Equivocality

Calcutta you are motion! Calcutta you are noise and smoke and all the impolite truths of humanity stacked on top of each other in one place. You are sound and light and fresh fruit juice, a man yelling mango juice mangojuice mangojuice! into the crowd on the corner. Step right up and get your slice of life! There’s nowhere to run anyway. The streets are packed with cars and carts and bicycles and rickshaws and pedestrians, and usually no sidewalks. The sidewalks are for sleeping on.

Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do not read this as a pessimistic statement. If it be true, then I can see in it nothing else but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination & will– & for the most beautiful act they can conceive with which to bestow meaning upon existence.

Everyone except me has already read this Pulizter Prize-winning 1996 book, so it hardly needs me to add my comment, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
This book addresses the question of why Europe conquered America, and not vice-versa, or more generally why certain races and continents entered the modern era with materially rich, technologically [...]

When Wikipedia was launched in 2001, many people though that the project could not work. They questioned whether anyone would be interested in writing articles on a volunteer basis, they wondered how giving everyone access could possibly result in accurate information, they worried about vandalism and conflict over contentious issues. Surprisingly, all of these concerns have been dealt with rather well. Wikipedia works, and is now unarguably the best encyclopedia in human history.

But why does it work? I’ve been participating in the Wikipedia community for some time now, writing, mediating disputes, and carefully studying the design of both the software and — just as important — the policies and culture surrounding it. To the best of my understanding so far, here are the basic reasons why Wikipedia works.

Consider: a Bluetooth headset implanted just under the skin + appropriately slick voice-command software = telepathy. I wonder who is going to sell it first?