Equivocality

eyes summing over
when will you take my measure?
please integrate me

Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump-thump.
… !
Bang.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
It’s an instant of, not fear exactly, but something that dissipates like a wave through your body. Your heart is still beating. It was just an ectopic beat, probably a PVC. Happens all the time, even in perfectly healthy hearts. Relax.
This is walking down the street, mind you, so you […]

No, but what if? What if we’ve been going about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence all wrong? Why do we expect anyone anywhere to be sending messages to a random little yellow dwarf star? I think no one’s sending us messages for the same reason that we’re not sending any messages to them: it’s ridiculous to expect that someone could be listening, in just the right place at just the right time on just the right frequency.

Instead, I started thinking about the problem of interstellar communication the other way around. I just assumed that a network of technological civilizations already exists, and asked what the protocol would be for connecting to it.

Supposed to be out yesterday, I know, but I just got back from India, and I have to read all these damn entries. Which I thank you all for submitting. Hang tight. The winner will be announced Soon, I promise.

Varanasi is perhaps what I thought I might find in India. The ghats (wharves) are— well. Hindus and painted faces and temples and cows and signs painted on the narrow alleyways, and elaborate lacy (Moghul influenced?) architecture, and stone streets, and everywhere filth and garbage and exuberance. Walking along the ghats in the evening, reveling […]

My god, it’s like lace reaching into the sky! I mean, I’d seen pictures, but this, actually standing here in Durbar Square, Katmandu, watching the pagodas silhouette the dawn– it’s a fairy tale. This place can’t be real. Here, let’s climb the steps. Oh. There’s graffiti at the top. The sun rises, shadows form. The traffic arrives with first light. Suddenly the square is filled with belching diesels and kids on scooters, and vendors selling cotton candy and mobile phones. Also illuminated is every other building, the surrounding sprawl of hideous brick boxes. Katmandu, 21st Century. The pagodas cower before the hot, flat, smoggy light of the present time.

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.