The Lil' Zet is a tumblelog.

Being right is overrated.

Doc Searls (via jayparkinsonmd)

It’s true. And you will never hear this from a politician.

What does it mean to think? Can machines think, or only humans? These questions have obsessed computer science since the 1950s, and grow more important every day as the internet canopy closes over our heads, leaving us in the pregnant half-light of the cybersphere.

Executives in the spring program also heard that some young people had started leaving college to set up their own synthetic biology labs on the cheap. Such people resemble computer tinkerers from a generation earlier, attendees note, except now they’re fiddling with the genetic code of organisms rather than software.

“Biology is moving outside of the traditional education sphere,” says Andrew Hessel, a former research operations manager at Amgen, during a lecture here. “The students are teaching their professors. This is happening faster than the computer evolved. These students don’t have newsletters. They have Web sites.”

The opposite of “sharing information” isn’t “keeping secrets.” Sometimes, it’s just “knowing when to shut up.

…distraction is nothing new. Over a century ago, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described his harassed peers. “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand,” he wrote in 1887, “even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market”. Yet Nietzsche didn’t blame clocks or markets. “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” he wrote in his Untimely Meditations, “because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.