Highfalutin

"The belief that Twitter is more than just another communications platform continues to spread, kind of like swine flu for media geeks. And like the flu, it’s plunging victims into feverish hallucinations: “Twitter saved the Iranian protestors!” they cry, neglecting the fact that it, uh, didn’t. “Twitter made the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck a sensation!” Yay, a fast-food truck makes money. “Twitter kept us updated about Balloon Boy in real time!”" - Maxamad (Amazigh) from Bookmarklet

Maxamad: what is the basis for those claims? what is the overall yearly uptime for twitter website or api, and how does this truly compare to other messaging platforms? what is wrong with its security? there is an HTTPS login https://twitter.com/ and OAuth is pretty reliable if implemented properly - Mike Chelen

Yar. - Maxamad (Amazigh)

"This is an open question: What is this fractal? It's a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way - circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra's Pearls, but I've never seen this particular arrangement before, and I've been looking for over ten years." - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

"Is the glass half empty or half full?" - Maxamad (Amazigh) from Bookmarklet

As support for the findings on who socializes with whom, my favorite conversation from this past summer was overhearing a Black girl share with a White girl information she had just discovered: "BG -- You White? Really, Girl, you breakin' my heart." "WG -- Didjya think I was Hispanic or somethin'?" "BG -- Somethin', yeah, but not White. [draws word out with scorn][pauses, then shrugs] But that's okay. You're alright." - Mickey Schafer

"The Setup is one of my favourite websites. 'the setup is a bunch of nerdy interviews. what do people use to get the job done?' " - Maxamad (Amazigh) from Bookmarklet

ha! - .LAG liked that

"Hi. My name is Brandon Paton and I am 17 years old. I am the CEO and President of stealth mode startup College Credential, Inc. I have founded four successful internet startups (one of which was acquired), and currently serve on the board of advisors of a rapidly growing startup. And don’t forget I’m only 17. Sound impressive? Too bad, because most of what I just told you is not true." - Maxamad (Amazigh) from Bookmarklet

"It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him." - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

lol .... "It was possibly a good thing that she never had children." - dkb

"Dawkins has been accused of aggression, militancy, arch-adaptationism and even -- don't say it -- reductionism. His critics hurl themselves against him in article after debate after full-length book, peppering him with questions: What about the gaps in the fossil record? How about the possibility of an intelligent designer? Would you believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old?" - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"It is impossible to talk about yin or yang without some reference to the opposite: yin–yang are rooted together. Since yin and yang are created together in a single movement, they are bound together as parts of a mutual whole. A race with only men or only women would disappear in a single generation; but men and women together create new generations that allow the race they mutually create (and mutually come from) to survive. The interaction of the two gives birth to things." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"Let me introduce some countrymen of mine, I said; they are lovers of philosophy, and have heard that Antiphon was intimate with a certain Pythodorus, a friend of Zeno, and remembers a conversation which took place between Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides many years ago, Pythodorus having often recited it to him..." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

I have to read it later, but it looks interesting. Thanks! - Michael Fidler

“‘What is your meaning, Zeno? Do you maintain that if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and that this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like-is that your position?’ ‘Just so’, said Zeno. ‘And if the unlike cannot be like, or the like unlike, then according to you, being could not be many; for this would involve an impossibility. In all that... more... - Anthony Citrano

"...a phenomenon in quantum game theory resulting in anomalously high success rates in coordination games between separated players. These high success rates would seem to require communication between the players; however, the game is set up such that during the game, this is physically impossible." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

10/6 </MadHatter> - Neal Krummell

“Chaotic systems consequently look random. However, they are actually deterministic systems governed by physical or mathematical laws (predictable in principle, if you have exact information) that are impossible to predict in practice beyond a certain point...” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"Whatever its historical basis, Shambhala gradually came to be seen as a Buddhist Pure Land, a fabulous kingdom whose reality is visionary or spiritual as much as physical or geographic. It was in this form that the Shambhala myth reached the West, where it influenced non-Buddhist as well as Buddhist spiritual seekers — and, to some extent, popular culture in general." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

“In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism...” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

“Technocracy is a form of government in which scientists and technical experts are in administrative or decision making management positions. The term came to mean government by technical decision making in 1932...Technocracy Incorporated predominated these groups as to notability and popularity. That group became a popular social movement during the 1930s and is still active today..The movement grew rapidly and as a mass-movement its real center was California where it claimed half a million members in 1934. Technocracy counted among its admirers such people as the novelist H.G. Wells, the author Theodore Dreiser and the economist Thorstein Veblen, who was also a member of the Technical Alliance, a precursor group.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

(via http://ff.im/9WEPt) - Anthony Citrano

[h/t wildcat: http://friendfeed.com/wildcat] - Anthony Citrano

I can totally agree with any sentence that has Human Imagination and Belief in God in it. - Jeff P. Henderson

I believe I'm god and like to imagine how humans are dying in innumerable ways. - Alexander Kruel

“Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism and panentheism). It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than animism or hylozoism, which holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.” - Anthony Citrano

Now I'm going to have to go back and re-read an old paper I wrote called "What is it like Not to be a Panpsychist" o_O - LogEx

“A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole - a property called self-similarity... Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, snow flakes, various vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli), and animal coloration patterns.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

“A form constant is one of several geometric patterns which are recurringly observed during hallucinations and altered states of consciousness.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month's Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role." - Ňicķ from Bookmarklet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Ňicķ

This guy's ideas sound kinda bullshit to me. Even his first example of entropy is, I think, incorrect (eggs to omelets), or at least not relevant and doesn't make logical sense (omelets being an intelligent human creation, in some ways also defying entropy... though yes, not reversible, but his point was it shows entropy, when in fact perhaps it shows merely change and a different kinds... more... - Ňicķ

“Talking to doctors about money is difficult. It's uncomfortable both for patients and for doctors to think that this most important and intimate service could be contaminated. But the truth is the decisions made by your physician when you enter his office are profoundly influenced by the way that doctors get paid in this country.” [thanks, http://friendfeed.com/rowlike...] - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"But study after study has borne out the truth of this completely anti-intuitive conclusion. In fact, Fisher and other researchers estimate that almost one-third of the care given in our country today is that kind of care -- care that isn't really helping people. The United States spends more than $2 trillion on health care every year. So the cost of that 30 percent unnecessary care... more... - Andrew C

“Physicists will never come to grips with the grand theories of the universe, Penrose holds, until they see past the blinding distractions of today’s half-baked theories to the deepest layer of the reality in which we live.” [thanks, WildCat: http://friendfeed.com/wildcat] - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

It's interesting, yes, our science is based on connections: things that we have come to expect to be connected. But really we don't understand why a thing is connected unless we are first able to disassociate the connection we see and ask why is this thing connected? - Melanie Reed

“...originated by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, denoting that a culturally-diverse society can be ruled (dominated), by one of its social classes. It is the dominance of one social group over another, i.e. the ruling class over all other classes. The ideas of the ruling class come to be seen as the norm; they are seen as universal ideologies, perceived to benefit everyone whilst only really benefiting the ruling class.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

“An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound ‘sensation of the absurd,’ and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called ‘The Uncanny,’ traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of ‘something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.’ At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy. Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.” - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

“There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.” [Albert Einstein] - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

1. Recreational drug use is already legal (for the most part - see alcohol;) 2. The vast majority of the “huge toll” on users, families, and communities are the result of the very laws you support; - Anthony Citrano

If what they are worried about the consequences of using drugs what they should do is educate and persuade people not to use them. I don't do drugs and it isn't because if I did I would go to jail it's because I've learned how they can affect my behavior and health. By prohibiting them what they are doing is causing a false sense of "want" in people (since everyone wants to do what's... more... - David Rodriguez