Apparently you can buy a subscription to Dangerous Intersection for only 99 cents at Amazon. I registered DI at Amazon about a year ago, but I had forgotten about this way of reading DI. I'm curious, though. Does anyone out there read DI on a Kindle? If so, do the layout and photos translate well on the Kindle?
British Author Matt Ridley recently gave a stimulating and entertaining talk at TED. The central topic was about "mating ideas," but the talk (which was engaging all the way through) took an surprising turn toward the end when Ridley announced that he doesn't care whether some individuals have a somewhat higher IQ than others. Smart individuals don't necessarily make for a smart society--he suggested that Neanderthals were smart individuals, but they didn't last. What do we modern humans have the Neanderthals lacked? We exchange things and ideas (the evidence suggests that the Neanderthals didn't exchange items and didn't have any meaningful division of labor, not even a sexual division of labor). We function together and we are able to create things that nobody on earth knows how to make individually. Who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody. The "team" that makes computer mice includes the coffee-grower who provides coffee for the guy who works on an oil rig, who pumps out oil in order to allow a chemist to make plastic for the mouse. But there are 1,000,000 other members of this team. We are prolific exchangers of ideas, and that is what we have over all other species. Each of us functions like a neuron, networking incessantly, enabling the whole to be much greater than the sum of the parts. Smart individuals (despite how interesting they sometimes seem) are often dead ends. What really makes a society fly is when individuals have a propensity to exchange ideas, a built-in drive for mating their ideas, allowing their ideas to go where no smart individual (or even many groups of smart individuals) could have ever anticipated. For an interesting epilogue, consider the work of David Sloan Wilson, who suggests that humans are half-bee (we're not quite there), and that religion serves as the binding force.
This Psychology Today article spells out strategies for effectively telling lies. I was interested, as a reader who wants to better understand how to detect lying. But then again, I might be lying.
Mark and I have been friends for 20 years. I've celebrated his many successes as a science fiction writer, and I was delighted when he showed interest in being one of the authors for Dangerous Intersection. I just checked the stats here, and I see that over the years, Mark has contributed 187 posts to DI. I've read every one of them, and I am repeated struck by the fact that there isn't a "cheap" post among them. They are all well-crafted and carefully considered. Every one of Mark's posts is still available at this site. Click on his name on the bottom right corner list of authors to see them. But perhaps you are not in the mood to read substantive posts tonight. If that is the case, you are in luck. About a year ago, I sat down with Mark at his St. Louis home and videotaped a long conversation with him. We covered many topics, which I am in the process of breaking into individual YouTube videos. I'm including the first three as part of this post. In Part I, Mark discusses his personal goals and the importance of art. In Part II, he discusses reading, heroes and censorship. In Part III, Mark discusses the blogosphere, including his impression of what goes on here at Dangerous Intersection. I know you'll enjoy getting to know Mark through his spoken words, at least as much as you've appreciated his written work. Without further ado . . . I'll be posting several more Mark Tiedemann videos later this week.
As part of the biggest Fourth of July celebration in St. Louis, Missouri, one could see corporate flags waving on the same staffs as American flags, which is apparently exactly where they belong. To me, this arrangement symbolizes the almost complete corporate take-over of the United States.
We’re in an ominous environment right now. We have a thoroughly corrupt Congress (Dick Durbin: “The banks frankly own the place”) and a Supreme Court filled with corporation-idolizing free market fundamentalists. If you think it’s already bad, here’s what’s about to happen. This upcoming ruling by the United States Supreme Court will make clean money legislation unworkable. Citizens United was apparently just the beginning of a terrible trend.
There are relatively few politicians speaking up with passion. Sheldon Whitehouse is one of the few. We need massive marches across America. We need millions of people to turn off their damned TVs and iPods and get up and march, but I don't see it happening. Most of the people I talk with don't care that money buys elections, even while they go to Fourth of July celebrations and give lip service to "America is the world's greatest country."