Category: Asides

“I don’t think history is Kleenex, it is not a disposable item you put to your nose and chuck out. History has to be recaptured – history dies unless we recapture it.” by Emile de Antonio (director 1968 anti-Vietnam War documentary In The Year of the Pig)

Generally, great writers are eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work. Hemingway, for example, was fascinated with the question of how to face death. After he witnessed the suicide of his father, it became the central theme, not only of his writing, but of his life. He chased death in war, in sport, on safari, until finally, putting a shotgun in his mouth, he found it – Robert McKee in his book Story: substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting

There is one brain organ that is optimized for understanding and articulating logical processes, and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick, and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it to.
~ Ray Kurzweil

You know, let me conclude with another thing that may interest you. People tell me, “What you are saying is impossible.” Did you notice how strange the word “impossible” functions today? When you talk about private pleasures and technology, everything is possible, you know, like we will live forever, everything will be downloaded, we can do whatever we want. We say impossible is happening everywhere in technology. But, the moment you go to social changes, ah, ah, ah, the idea is—we learned the lesson from the fall of socialism—practically everything that disturbs the market is impossible. So what they ruling ideology is telling us, maybe we will live forever, maybe we will become omnipotent, whatever you want, all these new—we will all travel to moon—that’s all possible. But a small social change of more healthcare is not possible. Maybe the time has come to change this and to less dream about these gnostic possibilities we will all turn into digital entities and more about quite modest social changes. – by Slavoj Zizek on 10-18-2010 interview.