the peanut gallery
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Posts tagged "the question concerning technology":
17 May 2010. 20:13
If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it while his heart was beating thirty or forty times, promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker.
This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.
This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,–the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a Laputan, who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time when a man should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and a multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, that one may creep over the surface of the picture with his microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant signs, and see what was the play at the “Variétés” or the “Victoria,” on the evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Stereoscope and the Stereograph
The Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859), pp. 738-48.
1 July 2009. 2:07
“The general trend today is to apply high laboratory standards to produce systems which are sophisticated in themselves, in order that the user need not be! This tendency toward fail-safe and foolproof systems unfortunately limits the controls the creative professional should have to express his concepts fully.”
7 May 2009. 9:46
“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
Wernher von Braun9:41
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German rocketeers after they surrendered to the U.S. troops in Bavaria. Left to right: Major General Walter Dornberger, Commander of the Army Peenemünde Center; Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Axter, a former Berlin patent lawyer and chief of the military staff at Peenemünde; Wernher von Braun (von Braun broke his arm in a car accident in March when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and the car crashed); and Hans Lindenberg, a combustion chamber specialist in Peenemünde and later in the Mittelwerk. Photo by Technician Fifth Class Louis Wintraub, U.S. Army, Austria, 3 May 1945.
5 May 2009. 0:56
“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn from introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”
benway28 April 2009. 23:03
Your Password must contain:
A minimum of 8 and a maximum of 20 characters
At least one number
At least one upper case and one lower case letter
At least one symbol (! @ # $ % ^ & *)
God damn i hate this kind of shit so much. This is why everyone has to have like 20 thousand passwords instead of just one, and why I can never remember mine—-because I was forced to tack on numbers and dollar signs and greek symbols and shit. Seriously, if someone goes through all the trouble to guess my password, then they can just have my ‘personal information’. It would be a lot less annoying than running this obstacle course and inevitably forgetting the password every time.
11 April 2009. 21:29
“Who doesn’t want to be cool? To get on YouTube and they have become instant celebrities with their peer groups,” Sapp said. [try to ignore the awful typo]
But doctors warn this is dangerous. Mark Shikowitz, a Long Island ear nose and throat specialist, treated a 9-year-old who had pieces of candy lodged in his nose.
“He told his parents that he felt his nose was burning,” Dr. Shikowitz said.
The candy eventually dissolved, but Shikowitz said kids could also accidentally inhale the fine powder down the wrong pipe.
“That irritation can cause you to cough, can cause you to laryngospasm, which is your voice box spasming and closing,” Shikowitz said.
What company is it exactly that makes all these coughing hazards anyway??
15 March 2009. 20:15
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard.. Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
John Searle
9 March 2009. 0:41
was lost in the mountains of maine since friday afternoon (queued posts!) and feeling pretty good about life until i got back and on the internet and discovered a ton of new things to be depressed about.
20 February 2009. 22:00
In fulfilling my obligation to post reactionary and neo-fascist materials as per the Tumblr Equal-Time Rule, I’d like to start with a quote by the most important philosopher of the 20th century a.k.a. the Nazi Martin Heidegger:
“The irresistability of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens…”
To be continued.
10 February 2009. 0:55
from Leger’s le Ballet Mecanique, 1924
20 January 2009. 0:07
Instead of reading Being and Time for class tomorrow, I just spent about 4 hours getting this game to run on my ipod touch. I know its uncharacteristic and even perhaps nerdy of me to be playing pokemon at this age, but at some point you just have to shout out your love to the world and try your best to deflect its consequences:
Until fully grownMaybe its finally time to live “in the moment,” the way a wild bulbasaur chasing a ratatat lives. Time to forget all this human rationalizing of the past (thru logic), and this human apprehension of the future (thru self-consciousness). Don’t let life pass you by!
You got a real good shot
Won’t help to hold inside
Keep it real keep it real shout out
-Noah “Brothersport” Lennox
And don’t go dragging your name,Pokemon knows me. Me and Pokemon work collaboratively toward highly exciting and profitable new ideas. Pokemon and I achieve a collective good that neither of us could on our own. Pokemon provides me comfort in ways that Martin Heidegger just can’t right now.
Through the mud and the rain,
When it dries I know some dust that wants to get in your eyes.
Put a stethoscope on,
You’ll notice the beat is gone,
All that’s left is hesitations from your previous life.
-Cameron Bird in Helsinki “Need 2 Shout”
gotta catch em all guys
