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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Culture Change - Time To Decide What Matters

    Rated Sep 14 • 1 review • environment, change, books, globalization • culturechange.org

    Time To Decide What Matters
    by Keith Farnish for Culture Change (the author has just come out with his excellent book Time's Up!, joining the Chelsea Green stable of works on sustainability.)

    Community is the antithesis of civilization for civilization thrives on the division of humanity into tiny, atomized, competing parts; but community is the form in which humans have always survived best. The choice is simple now: Civilization or Community; Progress or Humanity; Death or Life.

    Time To Decide What Matters
    Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis FREE 281 Pages PDF ebook



    Some more goods words. But reality remains the same. Change will only materialize when humanity will be confronted with the necessity to change its ways. This means when humanity will be confronted with massive dislocation of its societal ways leading to barbarity, violence and death.




    13 views
    Culture Change - Time To Decide What Matters

  • Darlene Pringle - Google Search

    Rated Apr 12 2008 • 0 reviews • music, books • google.com

    14 views
    Darlene Pringle - Google Search

  • index.html

    Rated Aug 24 2007 • 5 reviews • books, worldviews, technology • vrinimi.org

    Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
    via adrianhon / Metafilter, in vrinimi.org

    Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction visionary worthy of Arthur C Clarke's mantle, Vinge is most famous for popularising the idea of the singularity, where technology advances so quickly that humans cannot participate, but he's also credited with writing one of the first stories about cyberspace, True Names, back in 1981. More recently, he's been exploring how augmented reality and belief circles will change the way we live in his latest novel Rainbows End - which he put online, completely for free.

    Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge FREE EBook.
    singularity
    True Names by Vernor Vinge FREE EBook.
    augmented reality and belief circles
    Summary and notes on Rainbows Ends in Wikipedia

    Vinge focuses exclusively on the technological aspect of change. For sure everything comes fast nowadays but... other parameters could very well asphyxiate science and technology in the not so distant future.

    Vinge is nevertheless someone very creative and with a flair for where science is taking us. So singularity is mastered with augmented reality, at least, within the scope of the belief system of the individual.

    This idea of "belief circles" is certainly most interesting. It's kind of a tribalization of worldviews. But the description of them given by Vinge will without any doubt flounder due to the impact of all those determining factors that he does not take into account: side-effects of modernity, peak resources and an economic globalization that has been realized in a non globalized political system which inevitably concludes into destructive tensions.

    So in the end I remain convinced that we are assisting at the emergence of a worldwide worldview that shall take its shape as the outcome of the interactions between all the factors of change at work today.




    2,691 views
    index.html

  • Open Library (Open Library)

    Rated Jul 16 2007 • 8 reviews • open source, books, archives, freetools • openlibrary.org

    The Open Library
    via Metafilter / chunking express, in The Open Library

    What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book's key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

    First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia's public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

    Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

    But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

    The Open Library



    A grandiose project that I hope succeeds.
    Try to imagine a place on the net where all the books of the world could be found. That's quite exciting indeed.




    12K views
    Open Library (Open Library)

  • Friedbeef's Tech&|&Solving Everyday Problems With...

    Rated May 15 2007 • 43 reviews • books, archives • friedbeef.com

    Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide
    via y Tommy Gnosis / Metafilter in Friedbeef.com

    When we were reviewing 10 of the best online resources for free books, we had a LOT of readers chime in with their own favorites as well. Thank you for all your helpful contributions!

    In fact, we had so many suggestions, we have enough to compile a huge list from them, so here they are in no particular order:

    Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide

    Very useful archive.




    67K views
    Friedbeef's Tech&|&Solving Everyday Problems With Simple Technology - Freeware, Productivity, Useful Tips & More

  • American Scientist Online

    Rated May 13 2007 • 3 reviews • science, books • americanscientist.org

    The Bookshelf talks with Douglas Hofstadter
    via 3QD in American Scientist an interview of Douglas Hofstadter by Greg Ross

    ... two philosophers [Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel] asked me if I would write about my thoughts about what an "I" is. They said that they had appreciated what I had said of these ideas in G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach many years ago, but that they knew that I felt that my message had not really been absorbed\u2014that G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach had become popular but that the driving force behind the book had not really been perceived by most readers, let alone absorbed by a large number of people, and I was frustrated with this. I felt I had reached people, but not exactly as I had hoped. I had greater success with the book than I'd ever expected, but I didn't have the exact type of success that I wanted, and so they were giving me an opportunity to write an article in an anthology on the philosophy of mind, particularly on "I"\u2014they called it Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness [MIT Press, 2006].

    I'm talking about "What is a human being? What is an 'I'?" This may be an outmoded question to ask 30 years from now. Maybe we'll all be floating blissfully in cyberspace, there won't be any human bodies left, maybe everything will be software living in virtual worlds, it may be science-fiction city. Maybe my questions will all be invalid at that point. But I'm not writing for people 30 years from now, I'm writing for people right now. We still have human bodies. We don't yet have artificial intelligence that is at this level. It doesn't seem on the horizon. So that's what I'm writing for and about.

    Ray Kurzweil and others are predicting that there's a tidal wave coming. But they say it's bliss\u2014it's not bad, it's good, at least if you're surfing it in the right way. If you own the right kind of surfboard, it'll be fun.

    The Bookshelf talks with Douglas Hofstadter


    Hofstadter has an interesting viewpoint. He questions the scientists' acceptance of the evolutionary path that science sets in motion.




    48 views
    American Scientist Online

  • Annals of Law: Google's Moon Shot : The New Yorker

    Rated Jan 30 2007 • 3 reviews • library resources, archives, books • newyorker.com

    The quest for the universal library.
    in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin

    Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Googleu2019s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the companyu2019s custom-made scanning equipment.

    The quest for the universal library.


    The day this library is available in the future we'll also have interfaces to communicate directly with it from our brain.

    This seems as a promise of free access to knowledge. But is it really what it has in store for us?

    I see at least two fundamental hurdles.
    1. If our brain has not been trained properly to understand the global picture given by the content of such a universal library I'm afraid that all the info available in it shall be no more than googlish hum pa pa or a giberish of information particulates that we'll then have to spend all our lives trying to assemble in a whole that makes sense. What I mean to say here is that such a library foreshadows the necessity of a fundamental revisiting of our education systems, for, if our societies do not prepare our children to use such a great instrument intelligently it could end up being no more than a societal instrument delivering confusion.
    2. Will such a universal library be FREE ACCESS or will it be accessible against the payment of a fee? Hum... can we count on the logic of capital that drives private enterprises to decide such fundamentally important topics? Google will say "we are not evil" but its latest endeavor in China does not bode well for us to give it our blind trust...




    83 views
    Annals of Law: Google's Moon Shot : The New Yorker

  • http://www.thecommonreview.org/spotlight.html

    Rated Jan 23 2007 • 1 review • education, books, knowledge • thecommonreview.org

    Breadth of knowledge or Knowledge Deficit
    via Arts & Letters Daily, in thecommonreview.org

    ... \u201cbackground knowledge,\u201d knowledge not explicitly presented in a text, is essential to reading comprehension.
    ... even if one takes the view that, for the common good, tomorrow\u2019s better society must begin in today\u2019s schoolroom, there doesn\u2019t seem to be much chance of children maturing into an effective vanguard of transformation if they don\u2019t learn enough to make sense of a newspaper or magazine article.

    The Almighty Facts. A review of "The Knowledge Deficit" by E. D. Hirsch Jr.
    The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto
    A Librarian's Lament: Books Are a Hard Sell

    Breadth of knowledge or mastering the tools to learn; this is one of the most centrally important questions on which the Advanced societies of the West should focus their attention if they want to give their children an ounce of a chance to compete on a level playing field with the children of the countries of the South.
    - This is true of reading: being able to read fluently or being able to understand the ideas expressed in the text.
    - It is also true of painting: being able to use brushes masterly or being able to express deep truths of the moment with brushes.
    Today the citizens of the West are trailing their counterparts of the South, not only in terms of breadth of knowledge, but also in terms of mastering the tools to learn...




    623 views
    http://www.thecommonreview.org/spotlight.html

  • Digital Collections - Books - Gould, John, 1804-1881.....

    Rated Jan 19 2007 • 2 reviews • books, images, archive • gov.au

    The Birds of Australia : in seven volumes by John Gould.
    via lorac's SU pages in Gould, John. National Library of Australia..

    Exhibited: "National Treasures from Australia's Great Libraries". Touring exhibition December 2005 - August 2007, organised by the National Library of Australia. AuCNL; Library holds two complete sets at RBN ef F4773 with a supplementary volume published in 1869.

    The National Library of Australia has digitized all 7 volumes of John Gould's drawings of Australian birds. Of course, this one is my favorite.

    The Birds of Australia : in seven volumes by John Gould.




    Wow!
    What an impressive work and in the end the author had to self publish!
    London : Published by the author, 1848 (London : Printed by Richard and John E. Taylor)
    It was thus not much better then than now after all... in terms of publishing I mean.




    17 views
    Digital Collections - Books - Gould, John, 1804-1881.. The Birds of Australia : in seven volumes

  • Artsense - Google Books

    Rated Nov 25 2006 • 1 review • books, art, society • google.com

    Artsense on Google books
    on Google books



    Painting is bound to shine again soon the light of wisdom. Some critics declared its death in the seventies and eighties. While shocking their statement was nevertheless right on the mark. Art has indeed lost the societal functionality that has driven it from its early beginnings till sometime after the 2nd World War or over 99.9% of its time-span. Art has indeed always been instrumental at defusing the wisdom of the men of knowledge at the attention of all. Societies need cohesion to survive and, having a far deeper impact on humans than words and theories, visual signs imposed themselves as privileged instruments of that communication. Nowadays ever increasing pace of scientific changes and globalization impose themselves in a vacuum of accepted values which results in a deep shock and a strong need for sensical answers from new visual signs. This book is about a coming Renaissance in painting that will be driven as an answer to that societal need.

    Artsense on Google books
    Artsense on Amazon




    Read some of the pages of my book on Google books.

    As a painter, it is my understanding that we should have a grasp of what art has been all about along the tens of thousands, or perhaps the hundreds of thousands of years, that humans have practiced it. Not having such a historical perspective would indeed lead to paint "whatever" and that is exactly what is happening today with most artists.

    But, fortunately for the minority that is not satisfied with such a state of affairs, art is not whatever.

    Duchamp riled about his fellow visual-artists for being "dumb as an artist". He had in mind that art had been "litterary" for most of its past and he thought that it should remain so but he was conscientious that most artists had just not the intellectual background to attain this level of representation thus his mention of "being dumb as an artist".

    We are entering a period of deep societal change that will bring about the emergence of a new paradigm about reality. In short on one side the scientific and technological revolution will ease economic globalization from which the cultures of the earth will find the interstices to instill elements of themselves in the minds of all citizens. This, in turn, is bound to unleash the interaction of all the cultural, civilizational, elements wrought about by globalization with science and its rationality and so will come about this new paradigm of reality.

    In the end reality is indeed what art is concerned to represent. Scientific imaging already has shown us that reality is not limited to what the eyes can see. Further down the road the civilizations grounded in animism will show us that reality is even to be found in deeper layers.


    6 views
    Artsense - Google Books