Daily Archives: April 1, 2012

Quote of the day: lucky you, lucky me

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From Daniel Dennett, who is 70 today.

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

From his book, Freedom Evolves.

On reading (and not understanding?) Heidegger

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This morning’s Observer column.

If you write about technology, then sooner or later you’re going to meet a smartarse who asks whether you’ve read Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. Having encountered a number of such smartarses in recent years, I finally decided to do something about it, and obtained a copy of the English translation, published in 1977 by Harper & Row. Having done so, I settled down with a glass of sustaining liquor and embarked upon the pursuit of enlightenment.

Big mistake. “To read Heidegger,” writes his translator, William Lovitt, “is to set out on an adventure.” It is. Actually, it’s like embarking on one of those nightmares in which you’re wading through quicksand and every time you grasp a rope or a rock it comes apart in your hand. And it turns out that Heidegger’s fiendish technique is actually to lure you into said quicksand.

The Peer and his iPad

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Lord Puttnam, originally uploaded by jjn1.

David (Lord) Puttnam checking email on his iPad after the Open University ceremony last Friday awarding an honorary doctorate to Cathy Casserly, the new CEO of Creative Commons.

As it happens, it was 30 years to the day since he won an Oscar for his film Chariots of Fire.

Republican philosophy: the Romney version

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Lovely, succinct summary by Dave Winer:

I have a lot of money. I got it the right way. I inherited a lot of it, and then I made a lot more. Every year I make a hundred million or more. Money is a big deal for me.

And in that way I represent Republicans everywhere.

Now I know what you all want. You want my money. Hey if I were you I’d want my money too. Here’s what I have to say to that: Fuck You. I have my money and it’s mine and you can’t have it and that’s that.

In summary. 1. My money is mine. 2. Fuck you.

Those are the two basic tenets of the Republican philosophy.