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Not sure how I went so far without coming across this concept, it is an ancient one: Arete.
Having run across it – it really is my favorite word in the world.
Some things about it:
I simply love this word and what it represents. It is an aspiration and symbol for what is important in life (personally speaking).
Enjoy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete
is a concept in ancient Greek thought that, in its most basic sense, refers to “excellence” of any kind.[1] The term may also mean “moral virtue”.[1] In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential.
The term from Homeric times onwards isn’t gender specific. Homer applies the term to both the Greek and Trojan heroes as well as major female figures, such as Penelope, the wife of Greek hero Odysseus. In the Homeric poems, Arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often with effectiveness. The person of Arete is of the highest effectiveness; they use all of their faculties—strength, bravery, and wit—to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, Arete involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans.
In some contexts, Arete is explicitly linked with human knowledge, where the expressions “virtue is knowledge” and “Arete is knowledge” are used interchangeably. The highest human potential is knowledge, and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity. If Arete is knowledge and study, the highest human knowledge is knowledge about knowledge itself. In this light, the theoretical study of human knowledge, which Aristotle called “contemplation”, is the highest human ability and happiness.[2]
If you were to study gravity, you’d want nearly a perfect Zero-G enviroment and then introduce 2 spheres. It would give the ideal experimental result by removing all other noisy variables that you’d find in the real world.
Enter the Lemon…
If one were to think about how multiple items are produced and purchased. I suggest that the 3 citrus fruits Oranges / Lemons / Limes offer a nearly perfect study.
Just a thought but wanted to suggest… Citrus fruits to study substitution effects for producers based on demand.
**it also appears that many other fruits can be grafted onto a tree (up to 40 types from some articles) so interesting to consider**
Sketched a quick idea based on the idea of the classic model 500 telephone, (on a watch). Here it is.
Love my Royal KMM.. (as many of you know, or could easily guess).
Here is the user manual, years from now, maybe this one of the extant redundant copies.
Royal KMM Typewriter – Manual (PDF)
Cheers’
A photo taken of the Village Vanguard has been up for several months now on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Vanguard
About as sweet as the sound of Coleman Hawkins in Body and Soul.
The watchmaker analogy as it is known, made by William Paley states that a complex design, such as an eye, implies a designer….
For whatever reason, this thought popped into my head one day while in the shower*.
The role of ‘feature level’ in discussing how a machine is naturally selected and evolves is critical. The order of ‘features’ can be inferred by deduction and something which I didn’t really get until well.. today.
The Gist:
Eyes, or other specialized organs must of developed very very early on in the morph-history of species with eyes. The proto-species where eyes developed must of used ‘eyes’ in a more general purpose. Think protists, sun-sensitive algae etc, maybe even slugs.. I’m not sure of the biological details, but they are irrelevant to the argument. That these innovations come from something less specialized, something more crude and general in application on early prototypes. You can even take something fully specialized and re-appropriate it, say a dishwasher as a propeller for a motorboat, but the initial will be less specialized than later iterations. The novel part (to me) is that you can deduce the order of innovations.
Certain features cannot exist without the supporting base functionality.
The analogy and explanation is easier to see when looking at a car made with rain tread tires on it. We might look at the wheels of a car and see the treads perfectly made, designed to pump water away from the wheels and infer that this complexity can only arrive by a designer, but it doesn’t really belie the history of the tire (made pneumatic by michelin), the tires and bending wood technology before that, spokes before that, discs and ball and round logs before that. The idea which must of come for all bikes, cars or trains is the wheel which evolved very early on in the ‘protospecies’ / a more primitive preceding model.
The feature ‘richness’ of certain abilities allows us to infer which modification came first and set an order, by logic. That is very cool.
*Footnote: Showers are prodigious places for random ideas. Most people would agree with that. My theory about this is that no other place is as isolating or makes you stand stationary with little else to do for 10-15 minutes a day.
Some Photos of Disrupt 2012, SF – where Zuckerberg made an appearance to speak.
It was interesting, I learned a lot, most notably about the media news cycle but also (i think) about some of the in-the-room vibe of one M. Zuckerberg.
Here is a person who could of cashed out many years ago. Empirically, 1 B$ is worth less to him and doesn’t make him tick as much as influence/legacy on tech/people’s perceptions.
I’ll write more later, but here were the views from San Francisco.
Zuckerberg not talking about the FB phone with Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington
The Warm Green-LCD glow of 10,000 laptops in 1 audience.
I’ve uploaded an omnigraffle stencil called user groups. You can download it here.
http://graffletopia.com/stencils/903
Enjoy!
…If you had a parent living in a house, who locked their children up in the basement, provided no school, no health, no care, no nursing, allowing a dank basement as the only place to be, living in derelict conditions. Almost all of society would condemn this as unfit parenting and yet it is what ‘America the parent’ permits collectively.
Growing up in Canada – through ‘Canadian Eyes’ – it is something which i see daily and still cannot (and will not) get used to; even we in Canada are not that far ahead.
Having sons and daughters of the Nation – not growing up to contribute to society (and in fact stain it) seems an unwise social policy.
When the cost of 15 years of health and education, which pays such dividends, and when it is implemented in earnest.
Incarceration costs society not just socially but materially 60k+ a year each person. With 5% of the population we hold 25% of the world’s prisoners. Read this. That is much higher than any healthcare expense year over year.
Better to have people in society than out of it.
Just my opinion on the matter.