Orwell and Huxley, per Postman

Quote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Quotes by Mark Twain & Carl Sagan & Upton Sinclair

Three quotes for Today. Twain and Sagan quotes are quite similar, worth mentioning them both in this day and age. These are three of my favorite quotes:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” – Mark Twain

“If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

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In Praise of FoxTrot Professional Search Software for Mac

I have sometimes struggled to comb through several decades of legal research (as well as science and philosophy research) on my iMac 4tb hard drive. I've used Apple Spotlight's multi-faceted document search function over the years and it is often quite helpful. Today, however, I learned about FoxTrot Professional Search. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to pinpoint documents, images, spreadsheets and mail in dozens of ways, including proximity searches and tailor-made search strings with exceptions. You can apply complicated search requests to multiple indices on your main HD, as well as external drives (I've got another 3+ TB of data on my external drive. I've been exploring the parameters of FoxTrot for a couple of hours now and I highly recommend it. $100 per workstation. I hope this helps somebody out there . . .

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