"In India All Religions Hold In Common The Idea Of Two Indivisible Elements, A Male And Female Principle,

The Opposition Path and China's Future

The Opposition Path and China’s Future.

View Post

Technology concentrates power. In the 90’s, it looked like the Internet might be an exception, that it could be a decentralizing, democratizing force. No one controlled it, no one designed it, it was just kind of assembling itself in an appealing, anarchic way. The companies that first tried to centralize the Internet, like AOL and Microsoft, failed risibly. And open source looked ready to slay any dragon. But those days are gone. We’ve centralized the bejesus out of the Internet now. There’s one search engine (plus the one no one uses), one social network (plus the one no one uses), one Twitter. We use one ad network, one analytics suite. Anywhere you look online, one or two giant American companies utterly dominate the field. And there’s the cloud. What a brilliant name! The cloud is the future of online computing, a friendly, fluffy abstraction that we will all ascend into, swaddled in light. But really the cloud is just a large mess of servers somewhere, the property of one American company (plus the clouds no one uses). Orwell imagined a world with a telescreen in every room, always on, always connected, always monitored. An Xbox One vision of dystopia. But we’ve done him one better. Nearly everyone here carries in their pocket a tracking device that knows where you are, who you talk to, what you look at, all these intimate details of your life, and sedulously reports them to private servers where the data is stored in perpetuity. I know I sound like a conspiracy nut framing it like this. I’m not saying we live in an Orwellian nightmare. I love New Zealand! But we have the technology. When I was in grade school, they used to scare us with something called the permanent record. If you threw a spitball at your friend, it would go in your permanent record, and prevent you getting a good job, or marrying well, until eventually you’d die young and friendless and be buried outside the churchyard wall. What a relief when we found out that the permanent record was a fiction. Except now we’ve gone and implemented the damned thing. Each of us leaves an indelible, comet-like trail across the Internet that cannot be erased and that we’re not even allowed to see. The things we really care about seem to disappear from the Internet immediately, but post a stupid YouTube comment (now linked to your real identity) and it will live forever. And we have to track all this stuff, because the economic basis of today’s web is advertising, or the promise of future advertising. The only way we can convince investors to keep the money flowing is by keeping the most detailed records possible, tied to people’s real identities. Apart from a few corners of anonymity, which not by accident are the most culturally vibrant parts of the Internet, everything is tracked and has to be tracked or the edifice collapses. What upsets me isn’t that we created this centralized version of the Internet based on permanent surveillance. What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do. There was no design, forethought, or analysis involved. No one said “hey, this sounds like a great world to live in, let’s make it”. It happened because we couldn’t be bothered. Making things ephemeral is hard. Making things distributed is hard. Making things anonymous is hard. Coming up with a sane business model is really hard—I get tired just thinking about it. So let’s take people’s data, throw it on a server, link it to their Facebook profiles, keep it forever, and if we can’t raise another round of venture funding we’ll just slap Google ads on the thing. "High five, Chad!" "High five, bro!" That is the design process that went into building the Internet of 2014. And of course now we are shocked—shocked!—when, for example, the Ukrainian government uses cell tower data to send scary text messages to protesters in Kiev, in order to try to keep them off the streets. Bad people are using the global surveillance system we built to do something mean! Holy crap! Who could have imagined this? Or when we learn that the American government is reading the email that you send unencrypted to the ad-supported mail service in another country where it gets archived forever. Inconceivable! I’m not saying these abuses aren’t serious. But they’re the opposite of surprising. People will always abuse power. That’s not a new insight. There are cuneiform tablets complaining about it. Yet here we are in 2014, startled because unscrupulous people have started to use the powerful tools we created for them. We put so much care into making the Internet resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political failure. We treat freedom and the rule of law like inexhaustible natural resources, rather than the fragile and precious treasures that they are. And now, of course, it’s time to make the Internet of Things, where we will connect everything to everything else, and build cool apps on top, and nothing can possibly go wrong.

An extract from Our Comrade The Electron, a talk from the Webstock Conference by Maciej Cegłowski, which is worth reading in its entirety. (via new-aesthetic)

नवज्योति की नव-मीमांसा

नवज्योति की नव-मीमांसा हिन्दुत्व का दार्शनिक विमर्श प्रसन्न कुमार चौधरी 1. परम्परा और आधुनिकता युरोपीय आधुनिकता और गैर-युरोपीय परम्पराओं के बीच सम्बन्ध, उनके बीच टकराव और उनकी अन्तःक्रियाएँ पिछली दो शताब्दियों में बौद्धिक विमर्श का अत्यन्त महत्वपूर्ण विषय रही हैं । दुनिया भर के सर्वश्रेष्ठ मस्तिष्कों ने इस विषय पर समग्रता में, और अपने-अपने देशों के संदर्भ में, गहन मंथन किया है और इस विषय पर…

View On WordPress

We men are deplorable, dependent creatures. But compared with these women, every one of us is king, for he stands more or less on his own two feet, not constantly waiting for something outside of himself to cling to. They, however, always wait for someone to come along who will use them as he sees fit. If this does not happen, they simply fall to pieces.

-Albert Einstein

The fact the Einstein was a raging misogynist kind of makes sense, given that it is widely speculated his first wife made significant contributions to the Theory of Relativity, but was completely unacknowledged (especially after he left her for his cousin).

There is more and more evidence that Mileva Einstein-Maric (Einstein’s first wife) is the coauthor of “The Theory of Relativity.”  Recently published letters between Mileva Maric and Albert Einstein are shedding light on who is the author(s) of the “Theory of Relativity.”  Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921: he gave all the money from the Nobel Prize to his ex-wife - Mileva Maric- this was the condition for the divorce settlement.  Einstein did not leave any documents which acknowledged the contribution of Mileva Maric to the Theory of Relativity. 

In 1905, several articles bearing the name of Albert Einstein appeared in the Annalen der Physik - a Germans Physics Journal where the Theory of Relativity was published.  The paper dealing with relativity was entitled Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper.  Only Albert Einstein’s name appeared in the journal as author.  According to Abram Fedorovich Joffe, the original paper was signed “Einstein-Marity.”  ”Marity” is a variant of the Serbian “Maric”, Mileva’s maiden name.  Mileva Maric Einstein’s name was left out when publication of the article took place, but Joffe saw the original 1905 manuscript.

- The Tesla Society

"How happy I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion."

A young Albert Einstein wrote these words to his first wife, Mileva, shortly before publishing the Theory of Relativity. The release of letters like this one has scholars arguing over Mileva’s contribution to relativity. They met at Zurich’s prestigious Swiss Polytechnic School: Mileva was the only woman in the class, and only the fifth in the school’s history. The daughter of a wealthy Serbian family, Mileva excelled at physics and math, and was devoted to her studies until she met Albert Einstein. The two brilliant scientists fell in love. They lived and worked together. But more interested in their own work than their classes, both failed their final exams. Einstein passed on a second attempt. Unmarried and pregnant, Mileva failed hers again. Einstein never met his daughter… and no one is sure what happened to the baby. Einstein and Mileva later married and had two sons. Mileva focused her energies on Albert’s career. Some scholars believe Mileva did the math for the Theory of Relativity, others say she corrected Einstein’s math, and still others claim she was even more deeply involved. The paper outlining the theory is signed with a hyphenated name Einstein-Marty, the Hungarian form of her maiden name Maric.

Before the work was published, Albert Einstein left his wife and two sons. He never acknowledged his first wife or her work.

He did, however, give Mileva all of the Nobel Prize money. But, the money didn’t last long: Mileva was sick, and caring for their mentally ill (schizophrenic) son. Einstein went on to great acclaim, but he never again produced physics equal to the work he did while married to his first wife and collaborator, Mileva Maric.

-Women in Science

(via witheringwhiteskies)

Alfred Wertheimer’s never-before-seen photos of Elvis when he was a 21-year-old up-and-coming crooner.

One of the most significant intellectual errors educated persons make is in underestimating the fallibility of science. The very best scientific theories containing our soundest, most reliable knowledge are certain to be superseded, recategorized from “right” to “wrong”; they are, as physicist ...

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYa3_Ph7nHc)

All True Love Must Die: Richard Burton's Diaries : The New Yorker

Alice Munro: “The Bear Came over the Mountain” : The New Yorker