In Praise of Failure The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Janus FilmsWinning isn’t everything. Antonius Block, right, played by Max von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess in the 1957 film “The Seventh Seal,” directed by Ingmar Bergman. If there was ever a time to think seriously about failure, it is now. We are firmly in an era of accelerated progress. Certainly the promise of continual human progress and improvement is alluring. Why should we care? So, allow me to make a case for the importance of failure. Failure is significant for several reasons. Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition. Whenever it occurs, failure reveals just how close our existence is to its opposite. Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. In this role, failure also possesses a distinct therapeutic function. Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are. We are designed to fail.
Walking the Line Between Good and Evil: The Common Thread of Heroes and Villains 60 3Share Synopsis We are meant to view these two main characters—the Hero and the Villain—as opposites on the spectrum of ethics and morality. Mythology, science fiction and comic books are chock full of stories of heroes and their battles against the ills of society—the eternal struggle between good and evil. Contrary to popular belief, right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unethical—are not always on opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil. What is Heroism? In the days following the devastating earthquake in Japan, word quickly spread about heroism displayed across the region—from the 50 brave nuclear workers, "The Fukushima 50" who stayed behind after evacuation in a valiant attempt to prevent further disaster, to a man who donned scuba gear and went into the tsunami to rescue his wife and mother, as well as other (sometimes a bit tall) tales of men and women who fearlessly put themselves on the line to help others in the midst of that tragedy. Heroism to the Extreme
A.I. Has Grown Up and Left Home - Issue 8: Home The history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.” This harsh judgment summed up 50 years of trying to get computers to think. Sure, they could crunch numbers a billion times faster in 2000 than they could in 1950, but computer science pioneer and genius Alan Turing had predicted in 1950 that machines would be thinking by 2000: Capable of human levels of creativity, problem solving, personality, and adaptive behavior. Maybe they wouldn’t be conscious (that question is for the philosophers), but they would have personalities and motivations, like Robbie the Robot or HAL 9000. Our approach to thinking, from the early days of the computer era, focused on the question of how to represent the knowledge about which thoughts are thought, and the rules that operate on that knowledge. This lack of context was also the Achilles heel of the final attempted moonshot of symbolic artificial intelligence. (implies (equals ?
Less Labor Works Better: The Value of Mind-Wandering Share Synopsis An invitation to work and daydream differently. “The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation. … The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offer none, but most of the rest of the world’s rich countries offer between five and 13 paid holidays per year." - No-Vacation Nation, Center for Economic and Policy Research,Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt, May 2007 ” It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success.” 1. We work and then we crash. American or not, even when we’re seemingly idle, we crowd our minds with information. 2. 3. 4. 5.
ALCOHOL, WITHNAIL AND GARY KING BUT BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER LET HULK FIRST MAKE AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: IT'S REALLY HARD TO SIT HERE AND SPOUT OFF SOME BANAL PLATITUDES LIKE ABOVE. IT MAKES IT SEEM LIKE HULK IS JUST PICKING THEM OFF FROM SLOGAN-IZED SELF-HELP SECTIONS OR SOMETHING. SO PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THESE PLATITUDES COME MORE FROM A PLACE OF... WELL... PAIN. COMING OUT OF THE INITIAL SCREENING HULK ACTUALLY HEARD A CRITIC SAY "Ugh, why did he want to go finish the pub crawl so bad? "You know I used to be sober. An Open Letter From Assata Shakur: "I Am a 20th Century Escaped Slave" My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984. I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one. In 1978, my case was one of many cases bought before the United Nations Organization in a petition filed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, exposing the existence of political prisoners in the United States, their political persecution, and the cruel and inhuman treatment they receive in US prisons. The U.S. Assata Shakur Havana, Cuba
Are We Puppets in a Wired World? by Sue Halpern To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov PublicAffairs, 413 pp., $28.99 Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity and Anonymity on the Web by Cole Stryker Overlook, 255 pp., $25.95 From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet by John Naughton Quercus, 302 pp., $24.95 Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel Wiley, 302 pp., $28.00 Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pp., $27.00 Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E. Yale University Press, 368 pp., $27.50 Privacy and Big Data: The Players, Regulators and Stakeholders by Terence Craig and Mary E.
Martin Luther King's Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans - Jordan Weissmann The civil rights leader laid out his vision for fighting poverty in his final book. One of the more under-appreciated aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.' So what, exactly, was King's economic dream? To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income—or a universal basic income, as it's sometimes called today—is not the same as a higher minimum wage. King had an even more expansive vision. It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income. In part, King's thinking seemed to stem from a sense that no matter how strongly the economy might grow, it would never eliminate poverty entirely, or provide jobs for all. We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Note, King did not appear to be arguing that Washington should simply pay people not to work. More than basic, actually. But as a statement of values, King's notion remains powerful.
The Marriage Paradox - The Chronicle Review By Clancy Martin Last Thanksgiving, at the turn-of-the-century house Amie and I just bought in old Kansas City: Amie, my third wife; Rebecca, my second; Alicia, my first; Amie’s mom, Pat; and my three daughters sat around the harvest table. My first wife, Alicia, who has a large, ambitious heart, had proposed this act of holiday lunacy. My second wife, Rebecca, had suggested we just have fun without her, but then came anyway. Amie had felt powerless to say no, and now it was taking place. Once the guests arrived, Amie hid in the kitchen until dinner. Coming out of the kitchen with a roasted chicken on a platter, I listened nervously to the conversation: "I know the wood needs oil," Amie said, gesturing to the mahogany paneling in the dining room. My eldest daughter was musing aloud about what she would do if she accidentally killed someone. "No," her mother, my first wife, said. "I’d call my attorney!" Dinner and dessert went well. Good luck always makes me anxious.
Dangerous Delusions - 7 Interactive Infographics Challenging the Myths of the Elites Every year world leaders and business executives meet at Davos to discuss how they want to run our economy - in their own best interests. We're led to believe that without their entrepreneurial talent that we would all be worse off than we are now. The myths of this elite class have become so deeply engrained in society, that it can be difficult to challenge the power that they hold. So we've collected 7 myths to show that in reality, things are quite different... Myth 1: The poor are getting richer Inequality doesn’t matter because the poor are getting richer. >>> Read more Myth 2: Big business runs things better Our political elites say they love the private sector because it’s so much more efficient than the public sector. >>> Read more Myth 3: We need to have faith in the financial markets to solve our problems We live in the age of big finance. >>> Read more Myth 4: All we need is growth Economic growth is the panacea of our age. Myth 5: Everyone wins under free trade >>> Read more
The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes by Maria Popova “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. Horowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of what we conveniently call “reality”: Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. The book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to “attend to that inattention.” The perceptions of infants are remarkable.