Nietzsche Is Not the Proto-postmodern Relativist Some Have Mistaken Him For - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
When writing Ecce Homo in the late 1880s, Nietzsche sought to resurrect the Voltairean spirit in Europe, which he felt by his times had been washed away by pessimistic Romanticism. “Voltaire still comprehended umanità in the Renaissance,” Nietzsche wrote, “the cause of taste, of science, of the…
Vim Directory Structure - Anthony Panozzo's Blog
I searched for “vim directory structure” many times online and have rarely found something that helps me out. Generally I’m looking for the right place to put some random .vim file that I downloaded or which directory to put indentation or file type recognizer files. To compile this information, I…
Blockchains Never Forget
Just three years ago, in 2014, I wrote a little short story set in a future where most work is organized around blockchains. That story was set sometime past the 2120s, but it appears we’ll get there a century earlier than I thought. The idea of organizing work through smart contracts on blockchains…
Arguing About How the World Should Burn
After eavesdropping on a thousand Twitter arguments and reading just as many thinkpieces, I’ve noticed that there are two main ways of conceptualizing community governance. Both are normative. Both primarily arise when it comes to conflicts over free speech — or who it’s okay to punch. A glitched…
Patterns of Refactored Agency
This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery , blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal , collects his random hacks at Hyperphor , and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences . The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its…
The Government Within
Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal . Are ordinary people really populations of interests rather than something more solid? It’s disturbing to think of yourself as so fluid, so potentially unstable, held together only by the shifting influence of available…
They're Made out of Meat
Terry Bisson, 1991 Someone did a radio play of this... "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're…
Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve
Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians. Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding…
A Brief History of Existential Terror
This is a guest post by Taylor Pearson. “[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” –Viktor Frankl The healthy state of humans is mild…
Technical Debt of the West | Melting Asphalt
(Originally published at Ribbonfarm .) Here's a recipe for discovering new ideas: Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you're likely to have blind spots. Start groping around in those areas. If you can do this with the very…
Color in UI Design: A (Practical) Framework – Erik D. Kennedy – Medium
Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing:…
Refactoring Aesthetics
John Dewey, the 20th Century educational philosopher, wrote a book called ‘Art as Experience,’ which has been largely forgotten by history. It happens to contain a more-or-less complete philosophy of aesthetics, the comprehensiveness and usefulness of which has never been matched. Dewey’s writing…
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
Superintelligence The Idea That Eats Smart People In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire. This was a legitimate concern. Nitrogen, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is not…
The Strategy of No Strategy
Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on…
JK Rowling and the Cauldron of Discourse
Please understand that I’m not making any kind of criticism of her when I say that JK Rowling has abandoned the real world. When you have one billion dollars, it’s not really something you need any more; there’s no real need to explain why she chooses to live with magic instead. If nothing else, she…
The Fifteen Fundamental Properties
Pages 144-235 of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life contain a theory of beauty as perceived by humans, conveyed in fifteen “fundamental properties.” Not every property occurs in every beautiful object, but in very beautiful buildings and objects, many of…
Weaponized Sacredness
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Author’s note: The thinking that gave rise to this essay was committed in collaboration with St. Rev . Errors, suspicious implications, and dubious conclusions are my own. On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, just north of Los Angeles,…
The Quality Without a Name at the Betsy Ross Museum
Warning: some of the haiku and tweets reproduced herein contain naughty language and references to having intimate relations with an inanimate national symbol. Is beauty subjective? People have strong feelings in both directions. A stylized representation of possible opinions about the nature of…
Religion, Politics, and Self-Suppression | Melting Asphalt
Spiritual experiences, listening to live music, taking LSD, the state of flow. Becoming absorbed in a story, spending time alone in nature, singing in a choir. Staring into a bonfire, dancing at a rave, falling in love, meditation. What do these things have in common? They are all experiences in…
There's More to Life Than Being Happy
"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his…
The Essence of Peopling
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular. “People” is an…
How Harambe Became the Perfect Meme - The Atlantic
On May 28, Harambe, a 17-year-old lowland gorilla was shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo worker to save a small child who had wandered into its enclosure. As such tragic incidents go, there was nothing particularly unusual about this one. Just a week earlier on May 21, for instance, zookeepers at…
Boondoggle: How Ontario's pursuit of renewable energy broke the province's electricity system
Back in 2010, deep green environmentalist Rick Smith, then head of Environmental Defence Canada, hailed Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act regime as a cost-free operation that would catapult the province into the big leagues of renewable energy. Through fat subsidies and high prices…
Will the Left Survive the Millennials?
Benoit Tardif Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they…
The Sad Story Of The Man Who Figured Out An Equation For Altruism - Digg
lorelinde How discovering an equation for altruism cost George Price everything. Laura met George in the pages of Reader’s Digest . In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George…
Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down
Theranos founder, chairwoman, and C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes, in Palo Alto, California, September 2014. By Ethan Pines/The Forbes Collection. The War Room It was late morning on Friday, October 16, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address heremployees at…
Ads Don’t Work That Way | Melting Asphalt
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase. The meme goes something like this: Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions . They…
Happy Ambition: Success, Status Cocaine, and Happiness
Happy Ambition: Striving for Success, Avoiding Status Cocaine, and Prioritizing Happiness Why do billionaires, CEOs, and other titans of industry work so hard? Why do they maintain such relentless professional ambition? Look up and down the Forbes 400 list and you’ll find hedge fund managers who…
Conservatism’s Sad and Ugly Transformation into Trumpism
A nother week, another Donald-being-Donald moment. For many years in baseball, Indians, Red Sox, and Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez became a running joke in the fan community. That wasn’t because he couldn’t hit — he was a tremendous hitter. It’s because Ramirez was a kook. He’d throw to the wrong…
History tells us what will happen next with Brexit & Trump — Medium
History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump La Peste di Firenze It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re…
Why Arabic Is Terrific (Idle Words)
08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called…
Mission: Burfjord
07.11. 2010 On my fourth day in a remote cabin up in Norway my host Ivar asks me if I would like to come along on a day trip to Burfjord, a little town on the mainland about forty minutes away. I don't have to think twice. Going to the mainland means a chance to charge my camera battery, use a flush…
Dear Dad, Please Don't Vote For Donald Trump
Brian Snyder / Reuters I originally submitted this piece to the New York Observer where I am an editor-at-large and a columnist on media and culture. Editorial decided it would no longer accept columns of this nature on this topic. I have the utmost respect for the leadership at the Observer, but I…
Peter Thiel’s Reminder to the Gawker Generation: Actions Have Consequences
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. (Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images) Every time I write a piece about Gawker —and I’ve written a few —I pause before I hit publish. Once I take a second to check what skeletons are in my closet, that my personal life is in order and that my facts and figures are…
Ricky Gervais on Donald Trump: "You Get What You Deserve" America
The sharp-tongued Brit made his fortune playing "delusional, middle-aged men" who run their mouths, but this comic acknowledges the GOP frontrunner has surpassed even his bloviating characters: "Comedians tell a joke and they get in trouble; Donald Trump says a terrible thing … and he gets elected."…
Lesson One: Don’t Get Started
This is a temporary archive of the May 2016 Top Performer free lesson series. This page will only be available until May 21st, after which it will be taken down. If you want to get the remaining lessons before its over, please join the newsletter here . If you want to save the text for later, I…
Anxiety and Depression Are Symptoms, Not Diseases
It is very common when I first encounter a client struggling with mental health issues that they report their problem is that they feel anxious or depressed. Here is a typical exchange: Me: So, can you share with me what brings you in? Client: Well, I have not been feeling good. I have these low…
zen habits
There isn’t a working person among us who doesn’t deal with stress — whether you’re an entrepreneur, a freelancer, working for a struggling startup, or clocking in working for a company, work stress is inevitable. But where does this stress originate, and how do we deal with it? Most guides to…
The Evolution of Anxiety: Why We Worry and What to Do About It
Let’s pretend for a moment that you are a giraffe. You live on the grasslands of the African savannah. You have a neck that is 7 feet long (2.1 meters). Every now and then, you spot a group of humans driving around on a safari taking pictures of you. But it’s not just your neck and their cameras…
Over-compensate to compensate | Derek Sivers
Articles → Over-compensate to compensate 2016-02-23 You have something you want to change: a thought process or habit you want to fix. Let’s use the metaphor of a bunch of bricks on a seesaw.Right now all the bricks are stacked on one side.This is the way you have been. To make a change, most people…