Great Geek Manual

(via porco-voador)

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

- Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 1815.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

- Mark Twain

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

- Edward R. Murrow, upon receiving the “Family of Man” Award, 1964.

evangotlib:

FTW!

I don’t know about you, but since discovering the TED series, I’ve been completely addicted.  I find this lecture particularly interesting because it deals with one of the more esoteric ways in which mathematics permeates our lives.

I wish high school math classes had been more like this.

…the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young…

The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around…

When one experiences cyberspace as this extension of one’s mind – as a transitional space between self and other – the door is thrown wide open for all sorts of fantasies and transference reactions to be projected into this space. Under ideal conditions, people use this as an opportunity to better understand themselves, as a path for exploring their identity as it engages the identity of other people. Under less than optimal conditions, people use this psychological space to simply vent or…