“The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses). The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.” — Edge: TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY By David Gelernter
[video]
[video]
Kickstarter - 8-Bit Cities: real-world maps that look like 80s video games
Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones (via Awful Library Books)
“The most shocking result of having researched the causes of the financial crisis for the last year and a half is this discovery: economists have no compunctions about answering empirical questions, such as what caused the specific crisis of 2008, with general theoretical models, whether macro- or micro- in nature, that may or may not have any applicability to the actual historical event at hand. The possibility that a good model may not be applicable in a specific circumstance never seems to cross their minds.” — Causes of the Crisis: From Diversity to Consensus, and Austrian Economics
(by twistedbunny)
(via noonedonatespurple)
reinventtherobot: ddubbs: fuckyeahtheuniverse: langer:
From a collection of “hate mail from third graders” sent to the director of the Hayden Planetarium, via NOVA.
(via unicornology)
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
