Monthly Archives: May 2011
Daily Quote – Theodor Adorno
"A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it."
Daily Quote – Mortimer Adler
"If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess."
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they’re not worried. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” they declare. “Only if you’re doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don’t deserve to keep it private.”
The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the “most common retort against privacy advocates.” The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an “all-too-common refrain.” In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.
The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: “I don’t mind people wanting to find out things about me, I’ve got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government’s] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!”
The argument is not of recent vintage. One of the characters in Henry James’s 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: “If these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing.”
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
Daily Quote – Robert Adamson
"It's just that if you're not disruptive everything seems to be repeated endlessly – not so much the good things but the bland things – the ordinary things – the weaker things get repeated- the stronger things get suppressed and held down and hidden."
Paperwork Explosion Film
In 1967, Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new technology, the MT/ST, a primitive word processor. The film would explore how the MT/ST would help control the massive amount of documents generated by a typical business office. Paperwork Explosion, produced in October 1967, is a quick-cut montage of images and words illustrating the intensity and pace of modern business. Henson collaborated with Raymond Scott on the electronic sound track.
Paperwork Explosion
Word processors were going to liberate us from paperwork: “Machines should work, people should think.” But neither ideal is often enough the case. Now what?
“The government’s laws and orders will be transmitted to the furthest reaches of the social order with the speed of electric fluid.”1 Such was the promise made by the chemist, industrialist, and minister of the interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1800. It could be said to signal a shift in the West’s way of thinking about official recordkeeping. The idea of the paperless office was born.
Media historians have long recognized the astounding versatility, portability, and durability of paper, which is in many respects the ideal material support. As a corollary, the paperless office has been dismissed as a “myth” by social scientists, information engineers, and corporate consultants alike, who predict that paper’s many affordances will continue to make it indispensable.2 And a myth it is, but not (or at least not only) in the simple sense typically employed in these contexts. The paperless office should also be interpreted as a myth in the Lévi-Straussian sense of the term, that is to say, an imaginary resolution to real contradictions.
http://www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/articles/paperwork-explosion.html#
The Tale Of The Rose
We project on to roses our dreams and our stories, our emotional, spiritual and sexual selves.
The rose was made for symbolism, metaphor, allusion. Its beautiful flowers – in the wild, each bearing the symbolically charged number of five petals – bloom alongside vicious thorns. Sight, touch, smell and taste – when petals are distilled into rose water or rose oil – are all captivated (or challenged) by this extraordinary plant. If only sound is missing, then that is a gap rapidly filled, as Jennifer Potter makes clear in this sweeping and sure-footed survey of thousands of years of rose cultivation, by the long playlist of songs in which roses appear. She resists compiling a catalogue (but I can recommend it as a High Fidelity-style parlour game). As a result, the story of rose culture – in all senses of the word – is a tale well worth telling. Not that Potter’s task is an easy one. She presents “two interlinked stories”: that of the physical transformation from the simplicity of the wild briar into the sophistication of the garden rose; and the cultural metamorphoses that the rose simultaneously experienced as the centuries passed. But these stories are far from unilinear, and it has taken a steady hand to find a way to shape them into five sections with a broadly chronological feel which Potter encourages us to “enter at will”, taking the chapters in any order we might choose.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7175082.ece
Communiqué 
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