterial nooks and crannies. The smallest capillaries in the brain are about ten micrometers wide, or one fifth the width of a human hair. The wires Llinas proposes to use are one hundred times thinner. Researchers have already created wires that thin – and even thinner – using carbon nanotubes.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3134-39  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 08:08 AM

While undermining central authority, information technology nevertheless increases the benefits of human cooperation. In his book Non Zero, Robert Wright proposes a fascinating theory of human history that explains this. Wright draws upon a mathematical field known as game theory. In game theory there are “zero sum” games where one can only benefit at the expense of another. There are also “non-zero sum” games, where the total benefit and harm to the parties involved does not have to balance out. In non-zero sum games, each player can benefit, without any need to harm the others.
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Ramez Naam)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 3204-7  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 08:20 AM

“The human soul yearns for, longs for, aspires to some condition, some state, some goal toward which our earthly activities are directed but which cannot be attained in earthly life. Our soul’s reach exceeds our grasp; it seeks more than continuance; it reaches for something beyond us, something that for the most part eludes us.”
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A Pedestrianʼs Guide to Singularity  (singularityuniversity.nl)
- Highlight Loc. 18-19  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 05:30 PM

Today, you can buy a credit-card sized but fully functional personal computer called the Raspberry Pi, for only $25. Extrapolate that a billion times.. Computing power will be near limitless. Every thing can become smart.
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The Minds of Machines  (philosophynow.org)
- Highlight Loc. 20-21  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 06:19 PM

My interlocutors countered that although extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter amenable to the laws of physics.
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The Minds of Machines  (philosophynow.org)
- Highlight Loc. 22  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 06:22 PM

“We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”
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The Minds of Machines  (philosophynow.org)
- Highlight Loc. 83-89  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 06:41 PM

In other words, it makes no sense to believe that our minds are built on basic, atomic, context-free sets of facts and rules, with objects and predicates, and discrete storage and processing units. This is why the methods of natural science, which look for structural primitives such as particles and forces, fail to describe our experience. Therefore, contrary to the implicit beliefs of much Western philosophy and AI research, a ‘computational’ theory of the mind may be impossible. Isn’t our common sense “a combination of skills, practices, discriminations, etc, which are not intentional states, and so, a fortiori, do not have any representational content to be explicated in terms of elements and rules?” as Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus asked in Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain: AI Back at a Branchpoint.
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The Minds of Machines  (philosophynow.org)
- Highlight Loc. 115-18  | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 06:49 PM

The Dreyfuses sum it up: “If [a simulated neural net] is to learn from its own ‘experiences’ to make associations that are human-like rather than be taught to make associations which have been specified by its trainer, it must also share our sense of appropriateness of outputs, and this means it must share our needs, desires, and emotions, and have a human-like body with the same physical movements, abilities and possible injuries.” (Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain).
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1301-4  | Added on Monday, February 20, 2012, 10:15 AM

But if people keep getting smarter and learning more - expanding the number of relationships they can track, maintaining them more efficiently - and naturally specializing further as more knowledge is discovered and we become able to conceptualize more complex areas of study - and if the population growth rate stays under the rate of increase of Dunbar's Function - then eventually there could be a single community of sentients, and it really would be a single community.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1321-22  | Added on Monday, February 20, 2012, 10:16 AM

One of the key elements of boredom was suggested in "Complex Novelty":  If your activity isn't teachingyou insights you didn't already know, then it is non-novel, therefore old, therefore boring.
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1341-42  | Added on Monday, February 20, 2012, 10:18 AM

I have a small unreasonable fear, somewhere in the back of my mind, that if I ever do fully understand the algorithms of intelligence, it will destroy all remaining novelty
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1400-1401  | Added on Monday, February 20, 2012, 10:24 AM

"empathic inference" the idea that brains are so complex that the only way to simulate them is by forcing a similar brain to behave similarly. 
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Fun Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2034-39  | Added on Monday, February 20, 2012, 12:07 PM

"Nanotechnology and genetic engineering will abolish suffering in all sentient life.  The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible.  It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent.  The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment.  They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss.  States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health.  It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 301-5  | Added on Friday, March 16, 2012, 10:04 AM

Taxonomy is imprecise. Most experts agree that what emerged on that day was a minor manifestation, one I’d later learn to call a stichling. It was an insinuation at first, composing itself of angles and shadows. It accreted itself from its surrounds, manifesting in the transient. The bricks, plastone and concrete of buildings, the energy of the cages and the flesh of the captive animals from the gardens spilled toward and into the swimming thing, against physics. They substanced it. Houses were unroofed as their slates dripped sideways into a presence growing every moment more physical, more suited to this realness.
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The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (Ann Van der Meer and Jeff Van der Meer)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 69-72  | Added on Sunday, July 31, 2011, 02:08 PM

The bizarre animals in this book are descendants of phantasmagorical creatures that crawled out of the ocean of oral-story millennia ago. The beasts of myth were succeeded by a host of newcomers in tales of travelers returning from Ethiopia, Egypt, Persia, and India. Classical historians, geographers, and natural history authors recorded those accounts, describing the marvels of remote lands in terms of animals that a stay-at-home public would immediately recognize.
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The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (Ann Van der Meer and Jeff Van der Meer)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 411-16  | Added on Monday, August 01, 2011, 01:30 AM

Taken from far Persia, the word manticore means “man-eater.” Both terrifying and prickly, the manticore has a red body, blue eyes, a mouth full of three rows of teeth, poisoned spines, and a tail that ends in a stinger. Despite this, the beast has a voice that sounds like pipes and a trumpet, no doubt to lure the musically suggestible within its reach. Does it have wings? Perhaps. Some believe that it simply makes very long leaps that simulate flight. Cousin to the Sphinx, the manticore dabbles in riddles with captured prey. That good doctor of the absurd, Jorge Luis Borges, is correct that a manticore makes a cameo on the final pages of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony; many an unwary reader has been asked a riddle when expecting only a conclusion.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 38-40  | Added on Thursday, August 04, 2011, 09:12 PM

Those kids lean forward and begin to play. They play as if they care, because they do. And as they lean forward, as they connect, they lift themselves off the piano seat, suddenly becoming, as Ben calls them, one-buttock players.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 158-60  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:18 PM

There are more doctors, scientists, enlightened businesses, and engaged teachers in a society that values education. Sure, education is expensive, but living in a world of ignorance is even more expensive.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 188-90  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:21 PM

To efficiently run a school, amplify fear (and destroy passion) School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 196-98  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:24 PM

Traditionally, society assumed that artists, singers, artisans, writers, scientists, and alchemists would find their calling, then find a mentor, and then learn their craft. It was absurd to think that you’d take people off the street and teach them to do science or to sing, and persist at that teaching long enough for them to get excited about it.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 207-10  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:25 PM

Which came first, the car or the gas station? The book publisher or the bookstore? Culture changes to match the economy, not the other way around. The economy needed an institution that would churn out compliant workers, so we built it. Factories didn’t happen because there were schools; schools happened because there were factories.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 211  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:25 PM

Jobs were invented before workers were invented.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 246-55  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:35 PM

Here are a dozen ways school can be rethought: Homework during the day, lectures at night Open book, open note, all the time Access to any course, anywhere in the world Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction The end of multiple-choice exams Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement The end of compliance as an outcome Cooperation instead of isolation Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas Transformation of the role of the teacher Lifelong learning, earlier work Death of the nearly famous college
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 292-95  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:44 PM

The next century offers fewer new long-lasting institutions (we’re seeing both organized religion and the base of industry fading away), to be replaced instead with micro-organizations, with individual leadership, with the leveraged work of a small innovative team changing things far more than it ever would have in the past. The six foundational elements are taken for granted as we build a new economy and a new world on top of them.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 295-97  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:44 PM

Amplified by the Web and the connection revolution, human beings are no longer rewarded most for work as compliant cogs. Instead, our chaotic world is open to the work of passionate individuals, intent on carving their own paths.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 304-5  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:46 PM

School belongs to parents and their kids, the ones who are paying for it, the ones it was designed for. It belongs to the community, too, the adults who are going to be living and working beside the graduates the school churns out.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 313  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:46 PM

Connecting seekers to data.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 315-19  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:47 PM

result. In the connection revolution, value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other. This meta-level of value creation is hard to embrace if you’re used to measuring sales per square foot or units produced per hour. In fact, though, connection leads to an extraordinary boost in productivity, efficiency, and impact.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 316-19  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:48 PM

In the connection revolution, value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other. This meta-level of value creation is hard to embrace if you’re used to measuring sales per square foot or units produced per hour. In fact, though, connection leads to an extraordinary boost in productivity, efficiency, and impact.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 319-21  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:48 PM

In the connected world, reputation is worth more than test scores. Access to data means that data isn’t the valuable part; the processing is what matters. Most of all, the connected world rewards those with an uncontrollable itch to make and lead and matter.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 347-49  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 09:53 PM

Unlike just about every other institution and product line in our economy, transparency is missing from education. Students are lied to and so are parents. At some point, teenagers realize that most of school is a game, but the system neer acknowledges it. In search of power, control and independence, administrators hide information from teachers, and vice versa.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 436-37  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 10:07 PM

Our new civic and scientific and professional life, though, is all about doubt. About questioning the status quo, questioning marketing or political claims, and most of all, questioning what’s next.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 515-17  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 10:15 PM

One outgrowth of this analysis is that hourly workers are fundamentally different from salaried ones. If you are paid by the hour, the organization is saying to you, “I can buy your time an hour at a time, and replace you at any time.” Hourly workers were segregated, covered by different labor laws, and rarely if ever moved over to management.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 576-79  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 10:23 PM

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give them a platform to do it.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 629-32  | Added on Friday, August 05, 2011, 10:33 PM

If all the teacher is going to do is read her pre-written notes from a PowerPoint slide to a lecture hall of thirty or three hundred, perhaps she should stay home. Not only is this a horrible disrespect to the student, it’s a complete waste of the heart and soul of the talented teacher. Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 742-44  | Added on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 01:45 PM

Protectionism isn’t going to fix this problem. Neither is the stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 778-79  | Added on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 01:49 PM

Industrial jobs no longer create new industrial jobs in our country. A surplus of obedient hourly workers leads to unemployment, not more factories.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 797-801  | Added on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 01:52 PM

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 811-12  | Added on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 01:53 PM

Dreamers don’t help with either of these problems. Dreamers aren’t busy applying for jobs at minimum wage, they don’t eagerly buy the latest fashions, and they’re a pain in the ass to keep happy.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 861-62  | Added on Sunday, August 14, 2011, 06:45 PM

There’s a myth at work here, one that cannot and will not be seriously questioned. The myth says: Great performance in school leads to happiness and success.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 871-76  | Added on Sunday, August 14, 2011, 06:46 PM

David Weinberger writes, As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It’s not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from—literally unthinkable without—the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms—that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1020-23  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 09:00 PM

In the post-industrial model, though, the lectures are handled by best-in-class videos delivered online. Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized, and isolated on the long tail and delivered with focus. What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1058-59  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 09:11 PM

As our society industrialized, it has relentlessly worked to drive labor away and replace it with work. Mere work. Busywork and repetitive work and the work of Taylor’s scientific management. Stand just here. Say just that. Check this box.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1100-1101  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 09:16 PM

Much of this manifesto echoes the attitude of the hacker. Not the criminals who crack open computer systems, but hackers—passionate experimenters eager to discover something new and willing to roll up their sleeves to figure things out.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1138-42  | Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 09:23 PM

1. Grades are an illusion 2. Your passion and insight are reality 3. Your work is worth more than mere congruence to an answer key 4. Persistence in the face of a skeptical authority figure is a powerful ability 5. Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run 6. If you care enough about the work to be criticized, you’ve learned enough for today
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1476-79  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:05 PM

Access to information has radically changed in just ten years. Kahn Academy, Wikipedia, a hundred million blogs, and a billion websites mean that if you’re interested enough, you can find the answer, wherever you are. School, then, needs not to deliver information so much as to sell kids on wanting to find it.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1573-76  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:21 PM

Just about everything that happens in school after second grade involves rearranging symbols. We push students to quickly take the real world, boil it down into symbols, and then, for months and years after that, analyze and manipulate those symbols. We parse sentences, turning words into parts of speech. We refine mathematical equations into symbols, and become familiar with the periodic table.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1590-94  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:22 PM

I love stuff like this. The manipulation of ever increasing levels of abstraction is high-octane fuel for the brain; it pushes us to be smarter (in one sense). But at another level, it’s a sort of intellectual onanism. For a few math students, it’s a stepping stone on the way to big new insights. For everyone else, it’s a distraction from truly practical conversations about whether to buy or lease a car, or how to balance the Federal budget.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1654-55  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:25 PM

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa, and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1677-82  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:27 PM

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices; I’ve demonstrated my pro-book chops. I’m not saying I want paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring.) We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage are going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1682-85  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:28 PM

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and to coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring to bear domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1688-93  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 10:28 PM

The next library is filled with so many Web terminals that there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight—it’s the entire point. Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community, and create value.
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Stop Stealing Dreams (Seth Godin)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1842-43  | Added on Monday, August 22, 2011, 11:21 PM

“The best way to complain is to make things” –James Murphy
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3805-9  | Added on Tuesday, August 23, 2011, 09:25 PM

Rand flew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking with Jobs and listening to his vision. The computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.”
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Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 4145  | Added on Tuesday, August 23, 2011, 10:17 PM

intelligence fields (for rendering information from reconnaissance flights and satellites).
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 677-80  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 04:44 PM

At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 732-34  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 04:50 PM

ACL—ACCELERATED CONTACT LINGUISTICS—was, Scile told me, a speciality crossbred from pedagogics, receptivity, programming and cryptography. It was used by the scholarexplorers of Bremen’s pioneer ships to effect very fast communication with indigenes they encountered or which encountered them.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 935-38  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 09:02 PM

“What are you monitoring?” I said to him after a silence. “I can see your displays.” “It’s just habit. Temperature, air impurities, ambient noise. Mostly pointless. A few other things: I worked for years in situations that . . . well, I got used to checking for trid, cameras, ears, that sort of thing.” I raised an eyebrow. “And I tend to run translationware as a default.”
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1169-70  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 09:23 PM

Scile spent hours, many hours, listening to recordings of Ariekei speaking, watching trids and flats of encounters between them and the Ambassadors. I watched him mouth things to himself and write illegible notes, one-handedly input into his datspace.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1258-59  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 09:30 PM

The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1344-48  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 09:37 PM

CalVin once told me that Bremen’s original expectations of Arieka’s reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been over-optimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras or particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1569-72  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 09:50 PM

In Embassytown there were no rag-draped children playing with paper boats in stinking water, in potholes; no people selling themselves for food to immersers and people from the out, nor hawking bits of their DNA or flesh to bioccaneers; wattle-and-daub huts didn’t shake as ships rose and descended overhead, didn’t collapse every few landings. Our social graphs were pretty flat: differentials of money and power were minor. Excepting Staff, and Ambassadors.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 1929-37  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 10:30 PM

THERE WERE two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars. There was another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2643-44  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 11:50 PM

Terretech that looked jarring in that topography. They were extending a network of hailers and coms boxes.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2783-84  | Added on Friday, September 02, 2011, 11:59 PM

WE DRAGOONED some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2868-71  | Added on Saturday, September 03, 2011, 12:04 AM

In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemical: there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3136-39  | Added on Saturday, September 03, 2011, 12:20 AM

We buzzed a corvid. It was antique, metal and silicon and polymers: entirely Terretech. We were chary of using our more sophisticated machines now: they were built with a compromise of our traditions and local biorigging, and as addiction spread, they might be tainted. For all we knew they might gush that need if we flew them, in their exhaust, perhaps in the tone of their drone.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3476-79  | Added on Saturday, September 03, 2011, 12:43 AM

I missed the immer. The way the mess and mass of it gushed by ships on their way to impossibly far parts of the everyday universe, immersed in that infinitely older unplace. I imagined being an explorer on pioneering ships built for ruggedness, buffeted by currents through dangerous parts, through schools of immer-stuff sharks, repelling random or deliberate attack. I didn’t believe in the nobility of the explorer, but the thought, the project, compelled me.
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Embassytown (China Mieville)
- Highlight on Page 231 | Loc. 3533-36  | Added on Saturday, September 03, 2011, 12:58 AM

The researchers had teased apart the filigrees that enmeshed it into Ra’s mind with disentangler techzymes. Its nanotendrils dangled from it like thin hair, twitched in my hand in vain search for neuro-matter. It mimicked the theta, beta, alpha, delta and other waves detected from its companion piece in Joel Rukowsi, coordinated the two feeds into impossible phase. Whatever the brain-states, the output would seem shared.
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The State Of The Art (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1415  | Added on Tuesday, September 13, 2011, 05:45 PM

Synchronize Your Dogmas
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The State Of The Art (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1681-87  | Added on Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 01:55 AM

Here we are with our fabulous GCU, our supreme machine; capable of outgeneraling their entire civilization and taking in Proxima Centauri on a day trip; packed with technology compared to which their citybusters are squibs and their Grays are less than calculators; a vessel casually sublime in its impregnable power and inexhaustible knowledge ... here we are with our ship and our modules and platforms, satellites and scooters and drones and bugs, sieving their planet for its most precious art, its most sensitive secrets, its finest thoughts and greatest achievements; plundering their civilization more comprehensively than all the invaders in their history put together, giving not a damn for their puny armaments, paying a hundred times more attention to their art and history and philosophy than to their eclipsed science, glancing at their religions and politics the way a doctor would at symptoms
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The State Of The Art (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2141-43  | Added on Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 07:13 PM

'Sma' the ship said finally, with a hint of what might have been frustration in its voice, 'I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years radius, and by a factor of about a million ... but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions.'
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The State Of The Art (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 2612  | Added on Sunday, September 25, 2011, 10:06 PM

I: Irreversible Neu(t)ral Damage
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The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force That Transforms Performance (James Heskett)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 286-89  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2011, 06:34 PM

Both stories and numbers serve us in this effort. Stories, of course, don’t prove anything. But they provide memorable examples that make the numbers come alive. And they are an important way in which leaders communicate and reinforce an organization’s culture. As neuroscientists tell us, “Given the effect stories have on us, they are one of the most useful tools one can have in a mental world, replacing the carrot and stick of the physical world. We can use them both to understand and to shape how others think and behave.”
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 193-97  | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:34 PM

The existing volume of data about people’s social behavior can be overwhelming, and it’s growing at an increasing pace. Don’t get bogged down in the detail. This book will give you the basic and overall patterns you need to understand. To keep up to date with emerging research, follow the online writings of the people cited throughout this book. Three of the most influential people on how to think about the social web are Duncan Watts, Jonah Lehrer, and Robin Dunbar.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 199-208  | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:35 PM

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 best-selling book The Tipping Point describes The Law of the Few, which states that if you reach and influence the minority of influential people in society, they will in turn influence hundreds, thousands, and even millions of others.2 Much marketing activity in the last ten years has been focused on finding and seeding messages with these “influentials.” This focus on “influentials” is mostly based on a view of how we want the world to work versus how it actually works. Marketing would be easier if these influentials did exist. However, recent research concludes that it is very rare to see any one individual influence many other people.3 Even if the “influentials” consist of 15 percent of the population, and generate 30 percent of the conversations about brands (an optimistic number), people not recognized as “influentials” still generate 70 percent of the conversations.4 That 70 percent of conversations is originating with the people you and I sit down for dinner with, watch TV with, and work with.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 228-30  | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:39 PM

Move away from the idea of finding “influentials.” It is neither cost-effective nor efficient. We are all influential in different contexts. You need to find the everyday people who are passionate about what your brand does, and market to them. They will go on to tell their friends.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 252-56  | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:40 PM

Why we talk We talk to survive The desire to communicate is hard-wired into all of us. It was an effective survival mechanism for our ancestors, who shared information about food supplies, dangerous animals, and weather patterns, and it continues to help us understand our world, including what behavior is appropriate and how to act in certain situations. People talk because sharing information makes life easier.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 279-82  | Added on Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:41 PM

Research has shown that most conversations are recounting personal experiences, or gossiping about who is doing what with whom. Only 5 percent is criticism or negative gossip. The vast majority of these conversations are positive, as we are driven to preserve a positive reputation.8
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 375-78  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:11 AM

We can map how frequently we communicate with others onto our social network structure: We communicate more with the people toward the center of our social network, the people we are emotionally closest to. Who is listening to us changes what we talk about Who
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 435-36  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:15 AM

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 452-53  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:24 AM

The second law is preferential attachment. People with more connections tend to get even more connections.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 449-51  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:24 AM

Scientist Albert-László Barabási found that networks were governed by three laws.2 The first law is growth. As people go about their lives, they make new connections and the network grows.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 454-56  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:24 AM

The third law is fitness. Fitness describes how desirable it is to connect to that person. Their higher fitness could be from a range of factors including credibility, trust, domain knowledge, and so on. People with higher fitness are deemed more desirable to connect to, and are connected to more frequently.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 486-88  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:28 AM

This number, 150, is a physiological limit of our brain. We may have many more connections than 150, but we don’t know what is happening in their lives. Regardless of what technology we introduce, this physiological limit will remain the same.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 493-95  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:36 AM

Marketers currently segregate by demographics and psychographics, but in the future they’ll need to segregate by social network structure. Sometimes it will be better to design for, and seed messages with, a small number of specific people. They will need to consider whether they are trying to start conversations among close friends, or among people who loosely know each other but have similar interests.
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Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Paul Adams)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 646-55  | Added on Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 03:55 AM

• Associates are people who don’t know each other well, and only share a common activity, such as a hobby or a sport. • Useful contacts are people who share information and advice. Typically this is related to our work or career. • Fun friends are people who socialize together primarily for fun. They don’t have a deep relationship, and don’t provide each other with emotional support. • Favor friends are people who help each other out in a functional manner but not in an emotional manner. • Helpmates display characteristics of both favor friends and fun friends. They socialize together for fun and also help each other out in a functional manner. • Comforters are similar to helpmates but with a deeper level of emotional support. • Confidants disclose personal information to each other, enjoy each other’s company, but aren’t always in a position to offer practical help. • Soulmates display all of these elements and are the people we’re closest to.
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 94-95  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:02 PM

A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; not a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant or a physiological booster.
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 183  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:11 PM

'Residual synaptic capacitance,'
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 678-80  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 04:08 PM

'Want me to tell you your heart rate, skin receptivity level, pheromone signature, neuron function-state…?' Its voice trailed off as Gurgeh came to a halt, half-way up the flight of broad steps.
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1201-4  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 04:40 PM

'Empires are synonymous with centralised - if occasionally schismatised - hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through - usually - a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser - as a rule nominally independent - power systems.
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1659-62  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 08:29 PM

A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artefacts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on the board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by colour, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things,
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1828-30  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 08:40 PM

gradually dropped back and to the side of the GSV's inner atmospheric envelope. They went slowly through the many layers of fields; the bumpfield, the insulating, the sensory, the signalling and receptor, the energy and traction, the hullfield, the outer sensory and, finally, the horizon, until they were free in hyperspace once more.
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3224-25  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 11:02 PM

'No; I mean the possibility of being displaced. It's risky. I wasn't told about this. Displacement fields in hyperspace are singularities, subject to the Uncertainty Principle-'
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The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 3793-94  | Added on Sunday, October 09, 2011, 01:15 PM

Switches. Memory. The random element that is chance and that is called choice: common denominators, all.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 680-81  | Added on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 05:40 AM

(everybody knew that to drink was to increase the hydrographical pressure within a body, thus expressing the relevant fluids from all available bodily orifices, so that didn’t count).
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 762-65  | Added on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 05:51 AM

The Nariscene were insectile; the Zamerin was six-limbed and keratin-covered. His dark, quintuply segmented body, a little under a metre and a half long (excluding stalks, mandibles retracted), was studded with implanted jewels, inlaid veins of precious metals, additional sensory apparatus, numerous tiny holo-projectors displaying the many medals, honours, distinctions and decorations that had come his way over the years and a smattering of light weaponry, mostly ceremonial.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 773-77  | Added on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 03:25 PM

The transit facility was a micro-gravity environment and lightly pressured with a gently warmed gaseous nitrogen-oxygen mix; the web of life-support strands that infested it were coded by colour, scent, texture and various other markers to make them obvious to those who might need to use them. One identified the right strand in the web and hooked into it to receive that which one needed to survive; oxygen, chlorine, salty water or whatever. The system couldn’t accommodate every known life form without requiring them to protect themselves in a suit or mask, but it represented the best compromise its Nariscene builders had been prepared to come up with.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 853  | Added on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 03:32 PM

“Sursamen – an Arithmetic Shellworld orbiting the star Meseriphine in the Tertiary Hulian Spine.”
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1328-29  | Added on Thursday, October 20, 2011, 10:14 PM

clicked into her neural lace and through it into the vast, bludgeoningly vivid meta-existence that was the SC version of the Culture’s dataverse.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1329-33  | Added on Thursday, October 20, 2011, 10:15 PM

A clamorous, phantasmagoric scape opened instantly in front of her and flicked all around. Confronting, pervading Anaplian in this mind-dazzling, seemingly frozen blink of time was a collection of inputs using every amended-range sense available; this barely graspable riot of sensory overload presented itself initially as a sort of implied surrounding sphere, along with the bizarre but perfectly convincing sensation that you could see every part of it at once, and in more colours than even the augmented eye possessed.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1676-78  | Added on Sunday, October 23, 2011, 12:56 PM

Their realms and fields of influence – and to a degree their histories, cultures and achievements – tended to intermingle and overlap, reducing their cohesiveness as societies and making a defensive war 
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1688-90  | Added on Sunday, October 23, 2011, 01:01 PM

The Optimae had no kings to move a whole people to a single purpose at once, they had no real enemies they felt they had no choice but to fight, and they had nothing they valued that they could not somehow produce, seemingly at will, cheaply and in whatever quantities they chose, so there were no resources to fight over either.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2417  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 12:39 PM

Transient Atmospheric Phenomenon.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2423-28  | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 12:41 PM

SC added its own final, finessed layers of additional characteristics to her already heady mix of bodily enhancements, empowering her still further: here were fingernails that could lase, to signal, blind or kill, here was a tiny reactor within her skull that, amongst other things, could provide the power to keep her alive and conscious for years without oxygen, here was a whole-body fibre structure welded to her very bones that could sense distortions in the skein of space itself; here was a level of conscious control over her own body and, almost incidentally, over any merely electronic machine within fifty metres which exceeded that of any rider over their mount or any champion swordsman over his blade . .
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3025-30  | Added on Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:45 PM

they had been particularly active in the Swarm Wars of great antiquity, battling runaway nanotech outbreaks, Swarmata in general and other Monopathic Hegemonising Events – but mostly because they were no threat to anybody any more and a system of the galactic community’s size and complexity just seemed to need one grouping that everybody was allowed to like. Utterly ancient, once near-invincibly powerful, now reduced to one paltry solar system and a few eccentric individuals hiding in the Cores of Shellworlds for no discernible reason, the Xinthia were seen as eccentric, bumbling, well-meaning, civilisationally exhausted – the joke was they hadn’t the energy to Sublime – and generally as the honoured good-as-dead deserving of a comfortable retirement.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 4013-15  | Added on Wednesday, November 02, 2011, 08:58 PM

Quitrilis was piloting his ship by hand, the way you were very much not supposed to, not in the presence of a relatively close-packed mass of other ships – in this case, a whole fleet of Oct Primarian Craft.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 4223-27  | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 07:57 PM

A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation was attached to the Oct recording through the news and current affairs organisations which took an interest in such events. Many Shellworld and Sursamen scholars – there were even people who regarded themselves as Eighth scholars, Sarl scholars – bemoaned the lack of decent data, leaving so much to speculation. For others, this lack of detail seemed to be merely an opportunity; offers to play war games based on the recent events were appended. Entertainments inspired by the recent thrilling events were also in preparation, or indeed already available.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 296 | Loc. 4529-31  | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 08:16 PM

“Bilpier, fourth of the Heisp Nariscene colony system, is small, solid, cold-cored, habiformed to Nariscene specifications within the last centieon, dynamically O2atmosphered, one hundred per cent Nariscene and seventy-four per cent surface bubble-hived.”
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4845-49  | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 08:36 PM

“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 340 | Loc. 5200  | Added on Sunday, November 06, 2011, 07:40 PM

philosophical epigrams
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 343 | Loc. 5250-54  | Added on Sunday, November 06, 2011, 07:45 PM

“I’m well travelled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. I have been most places, at a certain scale. I have spent time with all the major Involveds, I have talked to Gods, shared thought with the Sublimed and tasted, as far as a human can, something of the joy of what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me.”
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 350 | Loc. 5361-63  | Added on Sunday, November 06, 2011, 07:52 PM

‘Liveware Problem’. I am not a properly normal human being. I am an avatoid of the Liveware Problem, a Stream-class Superlifter; a modified Delta-class GCU, a Wanderer of the ship kind and technically Absconded.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 415 | Loc. 6357-58  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 12:00 AM

“We are investigating all such anomalous structures out of stratigraphic orderliness, for once paying little heed to the integrity and place-in-sequence of all discovered objects.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 449 | Loc. 6885-86  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 04:49 PM

“The ship and I have the best original specification overview, secondary structure plans, accrued morphology mappings, full geo, hydro, aero, bio and data system models and all the latest full-spectrum updates available.
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Matter (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 456 | Loc. 6978-79  | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 04:57 PM

“Worked out what’s messing with the local systemry?” she asked. Hippinse was monitoring the disturbance in the surrounding level’s data complexes and analysing data they’d collected earlier while in the Aultridian scendship.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 278-83  | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 03:57 PM

With no interval to provide a margin for error at all, the drone shunted its personality from its own AI core to its back-up picofoam complex and at the same time readied the signal cascade that would transfer its most important concepts, pro-grams and instructions first to electronic nanocircuitry, then to an atomechanical substrate and finally - absolutely as a last resort - to a crude little (though at several cubic centimetres also wastefully large) semi-biological brain. The drone shut off and shut down what had been its true mind, the only place it had ever really existed in all its life, and let whatever pattern of consciousness had taken root there perish for lack of energy, its collapsing consciousness impinging on the machine's new mind as a faint, informationless exhalation of neutrinos.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 323-30  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 01:12 AM

The attack on its photonic nucleus came at the same moment, manifesting itself as a perceived disturbance in the space-time fabric, warping the internal structure of the drone's light-energised mind from outside normal space. It's using the engines , thought the drone, senses swimming, its awareness seeming to break up and evaporate somehow as it effectively began to go unconscious. fm-am! , cried a tiny, long-thought-out sub routine. It felt itself switch to amplitude modulation instead of frequency modulation; reality snapped back into focus again, though its senses still remained disconnected and thoughts still felt odd. But if I don't react otherwise… The other drone fired at it again, zooming towards it on an intercept course. Ramming. How inelegant. The drone mirrored the rays, still refusing to adjust its internal photonic topography to allow for the wildly shifting wavelength changes demanding attention in its mind.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 472-74  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 12:13 PM

The gelfield suit possessed something called a node-distributed brain which was capable of translating with seeming effortlessness every nuance of Genar-Hofoen's speech to the Affronters and vice versa, as well as effectively rendering any other sonic, chemical or electromagnetic signal into human-meaningful information.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1130-32  | Added on Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 02:29 PM

The Culture had had lots of minor OCPs, problems that could have proved to be terminal if they'd been handled badly, but so far it had survived them all. The Culture's ultimate OCP was popularly supposed to be likely to take the shape of a galaxy-consuming Hegemonising Swarm, an angered Elder civilisation or a sudden, indeed instant visit by neighbours from Andromeda once the expedition finally got there.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1644-46  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:29 PM

It had been successively fitted with ever-more efficient and powerful drives and engines, until eventually it was able to maintain a perfectly respectable velocity either warping along the fabric of space-time or creating its own induced-singularity pathway through hyperspace beneath or above it.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1737-39  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:34 PM

NB:Attention : The following is a screen-written text-only dynamically scrolled discrete-assimilation-opportunity document which may not be vocalised, glyphed, diaglyphed, copied, stored or media-transferred in any conventionally accessible form. Any attempt to do so will be noted.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1760-64  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:36 PM

Excession's physical characteristics: (¡am!){trans.:a nti-matter}sphere rad. 53.34km, mass (non-estimal by space-time fabric influence - locality ambiently planar - estimated by pan-polarity material density norms at) 1.45x813t. Layered fractal matter-type-intricate structure, self supporting, open to (field-filtered) vacuum, anomalous field presence inferred from 821kHz leakage. Affirm K7^category by HS topology & eG {trans.: (hyperspatial) energyG rid}links (inf. & ult.) {trans.: (the hyperspatial directions)inf ra andul tra).eG link details non-estimal. DiaGlyph files attached.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1764-67  | Added on Thursday, November 10, 2011, 03:37 PM

Associated anomalous materials presence: several highly dispersed detritus clouds all within 28 minutes, three consistent with staged destruction of >.1m3near-equiv-tech entity, another ditto approx 38partially exhausted M-DAWS .1cal rounds{trans.:M iniaturised-DroneA dvancedW eaponS ystem nanomissiles},another consisting of general hi-soph level (O2-atmosphered) ship-internal combat debris.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2157-80  | Added on Friday, November 11, 2011, 07:21 PM

Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at. Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined. It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better… and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you… so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story. Metamathics led to the Mind equivalent of that experience, repeated a million times, magnified a billion times, and then beyond, to configurations of wonder and bliss even the simplest abstract of which the human-basic brain had no conceivable way of comprehending. It was like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing, unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as they were beyond its understanding. This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled. Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked, while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognisable reality that would allow it to translate the rest into comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe was like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the Minds built their immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 3838-40  | Added on Thursday, November 17, 2011, 05:43 PM

Take a Plate class GSV's locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value… make that thirty-two at a time… and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service's acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 5296-5300  | Added on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 08:09 PM

There were thousands of instruments of torture, clubs, spears, knives, swords, strangle cords, catapults, bows, powder guns, shells, mines, gas canisters, bombs, syringes, mortars, howitzers, missiles, atomics, lasers, field arms, plasma guns, microwavers, effectors, thunderbolters, knife missiles, line guns, thudders, gravguns, monofilament warps, pancakers, AM projectors, grid-fire impulsers, ZPE flux-polarisers, trapdoor units, CAM spreaders and a host of other inventions designed for - or capable of being turned to the purpose of producing death, destruction and agony.
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Excession (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 377 | Loc. 5780-82  | Added on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 09:26 PM

It shut everything down and let itself drift, floating gradually back through the four-dimensional hypervolume towards the skein of real space, propelled by nothing more than the faint pressure of radiations expelled from the energy grid.
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The Barefoot Running Book: A Practical Guide to the Art and Science of Barefoot and Minimalist Shoe Running (Jason Robillard and Dirk Wierenga)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 185-86  | Added on Monday, November 28, 2011, 01:01 AM

Finally, I would like to thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster. His Noodly Appendages guided me throughout the creation of this project.
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The Barefoot Running Book: A Practical Guide to the Art and Science of Barefoot and Minimalist Shoe Running (Jason Robillard and Dirk Wierenga)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 236-38  | Added on Monday, November 28, 2011, 01:11 AM

Among their many findings is the discovery that wearing shoes decreases a runner’s ability to judge impact. As such, shod runners produce far greater impact forces when running. This is believed to be a major factor in the development of running injuries.
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The Barefoot Running Book: A Practical Guide to the Art and Science of Barefoot and Minimalist Shoe Running (Jason Robillard and Dirk Wierenga)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 543-53  | Added on Monday, November 28, 2011, 04:06 PM

When the foot hits the ground (initial contact), the first muscle to contract is the soleus of the calf—if you are landing properly without a heel strike. Forward momentum causes the soleus to stretch rapidly, and the soleus reflexively contracts to prevent the knee from buckling. While the soleus contracts, it also lengthens to allow the knee to advance over the foot (this is called an eccentric muscle contraction for you physiology buffs). Stretch reflexes from the lengthening soleus act as a powerful neurological switch that activates the quadriceps and hip extensors to prevent the leg and trunk from collapsing under the forces of landing on one foot. In fact, if the soleus doesn’t stretch properly, the hip extensors can be up to 75% weaker due to a lack of heteronymous reflexive control. The muscles in the bottom of the foot (the foot intrinsics) also play a role as body weight is accepted onto the foot. The foot intrinsics begin undergoing a lengthening (eccentric) contraction as the arch of the foot flattens slightly to absorb shock. The stretch reflexes initiated from the lengthening of the foot intrinsics produce an interesting mechanism of shock absorption at the knee and ankle by inhibiting the soleus and quadriceps—causing partial relaxation of these muscles—to allow the ankle and knee to give-way slightly as body weight is loaded onto the leg.
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 160-61  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 04:25 PM

'-What he was saying. Opposite meaning. Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.' 'Really?' 'Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.'
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 162-64  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 04:25 PM

'People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn't afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral-' 'Money. Technical term.' '-in the meantime. So they took the time off and they went away.'
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 336-39  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 04:48 PM

'Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.'
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1191-95  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 05:53 PM

Uagen Zlepe, scholar, hung from the left-side sub-ventral foliage of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus by his prehensile tail and his left hand. He held a glyph-writing tablet with one foot and wrote inside it with his other hand. His remaining leg hung loose, temporarily surplus to requirements. He wore baggy cerise pantaloons (currently rolled up above the knee) secured with a stout pocket-belt, a short black jacket with a stowed cape, chunky mirror-finish ankle-bracelets, a single-chain necklace with four small, dull stones and a tasselled box hat. His skin was light green, he was about two metres standing straight on his hind legs and a little longer measured from nose to tail.
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1295-97  | Added on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 06:01 PM

'The Yoleus would know more of your conclusions regarding your theory on the effects of gravitational susceptibility influencing the religiosity of a species with particular reference to their eschatological beliefs.' Uagen
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2149  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 04:42 PM

~ Infra-cultural mimetic transcriptioneer? What the hell does that mean?
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Look to Windward (Iain M. Banks)
- Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 5060-61  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 06:02 PM

'You did make an exhibit of yourself!' the machine shouted. 'That simian in the trees by the river was Marel Pomiheker; news-feeder, guerrilla journalist, media-raptor and all-round data-hound.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 24-26  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 09:34 PM

It is a great strength of Homo sapiens that we can, better than any other species in the world, learn to model the unseen. It is also one of our great weak points. Humans often believe in things that are not only unseen but unreal.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 59-60  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 09:38 PM

Carl Sagan used this parable to illustrate the classic moral that poor hypotheses need to do fast footwork to avoid falsification.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 84-87  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 08:52 PM

(Those who find this confusing may find it helpful to study mathematical logic, which trains one to make very sharp distinctions between the proposition P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is provable.  There are similarly sharp distinctions between P, wanting P, believing P, wanting to believe P, and believing that you believe P.)
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Bookmark on Page 6 | Loc. 87  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 08:52 PM


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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 126-27  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 09:06 PM

There's a theorem of rationality called Aumann's Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong."
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 231-37  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 03:18 PM

Within their own professions, people grasp the importance of narrowness; a car mechanic knows the difference between a carburetor and a radiator, and would not think of them both as "car parts".  A hunter-gatherer knows the difference between a lion and a panther.  A janitor does not wipe the floor with window cleaner, even if the bottles look similar to one who has not mastered the art. Outside their own professions, people often commit the misstep of trying to broaden a word as widely as possible, to cover as much territory as possible.  Is it not more glorious, more wise, more impressive, to talk about all the apples in the world?  How much loftier it must be to explain human thought in general, without being distracted by smaller questions, such as how humans invent techniques for solving a Rubik's Cube.  Indeed, it scarcely seems necessary to consider specific questions at all; isn't a general theory a worthy enough accomplishment on its own?
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 259-61  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 03:21 PM

There is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement.  A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all.  The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 276-79  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 03:23 PM

But rationalists - and also poets - need narrow words to express precise thoughts; they need categories which include only some things, and exclude others. There's nothing wrong with focusing your mind, narrowing your categories, excluding possibilities, and sharpening your propositions. Really, there isn't! If you make your words too broad, you end up with something that isn't true and doesn't even make good poetry.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 367-70  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 03:38 PM

For a true Bayesian, it is impossible to seek evidence that confirms a theory.  There is no possible plan you can devise, no clever strategy, no cunning device, by which you can legitimately expect your confidence in a fixed proposition to be higher (on average) than before.  You can only ever seek evidence to test a theory, not to confirm it.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 440-44  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 05:44 PM

Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand - the ones that seem real to us, the ones we can retrofit into our models of the world.  If you understand neurology or physics and read news in that topic, then you probably underestimate the surprisingness of findings in those fields too.  This unfairly devalues the contribution of the researchers; and worse, will prevent you from noticing when you are seeing evidence thatdoesn't fit what you really would have expected.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 606-8  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:19 PM

A properly designed AI would notice the problem instantly.  This wouldn't even require special-purpose code, just correct bookkeeping of the belief network.  (Sadly, we humans can't rewrite our own code, the way a properly designed AI could.)
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 613-14  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:20 PM

Thanks to hindsight bias, it's also not enough to check how well your theory "predicts" facts you already know.  You've got to predict for tomorrow, not yesterday.  It's the only way a messy human mind can be guaranteed of sending a pure forward message.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 627-29  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:22 PM

"Where did God come from?"  Saying "God is uncaused" or "God created Himself" leaves us in exactly the same position as "Time began with the Big Bang."  We just ask why the whole metasystem exists in the first place, or why some events but not others are allowed to be uncaused.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 633-37  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:23 PM

Jonathan Wallace suggested that "God!" functions as a semantic stopsign - that it isn't a propositional assertion, so much as a cognitive traffic signal: do not think past this point.  Saying "God!" doesn't so much resolve the paradox, as put up a cognitive traffic signal to halt the obvious continuation of the question-and-answer chain. Of course you'd never do that, being a good and proper atheist, right?  But "God!" isn't the only semantic stopsign, just the obvious first example.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 656-57  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:25 PM

What distinguishes a semantic stopsign is failure to consider the obvious next question.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 662-68  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:26 PM

"The animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine ... consciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his will. It appears therefore that animated creatures have the power of immediately applying to certain moving particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce derived mechanical effects... The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms... Modern biologists were coming once more to the acceptance of something and that was a vital principle."         -- Lord Kelvin
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 677-79  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:27 PM

Since you can say "Why? Elan vital!" to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, etcetera.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 684-85  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 06:28 PM

But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory.  If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 770-73  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 07:04 PM

Complexity is not a useless concept.  It has mathematical definitions attached to it, such as Kolmogorov complexity, and Vapnik-Chervonenkis complexity.  Even on an intuitive level, complexity is often worth thinking about - you have to judge the complexity of a hypothesis and decide if it's "too complicated" given the supporting evidence, or look at a design and try to make it simpler.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 784-89  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 07:08 PM

I suspect that in academia there is a huge pressure to sweep problems under the rug so that you can present a paper with the appearance of completeness.  You'll get more kudos for a seemingly complete model that includes some "emergent phenomena", versus an explicitly incomplete map where the label says "I got no clue how this part works" or "then a miracle occurs".  A journal may not even accept the latter paper, since who knows but that the unknown steps are really where everything interesting happens?  And yes, it sometimes happens that all the non-magical parts of your map turn out to also be non-important. 
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 795-98  | Added on Friday, December 23, 2011, 07:09 PM

Marcello and I developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn't understand, which was often, we would say "magic" - as in, "X magically does Y" - to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a gap in our understanding.  It is far better to say "magic", than "complexity" or "emergence"; the latter words create an illusion of understanding.  Wiser to say "magic", and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1002-6  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 05:00 PM

Why should your curiosity be diminished because someone else, not you, knows how the light bulb works?  Is this not spite?  It's not enough for you to know; other people must also be ignorant, or you won't be happy? There are goods that knowledge may serve besides curiosity, such as the social utility of technology.  For these instrumental goods, it matters whether some other entity in local space already knows.  But for my own curiosity, why should it matter? 
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1023-24  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 05:02 PM

The world around you is full of puzzles.  Prioritize, if you must.  But do not complain that cruel Science has emptied the world of mystery.  With reasoning such as that, I could get you to overlook an elephant in your living room.
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Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1074-77  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 05:07 PM

"I have to do something whose time comes in short units, like browsing the Web or watching short videos, because I might become able to work again at any time, and I can't predict when -" And then I stopped, because I'd just had a revelation. I'd always thought of my workcycle as something chaotic, something unpredictable.  I never used those words, but that was the way I treated it.
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Reductionism (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 266-68  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 07:55 PM

Probabilities express uncertainty, and it is only agents who can be uncertain.  A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory.  Ignorance is in the mind.
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Reductionism (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 304-5  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:00 PM

Reality itself does not need to be compared to any beliefs in order to be real.  Remember this the next time someone claims that nothing is 
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Reductionism (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 317-18  | Added on Saturday, December 24, 2011, 08:05 PM

The dichotomy between belief and disbelief, being binary, is confusingly similar to the dichotomy between truth and untruth.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 39-41  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:08 PM

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 51-52  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:11 PM

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 69-70  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:13 PM

We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 133-34  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:34 PM

the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 151-56  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:39 PM

There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse. Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
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The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier 
- Highlight Loc. 202-4  | Added on Sunday, December 25, 2011, 06:53 PM

The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 21-22  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 05:18 PM

I am not going to tell you:  "You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it."  (As von Neumann is reputed to have said; back in the dark decades when, in fact, no one did understand quantum mechanics.)
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 21-22  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 05:18 PM

"You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it."  (As von Neumann is reputed to have said;
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 200-202  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 05:31 PM

Now really, there's no need to go making the rules so complicated.  Occam's Razor, remember.  Just stick with simple, normal amplitude flows between configurations.
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 312-13  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 05:50 PM

(A differentclassical physics, not the same illusion of classicality we hallucinate from inside the higher levels of organization in our own quantum world.)
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 440-42  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 06:38 PM

Just as, once upon a time, it was easier to imagine Thor throwing lightning bolts, than to imagine Maxwell's Equations - even though Maxwell's Equations can be described by a computer program vastly smaller than the program for an intelligent agent like Thor.
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Quantum Physics (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 454-58  | Added on Monday, December 26, 2011, 06:47 PM

(Remember, the basics of quantum theory were formulated before Alan Turing said anything about Turing machines, and way before the concept of computation was popularly known.  The distinction between an effective formal theory, and one that required human interpretation, was not as clear then as now.  Easy to pinpoint the problems in hindsight; you shouldn't learn the lesson that problems are usually this obvious in foresight.) Looking back, it may seem like one meta-lesson to learn from history, is that philosophy really matters in science - it's not just some adjunct of a separate academic field.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 247-48  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:04 PM

change in the structure of societies tends to happen sooner or later, and is more likely to raise complexity than to lower it.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 282-87  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:11 PM

One premise of cultural evolutionism is “the psychic unity of humankind”—the idea that people everywhere are genetically endowed with the same mental equipment, that there is a universal human nature. The psychic unity of humankind is the reason that around the world, on every continent, cultural evolution has moved in the same direction. The arrow of human history begins with the biology of human nature. That arrow, a I’ve noted, points toward larger quantities of non-zero-sumness. As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grow in cope and depth.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 331-33  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:18 PM

The invention of such technologies—technologies that facilitate or encourage non-zero-sum interaction—is a reliable feature of cultural evolution everywhere. New technologies create new chances for positive sums, and people maneuver to seize those sums, and social structure changes as a result.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 338-39  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:19 PM

All of these are non-zero-sum functions, and the last is especially so. Giving people data, unlike giving them food or tools, has no inherent cost.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 341-43  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:19 PM

Sometimes, of course, surrendering information is costly (as when the supply of nuts doesn’t exceed your family’s needs). Still, data are often of little or no cost and great benefit; swapping them is one of the oldest forms of non-zero-sum interaction.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 343  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:20 PM

People by their nature come together to constitute a social information processing system and thus reap positive sums.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 347-50  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:22 PM

Evolutionary psychologists have made a strong—in my view, compelling—case that this unconscious savviness is a part of human nature, rooted ultimately in the genes; that natural selection, via the evolution of “reciprocal altruism,” has built into us various impulses which, however warm and mushy they may feel, are designed for the cool, practical purpose of bringing beneficial exchange.*
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 421-24  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 07:55 PM

To compete for high-status positions is to play a zero-sum game, since they are by definition a scarce resource.Yet one way to compete successfully is to invent technologies that create new non-zero-sum games. This is one of various senses in which the impetus behind cultural evolution, behind social complexification, lies in a paradox of human nature: we are deeply gregarious, and deeply cooperative, yet deeply competitive. We instinctively play both non-zero-sum and zero-sum games.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 494-95  | Added on Sunday, January 01, 2012, 11:18 AM

Long before economists were drawing graphs showing how diversified stock portfolios could serve the human aversion to risk, cultures were evolving by the same logic.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 783-86  | Added on Sunday, January 01, 2012, 12:10 PM

guiding any invisible hand there must be an “invisible brain.” Its neurons are people. The more neurons there are in regular and easy contact, the better the brain works—the more finely it can divide economic labor, the more diverse the resulting products. And, not incidentally, the more rapidly technological innovations take shape and spread.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 995-97  | Added on Sunday, January 01, 2012, 01:25 PM

(In The Art of War, Sun Tzu, recognizing war’s loselose aspect, counsels commanders to leave their enemies a means of escape.) Hence the incentive to “wage peace.”
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1095-97  | Added on Sunday, January 01, 2012, 01:35 PM

The question isn’t why hunter-gatherers “chose” farming, but why they chose the long series of tiny steps leading imperceptibly to it. Part of the answer is that these hunter-gatherers were people. People are innately curious. They fiddle around with nature and try to bend it to their will.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1494  | Added on Monday, January 02, 2012, 08:49 AM

Dawkins himself (whose hostility toward religion approaches religious intensity) has compared belief in God to a virus.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1544-47  | Added on Monday, January 02, 2012, 09:06 AM

Cultural evolutionists customarily call farming an innovation in “energy technology”—in the way people obtain the fuel that keeps them alive. And it was. But, given these lowered costs of communication in agrarian chiefdoms, it may make sense to think of farming as an advance in information technology as well. Indeed, farming may have ushered in the first true revolution in information technology.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1694-95  | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 07:58 PM

Ancient city-states had common interests—goods they could trade, mutual enemies they could jointly annihilate. But to reap the fruits of this non-zero-sumness they needed first to breach the information barrier.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1781-82  | Added on Sunday, January 22, 2012, 11:42 PM

Writing isn’t the only elemental information technology that evolved in ancient states. Money—a standardized currency—is an information technology.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1785-88  | Added on Sunday, January 22, 2012, 11:42 PM

In modern times, much kvetching has been done about money. Some consider it a tool for oppressing the downtrodden. But, in historical perspective, money looks more like a solvent of oppression. By invigorating market economies, it offered an alternative to a command economy dominated by the literate few. If an economic information technology is going to be wielded on your behalf, it’s usually best to do the wielding yourself.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1860-61  | Added on Sunday, January 22, 2012, 11:58 PM

Relations among city-states featured that double-barreled source of non-zero-sumness, Kant’s “unsocial sociability.” Polities traded and fought, traded and fought, and the result was, as usual, a strong argument for political unification.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Bookmark on Page 124 | Loc. 1896  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:06 AM


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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1895-98  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:06 AM

The Shang’s successor—the Chou, who dominated the first millennium B.C.—forged a vast state with many cities. But control was diffuse, and Chou principalities—Ch’i, Ch’in, Chin, Ch’u, and others—finally fell into open warfare. The Ch’in eventually prevailed, carrying Asian political unity to unprecedented scope. Hence the name China.
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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Robert Wright)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1900-1902  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:08 AM

4,000 miles worth of new roads (traveled by carts whose wheels were of standard, government-mandated gauge—so the ruts worn into dirt roads would be one-size-fits-all). Shih
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1170-77  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:14 AM

low energy global scale monitoring systems; low cost global scale monitoring uses; regular data collection applications; statistical measurement systems; monitoring behaviour system applications; location identification; ad hoc style information gathering; monitoring health and well being; monitoring for emergency cases and interventions.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1181-87  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:14 AM

smart stationery; smart home; smart office; interactive communication enabler; behavioural and reactionary functionalities; provision of service pre processing; data processing, manipulation and ubiquitous environment; preparation of information or specifically treated signals; information selectivity and effective databases.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1326-29  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:27 AM

The development of second-generation sensors started in the later part of the twentieth century and is approaching its peak in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. These sensor systems are commonly characterised by possession of a common architecture to accommodate the enhanced sensing features including embedded signal processing and light sensor specific computing and communication capabilities.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1330-32  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:27 AM

Their large-scale market enhancement becomes feasible when some basic processing features for carrying out common functions, such as networking, communications, basic data manipulations, low energy devices, application of specific selective smart processing adopted through advanced integrated circuit technology commonly processed in the electrical domain could be integrated.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1335-39  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:29 AM

That is, most of these original smart sensors need to include functions such as sensing specific signal pre processing, data gathering, data distribution, filtering, interference processing, and so on, on top of interfaces and communication protocols. In some cases extra processing, such as energy scavenging, clustering and media specific processes would increase the demand on the single core processor solution far beyond its capability or add cost, power, and so on, so that the extra shrinking boundary would push the originally estimated market into much smaller realistic margins.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1405-6  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:33 AM

wireless mobile sensors can position themselves and approach a target or as close as possible to the point of interest (PoI) in the media for collecting useful data.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1495-97  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:51 AM

Our existing survival depends on seeking new solutions for new and old problems because, due to the complex nature of controlling organisations, the industries cannot be trusted blindly, and new and progressive lawsuits are required to control the industries.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1519-23  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:54 AM

Much harder, but just as feasible, further developments that continued for another century meant that we succeeded with the second technological revolution, enhancing many nations' quality of life all over the globe. Chemistry was then offering new materials previously unknown, such as plastic and fibre, and electricity enabled new ways of generation and distribution of power, light (Edison) and signals to carry information (Morse, Bell, Marconi) all gathering the new essence of a change towards 
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1527  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 12:55 AM

Kondratiev long waves
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1685-86  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 01:08 AM

Therefore, let's have a look at three application-based classification groups: (a) traditional domain-based sensor applications; (b) mobility-based sensor applications and (c) intelligence-based sensor applications.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1760-61  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 01:14 AM

Cost effectiveness of a mass production could be easily jeopardised if the final applications deviate considerably from the core process.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 2005-7  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 01:33 AM

In general, actuators as a subclass of transducers can be regarded as a reversal process to the sensing. That is, sensors convert the domain features into usable information whilst actuators convert our data and decisions of an information nature, to inject a change or interfere with a process or feature in the domain of interest.
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Note on Page 133 | Loc. 2039  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 01:36 AM

save
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Distributed Sensor Systems (Habib F. Rashvand and Jose M. Alcaraz Calero)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2243-51  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 01:47 AM

RuBee is the IEEE standard 1902.1, a two way, active wireless protocol designed for high security asset visibility applications, as a new low frequency member of wireless networks uses an on-demand peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol. It uses narrowband long wave propagation optimally at 131 kHz signalling at 1,200 baud. Due to the nature of its magnetic radiation and non line-of-sight its indirect propagation loss is minimal as it goes through liquids and buildings so that the rays reach the destination for detecting RuBee tags and communicating with them wherever they are located or hidden in invisible places. RuBee tags use an Internet Protocol address (IP) and are often equipped with classic sensors such as temperature and humidity. A tag may hold data in its own memory, as much as 5 KB is usually enough for their application. RuBee's capability to work in harsh environments, interworking with many thousands of tags and relatively long range like 1 to 30 m make them very different to the RFID and other radio tags. Due to the fact that the energy is carried upon the magnetic field of the waves the antennas are much shorter than classic radio. Table 2.2 shows superiority of RuBee technology over other members of the family.
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A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)
- Highlight on Page 327 | Loc. 5013  | Added on Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 03:16 PM

nonlinear reading
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