Category: Best Read

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-Hopeless Emptiness-Why I'm Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

I’ve always tried to walk my own path, this makes me seem weird to most people. I remember reading a phrase that stuck to me “The Age of Distraction”.  We are living in the age of distraction, what is it? Let’s see, watch revolutioinary road, and remember the scene between leo , kate and michael shannon. It was the Hopeless Emptiness Scene. And I would be lying if I sad that I am probably in that mobious strip trying to find my way out. Mobious strip and revolutionary road, seems quite apt. IN my defense at least I know I am in a mobius strip like road and I must be revolutionary enough to escape. (Damn hate it when I can’t seem to let a couple of words go). I try to fight , I don’t know if I am winning, I hope I do! I hope you do to!

When I think about all the hours I wasted this past year on Facebook, and imagine the good I could have done instead, it depresses me. Instead of scouring my friends’ friends’ photos for other possible friends, I could have been raising money for Darfur relief, helping out at the local animal shelter or delivering food to the homeless. It depresses me even more to know that I would never have done any of those things, even with all those extra hours.<Emphasis Mine>
Why I’m Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com.

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Strangely Evoked Some Feelings-Why I'm Twittering From Davos Even Though I Run Reuters

Wow, Some people do get it. Read the whole thing!

Why I’m Twittering From Davos Even Though I Run Reuters
David Schlesinger | January 30, 2009 1:25 PM
schlesinger.jpgDavid Schlesinger is the Editor in Chief of Reuters News. His Twitter from Davos alerted us to the fact that George Soros had predicted the end of the world. We asked David whether, by live-Twittering, he was concerned about scooping himself. Here, in a post on Reuters, David responds:
Twittering Away Standards…Or Tweeting The Future of Journalism?
I’ve been tweeting from the World Economic Forum, using the microblogging platform Twitter to discuss the mundane (describing crepuscular darkness of the Swiss Alps at 5 a.m.) or the interesting (live tweeting from presentations).
Is it journalism?
Is it dangerous?
Is it embarrassing that my tweets even beat the Reuters newswire?
Why I’m Twittering From Davos Even Though I Run Reuters.

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rePost – Excellent Advice–wronging rights: So You Really Do Want to Go to Law School: What Now?

This advice applies to most things like your career, your job, choosing the club you hang out , etc!

Wrong. It is possible to be happy in law school, if you pick the right one. I loved it. I adored my classes, my profesors, and my classmates, and I don’t think that I would have had the same experience if I had gone somewhere else. I went to Georgetown, so I can’t really comment on the experience at other schools, but I think that my decision to go there was one of the best I ever made.
I did the Alternative Curriculum, known within the law school by the Roswellesque nickname “Section 3.” That meant that in my first year, my section took roughly the same subjects as everyone else, but re-framed with a more critical, theoretical bent. Think “Democracy and Coercion” instead of Constitutional Law, and “Legal Process and Society” instead of Civil Procedure. That was a good call, for three reasons. First, my fellow students and I had all chosen to do something a little different, and which weeded out the insanely risk-averse students whose lives were governed by fear that they might do the wrong thing. Those guys are less fun to be around. Second, the Section 3 professors had also chosen to step outside the well-worn grooves of the standard first-year curriculum. That correlated with increased levels of zaniness, but also of love for teaching and for their particular subjects. Third, the academic approach suited me (more legal theory, less case law). Programs like Section 3 are rare. Of the top schools, the only similar program I know of is at Yale, whose law school program is just one giant alternative curriculum. But if you get into a school that has one, I highly recommend going.
wronging rights: So You Really Do Want to Go to Law School: What Now?.

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Not Changing is Insanity –Knowing and Doing: January 2009 Archives

• During one of his messages, Peter Denning showed the familiar quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over again, expecting different results,” as a motivation to change. But I think there is more to it than that. I was reminded of a recent Frazz comic, in which the precocious Caulfield pointed out that the world is always changing, so it is also insanity to do the same thing over again, expecting the same results. The world is changing around computing and computing education. There is no particular reason to think that doing the same old things better will get us anywhere useful.
Knowing and Doing: January 2009 Archives.

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Something I have been feeling for a while but do not have the chops to bring into life with words!–Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com

Here is a piece from the late great DFW who shows how a great writer can write about anything and still make you think, and feel.
as for the title Let’s just say that I’ve turned down a lot of vacations that I can honestly say I don’t like being a tourist. I went to baguio a month ago with Chuck,Vince and Tonio , and when we were deciding where to go Chuck wanted to go to an uninhabited island whilst I was really pushing towards a real tourist destination. This seems wierd. The fact is what I was trying to do was akin to what I used to do when I was a child and had a tooth that was about to fall off. I just kept moving it feeling the pain but nonetheless still doing it, till the pain becomes enjoyable and suddenly your tooth falls off. I loved going to Baguio, but I can say that any time and any where I am with friends and I can say with a straight face that I do not like tourist’s destinations, they me feeling something that I have failed to bring to life using my meager vocabulary and my ill command of the english language. The words quoted below do justice to my inner conflict with being a tourist. I don’t know I fancy myself as a traveller.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com.

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Overcoming Bias: The Meta-Human Condition

My last reason is partly selfish and partly unselfish: the Meta-Human Condition thwarts attempts to fix the Human Condition. That’s the lesson of learned helplessness studies: dogs won’t press a button to stop electric shocks if they’ve previously come to believe the button is worthless. Aubrey refers to a similar idea himself: the “catatonia” that afflicts modern biogerontologists, preventing them from recognizing the urgency of the situation. As Eliezer wrote, in one of my favorite quotes, “if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.”
Today, there are people trying to eliminate parts of the Human Condition. Eliezer wants to build a Friendly AI, which could fix a surprisingly large chunk of the Human Condition. Aubrey is working on the more modest, but still Herculean, task of curing aging. Both of these guys don’t get enough funding because of the Meta-Human Condition. Most people won’t pay for a solution if they don’t want to believe that there is a problem.
Overcoming Bias: The Meta-Human Condition.

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Stop The Hurting Please (An It Allegory)

I work in IT and a large part of my work is about supporting old applications and I have to say that this is so very true! read the whole thing here!

He chuckled, in that fucking annoying “Oh, you young lads, how funny you are” way that our elders have, and said:
“Being in IT is kind of like being a doctor with a patient who complains that “It hurts when I stick a fork in my eye.”
We, of course, being the logical sort, reply back, in all sincerity and earnestness, “Well, you should stop sticking a fork in your eye then.”
The user, or patient will then look at us like we really are the idiots they believe us to be and say: “No, you don’t understand…I want you to make it stop hurting.””
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Yeah Like Most People I Meet!–Rate Your Students: "Students Today Are Completely Full of Shit."

Hehe, I have a tendency to be an introvert, this is because I ask people the hard questions, I often fail to not get affected. I want people to be “REAL” to have “VALUE”.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to stop myself, that’s why I often opt not to play, its hard.
Why is it hard? Because People Don’t Want The Truth. maybe They Can’t Handle The Truth.

We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works just as long as everybody’s winking at the same time. If one person stops winking, you just beat the crap out of that person, and they either starting winking or go somewhere else.
Rate Your Students: “Students Today Are Completely Full of Shit.”.