837 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2016
  2. Oct 2016
    1. I speak as one who knows your nature because I understand the fabric of life into which your life is interwoven, and I do not see you as separate or apart from this. I see you as part of a greater tapestry of life, a greater tapestry of life in this time, in this world, in this place, in these circumstances, for the tapestry is changing. Let us not confuse, then, your life within the world withyour life beyond, for they are different. If you think they are the same, you will underestimate your life beyond the world, and you will overestimate your life within the world, and you will make some grave misinterpretations of your abilities and your nature while you are here. You are working in a very limited context. You have physical and mental limitations while you are here. You have experienced these limitations, perhaps painfully, but you need to understand them, and you need to recognize them without self-condemnation, for you have limits. You are working through a limited vehicle in your body and a limited vehicle in your mind. The spirit of you, which we call Knowledge, must exercise its Wisdom and its beneficence and its purpose through these limited vehicles and through the circumstances that you face in everyday life.
      • "we are spirits in the material world"
      • "We are spiritual beings having a human experience"

      or as I jokingly say:

      • 'I am a Pleiadian being having a Human experience.'

      Of course you're in a limited state. Being in a body is a limited state. It's a great nuisance carrying around this hunk-feeding it, housing it, keeping it clean, clothing it, making it beautiful, keeping it comfortable and attending to its many aches and pains. A nuisance, my God! Don't you just want to fly away sometimes? But the body is the garment you wear in being in this world, and it enables you to communicate here. You don't get much attention if you don't have a body and you want to communicate. Then it is hard to get people's attention. And if you do get their attention, you scare the daylights out of them, and they never want to have an experience like that again! So, obviously, our ability to communicate with people in the world seems very limited. We still give them something, but it will arise from within them and they will think it is from themselves.

      https://hyp.is/CxRY8prCEeafH6-CvEocWw/gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPmEFwAKZTkEDca6uRR4VwkHwmmrdFuuBvopgfGPmKEsg

  3. Aug 2016
    1. A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines. From there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines. This is similar to how many email spam filters work.

      Though details are scarce, the very idea that Facebook would tackle this problem with both humans and algorithms is reassuring. The common argument about human filtering is that it doesn’t scale. The common argument about algorithmic filtering is that it requires good signal (though some transhumanists keep saying that things are getting better). So it’s useful to know that Facebook used so hybrid an approach. Of course, even algo-obsessed Google has used human filtering. Or, at least, human judgment to tweak their filtering algorithms. (Can’t remember who was in charge of this. Was a semi-frequent guest on This Week in Google… Update: Matt Cutts) But this very simple “we sat down and carefully identified stuff we think qualifies as clickbait before we fed the algorithm” is refreshingly clear.

  4. May 2016
  5. hum1online.wordpress.com hum1online.wordpress.com
    1. Homi Bhabha

      Homi Bhabha is an academician who is currently the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University as well as the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language. He is a significant figure in the contemporary post-colonial studies and had contributed key ideas to the school such as Third-space, Hybridity, Ambivalence, and Mimicry to name a few.

    2. Who is Zinedine Zidane?

      Short Answer: A football (or as Americans like to say, soccer) player.

      Long Answer: Born in Marseille, France to Algerian immigrants, Zidane is most well known for being a three-time FIFA World Player of the Year who led France to victory in the 1998 World Cup. He has played for clubs in France, Italy and Spain, but his career ended when he was expelled from the 2006 World Cup final for headbutting an opponent.

    1. relievedfromstrainorstress

      Rather than saying the relief is what makes the situation humorous, I would be more willing to believe that the humour makes me feel more relieved about the situation.

      Or maybe seeing something unexpected would cause you to be relief, and because you're not as tense as before, you're able to laugh and see the humour in it?

    2. ambivalencetheories

      So in other words, a situation is humorous if it evokes conflicting emotions within the person viewing it.

      Key and Peele - I do feel conflicted about this sketch because on one hand, it's a serious and pertinent problem in reality as the sombre tone of the first few seconds of the sketch conveyed while it was still being pretty normal. However, as it continued on, it got increasingly interrupted by amateur magic tricks by the cop, who also had the most hilarious impressions thanks to Key, that did make me want to laugh. However, I felt that I shouldn't laugh - this conflicting emotions just make me feel guilty, not humorous. Am I misinterpreting this category?

  6. hum1online.wordpress.com hum1online.wordpress.com
    1. Why do you think Serena Williams danced at the end of her 2012 Olympics final? Do you believe this was a “tasteless” act? Why or why not?

      Because she just won the Olympics final and since - very uderstandably - it is an amazing and wonderful accomplishment, she danced in this manner to express her joy in celebration.

      The way the act was described covers a layer of deliberate prejudice over her actions, however. "...Crip-Walking all over.." implies a certain amount of chaos or scene being made when in reality, it barely lasted a few seconds, contained within her little spot at her side of the court. And watching her move like that with a huge smile on her face, as well as her sister's, anyone would be hard pressed or extremely biased to interpret this action as anything other than just an automatic reaction borne out of happiness and joy.

    2. What does “playful mocking” mean?

      I think it refers to when someone makes fun of certain characteristics or features of another person with the intent to tease or amuse but without any malicious intentions. By this I mean, they did not do it to hurt the other, or would/should not have done it if they knew it would've hurt the person they were mocking regardless of it giving others enjoyment.

    1. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization,

      Does she mean the western civilization? That she would not have been part of the USA as she was then had it not been for slavery?

    2. but I was their Zora nevertheless

      They were protective of her, then? They cared for her in a more sincere way separate from the superficial way the whites treated her despite the treatment being more "positive" towards her "joyful tendencies".

    3. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me

      I wonder why though - is it because they felt the coloredness clearly and constantly unlike Zora and therefore could not share the joy she freely did in her childlike innocence?

    4. warranted not to rub nor run.

      I honestly don't understand what she means by this. Help?

    5. queer exchange of compliments

      I wonder what about the exchanges were queer to her. Did they compliment each other out of politeness about things they didn't really mean, which struck her, even as a young child, to be strange?

    6. I became colored

      I can imagine this statement being very powerful in the social context of that time. When "people of color" was thrown around normatively, this sentence would have made many reconsider their idea of colored was and how one can be considered as such.

      On a personal level, I can relate to this very well. As someone who grew up in Asia, I never considered myself a person of color or a minority or any other label that would not only distinguish but also made me inferior in one phrase. We had different ethnicities and different races, sure, but it didn't give me the feeling of somehow being less than "poc" in the USA does, even as the people of color themselves are trying to reclaim these terms as empowerment.

      I can't decide if this is a sign of my privilege and luck previously as I am part of the major ethnic group in Burma while Singapore takes extraneous pains to ensure racial harmony and balance, or if it's just an imbalance in the part of the United States.

    7. I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances

      The instructions above used this as an example of how Zora Neale Hurston was not ashamed to be colored when to me, I interpreted it as her highlighting some sort of shortcoming on her part at that point of time that didn't make her "colored-ness" less severe.

  7. Apr 2016
    1. in an unprovoked attack

      The saddest and scariest thing to me about these hate crimes is that it has all to do with something beyond your own control. The perpetrators hate you, hurt you not for something you have done or can do, but rather for the sake of you simply being you. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for those who actually have experienced it and have this threat looming over them every day. It's unbelievably scary to me that we live in a world - no, a society - like this. But perhaps we can be empowered by the the fact that the fault lies in the beliefs and norms we have built around ourselves when it comes to race, and not something that is set in stone. I believe this means that we still have the power to turn these assumptions and harmful stereotypes around.

  8. Dec 2015
    1. self-acting

      We're essentially creating things on purpose that are going to have the ability to make their own decisions, possibly be smarter than us, and also have a chance of malfunctioning... Why?

    2. a sophisticated creation thatseems to simultaneously extend but also threaten our understanding of what it means tobe human.

      So if it threatens our understanding of what it means to be human.. is that beneficial to our ongoing research of essentially what makes us humans by constantly pushing our understanding to be deeper? or is harmful and uprooting of the interpersonal/cultural norms we've established?

  9. Nov 2015
    1. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place.

      It reminds me of the machine performance, the human performance and the idea of the text as a performative event (as in Johanna Drucker's theory of performative materiality).

  10. Jul 2015
    1. national security initiatives are solely needed in order to tighten stability

      Funny how he feels a need to sell this point to his own staff

    2. For “activists working for no-profit organizations … directing their efforts towards small, possibly foreign, technology companies is easy; directing their efforts toward local agencies is hard and risky,” he wrote. “I have a question for you all: PLEASE NAME a single really ‘democratic’ country, a country which does not violate anybody’s rights and has a TOTALLY clean human rights record.”
    3. The company has long denied any implication in human rights abuses, regularly pointing reporters to a policy on its website that says it only sells to governments, investigates allegations of human rights abuses and complies with international blacklists.
  11. Jun 2015
    1. our lack of hardwired patterns of behavior

      This passage reminds me of Lyotard's introduction to The Inhuman, and this Onion article.

  12. Apr 2015
    1. Name /yal05/27282_u00 01/27/06 10:25AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 6 # 6  1 0  1 “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” “Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of plea- sure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of differ- ent physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding di- versity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.” JohnStuartMill, On Liberty (1859
  13. Mar 2015
    1. Therefore, I learned — and learned well — that forgiveness is an essential key to healing. The opposite of forgiveness is judgment, and judgment always creates separation and guilt. Judgment will evoke a sense of guilt in the one who has been judged, unless, of course, they are perfectly awake. But more than this, each time that you judge anything or anyone, you have literally elicited guilt within yourself, because there is a place within you, yet still, that knows the perfect purity of your brother and sister, and sees quite clearly that all things within the human realm are either the extension of Love, or a cry for help and healing.
  14. Feb 2014
    1. But at the level of the capability hierarchy where we wish to work, it seems useful to us to distinguish several different types of structuring--even though each type is fundamentally a structuring of the basic physical processes. Tentatively we have isolated five such types--although we are not sure how many we shall ultimately want to use in considering the problem of augmenting the human intellect, nor how we might divide and subdivide these different manifestations of physical-process structuring. We use the terms "mental structuring", "concept structuring", "symbol structuring", "process structuring," and "physical structuring."

      The 5 structuring types outlined by Doug Engelbart:

      • mental
      • concept
      • symbol
      • process
      • physical
    2. The fundamental principle used in building sophisticated capabilities from the basic capabilities is structuring--the special type of structuring (which we have termed synergetic) in which the organization of a group of elements produces an effect greater than the mere addition of their individual effects. Perhaps "purposeful" structuring (or organization) would serve us as well, but since we aren't sure yet how the structuring concept must mature for our needs, we shall tentatively stick with the special modifier, "synergetic." We are developing a growing awareness of the significant and pervasive nature of such structure within every physical and conceptual thing we inspect, where the hierarchical form seems almost universally present as stemming from successive levels of such organization.
    1. Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

      Selection by association, rather than indexing.

    2. The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

      With the advent of Google Docs we're finally moving away from the archaic indexing mentioned here. The filesystem metaphor was simple and dominated how everyone manages their data-- which extended into how we developed web content, as well.

      The declaration that Hierarchical File Systems are Dead has led to better systems of tagging and search, but we're still far from where we need to be since there is still a heavy focus on the document as a whole instead of also the content within the document.

      The linearity of printed books is even more treacherously entrenched in our minds than the classification systems used by libraries to store those books.

      One day maybe we'll liberate every piece of content from every layer of its concentric cages: artificial systems of indexing, books, web pages, paragraphs, even sentences and words themselves. Only then will we be able to re-dress those thoughts automatically into those familiar and comforting forms that keep our thoughts caged.

  15. Jan 2014
  16. Oct 2013
    1. if he is unwilling to learn, let another be taught before him, of whom he may be envious.

      This aligns with Confucius thinker Xunzi's attitude on properly cultivating morality in others. We are guided by our desires: whatever we feel a sense of lack in, we desire that object. It is the role of those with cultivated morality (gentlemen, sages) to act as an exemplar of moral goods, so that others who have yet to be cultivated desire what they have.

    2. We are by nature most tenacious of what we have imbibed in our infant years, as the flavor with which you scent vessels when new remains in them, nor can the colors of wool, for which its plain whiteness has been exchanged, be effaced. Those very habits, which are of a more objectionable nature, adhere with the greater tenacity, for good ones are easily changed for the worse, but when will you change bad ones into good? Let the child not be accustomed, therefore, even while he is yet an infant, to phraseology which must be unlearned.

      Claim on early development (and an accurate one, by contemporary standards).

    3. As birds are born to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding

      This little diddy here smacks of Aristotle: what distinguishes humans from all other creatures are their cognitive faculties.

    1. Again, (4) it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

      Again, rhetoric as what sets humans apart from other animals.

  17. Sep 2013
    1. I find this quote to fascinating. Isocrates isn't necessarily a cynic, but he certainly is not the happiest of philosophers.

    1. persuasion is the chief end of rhetoric

      Is rhetoric just the title we give to innate, self-interested, behavior? Is the term 'rhetoric' to blame, or is it simply just a label we give to human interactions?