From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
Europeans drink water for what’s in it, for its minerality, while Americans tend to drink water for what’s not in it.
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Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
From Douglas Rushkoff’s “Faith = Illness: Why I’ve had it with religious tolerance“:
When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn’t really screw anything up [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, religion | Comments Off
From danah boyd’s “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide“:
Culture is the set of values, norms and artifacts that influence people’s lives and worldview. Culture is embedded in material objects and in conceptual frameworks about how the world works. …
People are a part of multiple cultures - the most obvious of which are constructed [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Ben Jones’s “Benblog“:
That is our challenge, unique in the cosmos, to know that our own brief existence is simply a moment in time, and to experience that breath in the universe with a smile, knowing that we will fade once again into the oneness, floating someday, cosmic dust in a snowflake, minerals floating the [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, overheard | Comments Off
From “Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability“:
In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. …
Relativity says that there is no privileged, “objective” viewpoint for certain observations. … Now, if things move relative to each other, then obviously [...]
Posted on March 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
"There is nothing absolute in the theoretical value of political institutions," Tocqueville wrote. "Their efficiency depends almost always on the original circumstances and the social conditions of the people [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, politics | Comments Off
