23 Jan 2017
22 Oct 2015
13 May 2015
22 Apr 2015
24 Feb 2015
Quote of the day
Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.
Richard K. Morgan
10 Jan 2015
5 Sep 2014
Quote of the day
Sometimes you have to understand that you push ahead, there's going to be a lot of flak, there's going to be a lot of dogs barking, but the wagon train moves ahead.
Juan Williams
Juan Williams
26 Mar 2014
8 Feb 2014
Quote of the day
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
Source
Swami Vivekananda
Source
11 Dec 2013
6 Dec 2013
3 Nov 2013
29 Sep 2013
14 Sep 2013
13 Sep 2013
Quote of the day
I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth.
Morpheus, The Matrix
23 Jul 2013
14 Jul 2013
7 Jul 2013
16 Jun 2013
3 May 2013
27 Apr 2013
Krugman on George W. Bush's legacy
"... But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.
From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.
But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.
Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies.
I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where.
(...) Even more important, Bush lied us into war.
(...) And right there you have something that should block Bush from redemption of any kind, ever: he misled us into a war that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, and he did it in part for political reasons."
my emphasis
Similar levels of dishonesty were also reached by politicians in this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
26 Apr 2013
Today I heard something that is the best thing I've heard in years...
"I give up. You know what's best for you."
Finally!!
25 Apr 2013
Quote of the day
And then she does something magical, something that almost makes me kiss her. And I would too, if I didn't have flashing memories of her tearing a young girl's arm off and beating three people to death with it.
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
19 Apr 2013
Artificial Intelligence in fiction
This wikipedia page has a list of fictional computers in literature, movies and other media. One in particular caught my attention:
A "supercalculator" formed by the networking of all the computing machines on 96 billion planets, which answers the question "Is there a God?" with "Yes, now there is a God" in Fredric Brown's single-page story Answer (1954).
A "supercalculator" formed by the networking of all the computing machines on 96 billion planets, which answers the question "Is there a God?" with "Yes, now there is a God" in Fredric Brown's single-page story Answer (1954).
7 Apr 2013
6 Apr 2013
30 Mar 2013
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