In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson presents three images of duration. The first is of two spools, one unrolling to represent the continuous flow of ageing as one feels oneself moving toward the end of one's life-span, the other rolling up to represent the continuous growth of memory which, for Bergson, equals consciousness. No two successive moments are identical, for the one will always contain the memory left by the other. A person with no memory might experience two identical moments but, Bergson says, that person's consciousness would thus be in a constant state of death and rebirth, which he identifies with unconsciousness.[9] The image of two spools, however, is of a homogeneous and commensurable thread, whereas, according to Bergson, no two moments can be the same, hence duration is heterogeneous.

"Pragmatists believe that design trade-offs should be resolved based on concrete, project-specific requirements and constraints. They view the indiscriminate application of the same design patterns to widely different problems as a sign of dogmatic thinking, not as disciplined design. Absent specific requirements and constraints, pragmatists prefer to use the simplest possible design. What “simplest” means is again very context dependent. It may mean a design which fits the technologies, frameworks, or tools used the best.
You might argue that Pragmatic REST is not a separate design philosophy since its practitioners freely borrow and mix design approaches from all the other schools. The “pragmatic” label best describes APIs which do not fit neatly into any of the other categories. There are quite a few of these. If you look at the collection of the Google APIs you will discover characteristics of Hypermedia APIs, Data APIs, and Web APIs, but not in their purest forms."

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

Long a favorite saying of mine, one for which I couldn't find a satisfactory URL.

There is also a variation on this that says there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Values are only meaningful if they are lived every day, if they are put into tangible action by the management team down day in and day out. As I get older I have a hard time with long list of things (where long is 5) and the product manager in me reminds me that having short and sweet priorities is paramount So, after years of working in, leading, studying teams and organizations, I think that if I had a company on my own again I would boil the company values down to two. Ready? Here they go: Care Kick Butt

"This series of vignettes is based on a talk I gave on October 27, 2009, at UCLA, as part of the Mobile Media Lecture Series, organized by Casey Reas. It’s mostly about the current state of the digital world (as I see it), and some thoughts about what that world's future could be."

"I choose Unix over anything else because I believe that the respect for the systems administrators, programmers and end-users that lies at the core of the Unix philosophy remains our best hope for creating computer systems that will promote and encourage free expression, liberalism and humanism. Unix is the operating system that most clearly expresses the values of the liberal enlightenment that form the basis of my own personal philosophy, and I will continue to use and support it."

So does any technology lurch forward on its own inertia as "a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow", in the words of technology critic Langdon Winner, or do we have clear free-will choice in the sequence of technological change, a stance that makes us (individually or corporately) responsible for each step?

"There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. | Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. | There is no editing stage. | Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it."

"I have read and heard a great deal of advice on how to ask good questions of students, but nobody has ever told me how to get students to ask good questions. Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it strikes me that if we are ultimately trying to create "active lifelong learners" with "critical thinking skills" and an ability to "think outside the box," it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions."

"These four pillars of knowledge cannot be anchored solely in one phase in a person's life or in a single place. There is a need to re-think when in people's lives education should be provided, and the fields that such education should cover. The periods and fields should complement each other and be interrelated in such a way that all people can get the most out of their own specific educational environment all through their lives." Learning to know, to do, to live together, to be

fight it

"Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters."

the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?"

Q: Favorite Bucky Fuller quote? A: "Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood." (via Preoccupations)

a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess

How philosophies of teaching pair with technology approaches

Excellent list of Key Learning Principles on page 7. From a Grant Wiggins pdf.

The Edge question for 2007 WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

At the end of 16 months, Compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities

"We are the means by which we create meaning, our choices (or lack of choice) are a part of the unfolding pattern of the world in which we live and we need to take responsibility for them, that way lies freedom."

polluting and buying carbon credits is hypocritical in the same way that buying groceries instead of having a garden is

pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote

"the most influential scholar you've never heard of."

1988 docudrama about "the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter". It was created by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos. Features interviews with Doug ... all » Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. Dennett also stars as himself.

Stallman's greatest achievement, the GNU General Public License (GPL), has bestowed many benefits on users and developers alike, not all of which were necessarily foreseen at the time of its creation.

Collecting "imponderables" or interesting unanswered questions is one of my hobbies

obtained through a direct causal (experience-based) interaction between a person and the object that person is perceiving.

Therefore, what seems to us more important, more painful, and more unendurable is really not what is more important, more painful, and more unendurable but merely that which is closer to home. Everything distant which, for all its moans and muffled cries,

The Way to the End of Suffering

Hint: it's about time

the way Buddhists perceive the world, the four main teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhist view of the self, the relationship between this self and the various ways in which it responds to the world, the Buddhist path and the final goal

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simu

These koans, or parables, were translated into English from a book called the Shaseki-shu (Collection of Stone and Sand), written late in the thirteenth century by the Japanese Zen teacher Muju (the "non-dweller"), and from anecdotes of Zen monks