Image by stevegarfield via Flickr John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, for Vice President is so out-of-wack with his campaign emphasis on his ‘experience’ as to be laughable. It’s almost disrespectful to the office of the Vice President if that is possible. Tina Fey would have at least a sense of humor about the absurdity of it all. Is America really going to fall for this charade?
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It was an amazing and thrilling speech Obama gave last night at the closing of the Democratic National Convention. It was also a speech full of powerful sound clips that will resonate in the social and traditional media for years to come. When Pat Buchanan and the Rev. Al Sharpton are both gushing over what a fantastic speech it was, you know that it pushed a lot of political and emotional buttons embedded very deeply in the common American psyche. We heard many speakers over the last few days with many of the same ideas being tossed out to the crowd. But, as they say, execution and timing is everything. History is being made here. Damn, history is being made everywhere this year.
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There’s a debate in literary circles as to what kind of a guy was Franz Kafka. A recent biographical description sees him as an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, engaged three times, liked by his employer, promoted at work and other similar sorts of normal characteristics. Oh yes and he was author of seven books. This view flies in the face of his legend: mystery, alienation and an auger of the then emerging totalitarianism the world was to experience.
Now it seems that dogs are conjured up everywhere in Kafka’s writings. Michael Löwy writes, for example:
For Kafka, the dog represents an ethical category — if not a metaphysical one. The dog is actually all those who submit slavishly to the authorities whoever they may be.
In this image, he is pictured with a dog. And most times a dog is, well, just a dog. Yet this is Kafka, and maybe a dog is something else altogether — as implied by his rather famous quote in my graphic above. Even this quote, which touches on some sort of philosophical and spiritual reverence for dogs, is misleading once you put it in literary context -it’s a dog speaking about his own dog nature.
At the end of his life, Kafka wrote a short-story, oddly enough called ‘Investigations of a Dog’, where he takes us through a dog’s search for meaning, which in dog terms, eventually equals food.
“I know that it is not one of the virtues of dogdom to share with others food that one has once gained possession of.”
The dog investigator asks, but dogs, he finds, admit nothing because the world of dogs, he discovers, is “pledged to silence”.
“Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.”
So what can we ask the dog about the man in the photograph ? Was he a good friend to you? Did he feed you well, take you out for exercise? Did he talk to you, reveal any of his hopes or demons? Were you listening?
Yes we could ask the dog these questions and more, and try to get clarity on the debate over what kind of man Kafka really was. But the legend, I’m afraid, has beat us to the punch. Dogs, it seems, keep their confidences, and their food, to themselves.
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Image via WikipediaHere are a few more gems from Scott Berkun’s book The Myths of Innovation. Seems I just can’t put this down.
Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face.
The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from people they hope to help.
No matter how amazing an idea is, until proven otherwise, its imagined benefits will pale in comparison to the real, and nonimagined , fear of change.
The future never enters the present as a finished product, but that doesn’t stop people from expecting it to arrive that way.
Talent is only as good as the environment it’s in.
Good managers of innovation recognize that they are in primary control over the environment, and it’s up to them to create a place for talented people to do their best work.
The difference betwenn success and failure is most often relentlessness, not talent or charisma. . .
And my favorite,
The best ideas don’t always win . . .
From Freeman Dyson‘s Imagined Worlds:
Successful technologies are pulled along by the needs of the buyers, and not pushed along by the ideologies of the sellers.
And this is true no matter how current, attractive or hip that ideology may be. But what about when ‘ideology’ and buyers combine forces on a technology? Is there an ideology alive and well living in the core of the Apple?
One can never think of DNA in quite the same way after reading Judith Roof’s book, The Poetics of DNA. Here are a few morsels for your consideration:
. . . DNA is not simply a chemical active in biochemical processes. It stands at the tip of an iceberg of beliefs, ideas, and concepts about how life and science work, what we can do with what we know, and the forms knowledge can take.
. . . it [DNA] has become a symbolic repository of epistemological, ideological and conceptual change.
The evolution of DNA-based genetic science accompanied the development of digital computers and theories of cybernetics, and the emergence of the contemporary category of the postmodern. The correlation of thought and molecule suggests that the history of DNA has been a saga of things falling into place.
DNA’s analogies encourage a hyperbolic sense of agency and control as well as a host of Western ideologies about identity, gender and difference.
The paradox — that representations of science render scientific facts less “true” (or more culturally relative) while the figures of their representation become scientifically operative — is a paradox only within the larger realm of cultural dynamics.
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An excerpt from a WIRED interview by Stewart Brand with Freeman Dyson on the snobbery of PhDs when it comes to inventors. Priceless and true.
SB: Is it the scientists who are putting them down?
FD: Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.
SB: Are there other kinds?
FD: There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.
SB: Is that a weird British hangover?
FD: It’s even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.
SB: How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?
FD: I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs.
SB: Are those getting PhDs rewarded in any other way than as an honor?
FD: It’s much more than an honor. It’s a ticket to a job.
SB: So is anybody buying this? Are PhDs being abolished or disregarded?
FD: No. The stranglehold has gotten even tighter over the years. It’s become essentially like the MD – with much less justification. It’s simply a barrier you have to climb over before you can make a career, and it’s being imposed on more and more jobs. At even the smallest liberal arts college, nowadays, they say with pride, “All of our faculty have PhDs.” Many of the best teachers are thrown out because they don’t have a PhD. It’s a paper qualification that poisons the whole field.
The Berkman Center at Harvard hosted today live webcast by Chris Conley on issues related to transparency and digital surveillance as part of his project on the ethical implications of emerging technologies. Both topics are health care issues as well and I’ve covered them before on this blog in a number of posts. See for example here and here.
A brief description of the webcast lays out the challenge:
Government surveillance of Internet activities – like most law enforcement practices – is designed to prevent harmful activities through two mechanisms: by identifying persons who are planning or are likely to plan such activities, and by discouraging others from joining such groups or planning such activities. In the case of surveillance, these two mechanisms of preventing activity are often perceived as being in conflict: effective surveillance requires secrecy, whereas deterrence requires publicity.
What struck about his presentation was how similar some of his advice is (as to where we go with public disclosure of surveillance practices) to what we hear from health care advocates, that to the extent possible, it must be self-disclosing, conservative, and harmless in-and-of itself.
His presentation is definitely worth a look see.
From the Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan on trying to fight the despair in following the twists and turns in the campaign:
The only way past this is through it. And it’s not just up to Obama; it’s up to those of us who see him as a vehicle for real change.
From one of my favorite blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:
I’ve been struck by how calm Obama seems in the face of all this Clinton drama. It helps to recall that he never expected this to be easy or anything but extremely close. And he’s still ahead. And still the overwhelming favorite. Against the biggest brand in Democratic politics as a freshman senator. WIth a little perspective, the calm makes more sense.
Obama’s the only grownup in the room when it comes to this election.
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