Fire and Knowledge

Jeremy posted this great quote from James Madison about how war is an enemy of liberty. With current US military spending over $1,200,000,000,000 dollars^src (51% of our taxes), we had better take note.

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

The goal of education-as-job-training, which is now the dominant pedagogical idea, is a high professional salary. Young people are being told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not everything. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 58

Time magazine gave one of its awards for the best invention of the year in 2001 to “Slugbot,” a two-foot-high machine that patrols gardens using an image sensor, beaming read light, to pinpoint slugs, which emit a different a different infrared signal than worms or snails. Slugbot then uses a carbon fiber arm to pick up the slugs and store them in a fermentation tank, which turns the animals into electricity. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a flesh-eating robot that can support itself.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 75

There’s a reverse Moore’s law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

–Jaron Lanier in Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 70

Then [old Lillian] introduced me to [her date,] the Navy guy. His name was Commander Blop or something. He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you.

–Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), p. 113

So how do you create an idea that spreads? Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody. The everybody products are all taken… The way to break through to the mainstream is to target a niche instead of a huge market.

–Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, p. 31

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

–John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), 209

Reading speed increases to the extent that you reduce the number and duration of fixations per line. That is the verifiable science of speed reading in one sentence.

The process is simple. First, draw a vertical line down the center of five text pages, then draw two additional vertical lines 2” to either side of each center line. Practice fixating only at the points where these vertical lines intersect the horizontal lines of text, then progress to unmarked pages of text. By training peripheral vision and consolidating eye movement, you will be reading at least three-times faster than before.

–Tim Ferriss “The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload and Triple Productivity in 24 Hours” (pdf), p. 5