“The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”. […] Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.”
—A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter : The New Yorker
February 2010
21 posts
“Que un político analfabeto, sea del partido que sea, que no ha leído un libro en su vida, me hable de memoria histórica porque le contó su abuelo algo, no me vale para nada. Yo quiero a alguien culto que me diga que el 36 se explica en Asturias, y se explica en la I República, y se explica en el liberalismo y en el conservadurismo del XIX… Porque el español es históricamente un hijo de puta, ¿comprendes?”
—Arturo Pérez Reverte
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo, “Why I am a Destiny”
“You can only do a very small portion of what you want to do. That is natural. […] 80 or 90 years is nothing. There are a lot of very beautiful pieces of music of the past which the majority of the people alive now will never hear. These pieces are extraordinarily precious, full of mystery and intelligence and invention. I’m thinking at this moment of certain works by Johan Sebastian Bach, or even earlier composers. There are so many fantastic compositions, five or six hundred years old, not even known to the majority of human beings. So it will take a lot of time. There are billions of precious things in the universe that we have no time to study.”
—Björk Meets Karlheinz Stockhausen - “Dazed and Confused”, issue 23, August 1996
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.”
—Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)
“Al despedirnos éramos como dos chicos que se han hecho estrepitosamente amigos en una fiesta de cumpleaños y se siguen mirando mientras los padres los tiran de la mano y los arrastran, y es un dolor dulce y una esperanza”
—Julio Cortázar, “Rayuela” (Capítulo 93)
“As a set of dietary restrictions, rather than a medical phenomenon, it seems reasonable to see food allergies – along with vegetarianism/veganism, the Slow Food movement, the “buy local” movement, and the $30 billion-plus diet market (in the US) – as an attempt to wrest back control over an aspect of our lives that we are increasingly and maybe irretrievable disconnected with. […] Food allergies allow us to assert control – on pain of death – over what we ingest, and demands an attentiveness – again, on pain of death – to what’s in the foods that we buy [… and] join a range of other control-seeking phenomena – pop psychology, personal productivity, conspiracy theorism, and religious fundamentalism, all of which attempt to throw a lasso around the neck of our stampeding lives. As a critique of modernity, there’s nothing original here; Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life addressed similar concerns about the loss of autonomy in 1903.”
—Food Allergies and Modern Life | Savage Minds
“A recent study in the UK that found that only 2% of people who claimed to suffer from food allergies were actually allergic. […] The realisation that most people aren’t that special can be avoided by adopting a quasi-medical condition that sets one apart. It demands attention and consideration. It forces other people to think about them and make special arrangements for them. Only last week, a friend with recently self-diagnosed lactose intolerance came round for a cup of tea. “Do you have any soya milk?” she asked as the kettle boiled. I confessed I hadn’t and felt awful. It was then that I realised she was on her third chocolate biscuit. “Oh, milk’s OK in chocolate biscuits,” she said hastily. How convenient, I thought.”
—Food intolerance: the new epidemic? - Telegraph (via Savage Minds)
“Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
—How does our language shape the way we think? (via Savage Minds, months later)
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“What if objects straight from the factory seemed somehow orphaned, smaller and less interesting for the fact of their pristine condition. If we care about recycling, we want objects to be better at absorbing and recording and reporting their histories. […] clothing, furniture, technology, these could be storyful. And they could spared the landfill for one or more cycles of ownership by the stories they bring us.”
—Recycling: adding value by adding meaning :: Grant McCracken
“What if each seat in a theater space had its own story, written by each occupant over time? What if the tenant of that seat could learn about a previous tenant and their experiences, then add their own to the narrative, and pass it along to the next person who happens to sit there?”
—The cumulative value of stories - The Artful Manager
“…the need to express our intrinsic freedoms, to prove to ourselves, and the world, that the control is in our hands, despite everyone’s constant moaning about how are basic freedoms are constantly being violated. You are the only one who can violate your freedom and we prove day after day that we can get into any place we want to, despite the omnipresence of CCTV, despite their mountains of barbed wire and signage warning of our impending doom should we cross the imaginary boundaries they have established. And we like the game, we don’t want them to stop trying. […] I often think about Nietzsche saying that the truly free spirited will not agitate for the rules to be dropped or even reformed, since it is only by breaking the rules that one realizes their power.”
—Place Hacking | Savage Minds
“I like the idea of learning on the taxi to the airport that my Tumi bag is, in truth, a little afraid of flying. I like the idea of learning that when in Seattle last week it really liked that carpet in the elevator. My Tumi could have an entire, entirely poetic, vocabulary for hotel surfaces. I like the idea that it is noticing things I don’t. I love the idea of the hearing my bag murmur (by way of twitter) that the man at the check-in desk wasn’t really very polite. Or, more dramatically, that he has only 5 days to live. […] I like the idea of luggage that’s a little bad tempered, put upon, inclined to grumble, quick to take offense.”
—Tumi and the case of the talking suitcase :: Grant McCracken
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’”
—W. H. Murray on Goethe
January 2010
2 posts
“We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it […]. Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we care about. […] None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they’re often cognitively quite alien processes — which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we’re still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want — or don’t want — to be.”
—collision detection: Garry Kasparov, cyborg
