"Undoubtedly libraries are a good thing. The access and training that we provide for technology isn't offered by any other public service (largely because public services are rapidly becoming a dirty word in this gilded age of decadence and austerity), and without our services it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a significant dimming.

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this… [lengthy case study]

So that little melodrama right there is every minute of every day at the public library…The digital divide isn't just access, but also ability, and quality of information, , and the common dignity of having equity of participation in our increasingly digital culture."

"We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives…

I think that we are generally not very good at making decisions. Mostly, things just happen. And there are some very creative human individuals who provide the sparks to drive that process. History is unpredictable, so the important thing is to stay adaptable. When you go to an unknown island, you don’t go with concrete expectations of what you might find there. Evolution and innovation work like the human immune system: There is a library of possible responses to viruses. The body doesn’t plan ahead trying to predict what the next threat is going to be, it is trying to be ready for anything."

"The people in the tumblr aren’t demanding to bring democracy into the workplace via large-scale unionization, much less shorter work days and more pay. They aren’t talking the language of mid-twentieth century liberalism, where everyone puts on blindfolds and cuts slices of pie to share. The 99% looks too beaten down to demand anything as grand as “fairness” in their distribution of the economy. There’s no calls for some sort of post-industrial personal fulfillment in their labor – very few even invoke the idea that a job should “mean something.” It’s straight out of antiquity – free us from the bondage of our debts and give us a basic ability to survive."

"Question: Hey Nonexpert, my girlfriend drags me to IKEA almost every weekend and it’s driving me crazy. What should I tell her? –Brent Flagg<br />
Answer: There is no known treatment for IKEA addiction. The best you can do is learn to survive…

IKEA WALKTHROUGH v2.3.1…

IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized."

"Art is fundamentally a survival device of the species. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so persistent. It wouldn’t be in every culture. We wouldn’t know about it…

How does art help you survive? It helps us survive by making us attentive. In a simplistic way, when you go past a forest and you look at it and you say, ‘that looks just like Cézanne.’ And you realize Cézanne has made you see the reality of the forest in a way that you never could have seen before. He’s made you attentive. Every work of art that you care about makes us attentive. And if it doesn’t do that it ain’t art."

"In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?<br />
<br />
The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?" [Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/deWaal-t.html?pagewanted=all ]

"Chilean health officials are seeking advice from Nasa on how the 33 miners trapped underground can remain sane and healthy while rescue efforts continue.<br />
<br />
The men appear to be healthy and optimistic but are likely to be confined in a tiny shelter 688 metres underground for up to four months while relief crews bore an extraction shaft.<br />
<br />
According to officials at the Chilean health ministry, conditions in the chamber are similar to those faced by submarine crews or astronauts on the international space station.<br />
<br />
Rescue workers have now started delivering food, water and oxygen to the trapped men, and a communications system has been installed. The first package contained rehydration tablets and a high-energy glucose gel to help the miners' digestive systems.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, doctors and psychologists are trying to safeguard the miners' mental wellbeing by keeping them informed and busy."

"in view of the advancing climate change, the exhibition 'climate capsules: means of surviving disaster' poses the question: 'how do we want to live in the future?' and draws attention to the socio-political consequences of coexistence under new climatic conditions. in relation to the issue that politicians are hesitant to enforce strict measures for climate protection and that citizens are very sluggish about altering their habits, the change appears inevitable. the world community is accordingly confronted with the challenge of investigating various possible means of adapting to climate change. this exhibition brings together historical and current climate-related models, concepts, strategies, experiments and utopias from the areas of design, art, architecture and urban development – pursuing not the aim of stopping climate change, but envisioning means of survival after disaster has struck."

"When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs & playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, & severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, & when your rebellion ended in suffering & failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.

"1. Drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive. Your greatest risk of death comes from a motor vehicle accident. Despite all the data from the government on crash test safety, I can say unequivocally that in a 2-car accident, the person in the larger car always fairs better. ... 3. Do not road cycle or jog on public roads/roadsides. This is self-evident. ... 9. If you are retirement age and plan on moving to a new home…think twice. The stress pushes many seniors over the edge. If you do, buy an existing house. I have lost count of the number of retirees that have died of heart attacks while going through the stress of custom-building their retirement dream home. ... 11. If you are in any personal or professional relationship that exhausts you or otherwise causes your recurrent distress, then end the relationship immediately."

"Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks's success?"

""The thrust of [The Pale King] is an attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium & boredom & repetition & familiarity that life is made of & through that to find a path to joy & art & everything that matters. Wallace has set himself the task of making a moving & joyful book out of the matter of life that most writers veer away from as hard as they can. & what he left of it is heartbreakingly full & beautiful & deep. He was looking at how one survives.”...Pressed for more details, Pietsch cites a commencement speech that Wallace gave at Kenyon in 2005, which he says is "very much a distillation" of the novel's material. "The really important kind of freedom involves attention & awareness & discipline, & being able truly to care about other people & to sacrifice for them over & over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom...The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, & lost, some infinite thing."

"Childhood is a branch of cartography... Most great stories of adventure ... come furnished with a map... traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city ... is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, ... become as lost as one possibly can. ... our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it. What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? ... Should I send my children out to play? ... Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with? Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?"

"OLPC XO ($400)

"I particularly like Jason's "10 specific things you can do" section. In that section he urges entrepreneurs to get focused, get better, get leaner, and ultimately to get profitable. That's spot on."

"What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the to

"The major hopeful element he sees is that cultural evolution can move very quickly at times. The "Soviet Union disappeared overnight. The liberation of women is a profound cultural shift that occurs in decades. Facing dire times, we need to understand ho

List of outrageous (for then, not all now) scenarios imagined by Kevin Kelly & Brian Eno in 1993 including several some school related: "American education works" "Schools abandon attempt to teach 3 Rs" "Schools completely abandon divisions based on age"

"So if the typical person today couldn't hack it in 1000 AD (I agree that we probably can't) What is the furthest back someone from today could go and have a fighting chance to make ends meet?"

"How would you survive if suddenly transported back to 1000 AD? Leave your suggestions for survival in the comments." Kottke continues this conversation: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/06/time-travel-bac.html

"Harlequins contained kind of information Jody might have chosen to get from encyclopedia, if she’d had one at home...showed her ‘how “normal” people behaved & treated each other.’”...kind of Minimum Nutritional Value in form of facts & glimps

"Readers, do you have any other tips? Is there any way that Londenio can leverage his knowledge of modernity (he is, by the way, a marketing professor) into socially valuable outputs? Would prattling on about sanitation and communicable diseases do him an

"I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don’t share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad."

"In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul."

"If you’re serious about putting any such bag together, though, and intend to rely on it for real, please please please consider the following:"

"How to predict consequences; read; distinguish truth from fiction; empathize; be creative; communicate clearly; learn; stay healthy; value yourself; live meaningfully" - resonse to Guy Kawasaki's 'ten things you should learn this school year'

+ "From a Sarajevo War Survivor: Experiencing horrible things that can happen in a war - death of parents and friends, hunger and malnutrition, endless freezing cold, fear, sniper attacks."

"A disaster simulation game from the UN/ISDR"

"EXTREMES OF OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM ABOUT THE HUMAN FUTURE"

"After the fall of post-industrial civilization, humans will transform into comfortably numb spiritually nomads (the "navigators"), they will wear their high-tech home on their backs and be mentally and materially equipped to survive in a landscape reconf

"MAN’S first cities were built to protect people from the ravages of climate change, a conference was told yesterday."

"This is ideal for anyone who wants to have the essential survival gear along each time they head into the field. Everything fits in the Altoids tin (above). It fulfills all the component groups (see “Make Your Own,” last slide) except for shelter and