I was talking with my son about science fiction of the past and how many of the icons, images and tools of those old stories and TV shows have showed up, or had an effect on the design of what we have today – the Star Trek communicator and the flip phone, for example. When I saw this video today on Wimp.com, I felt as if I have seen a glimpse of something that will be common place probably shortly after my life, or perhaps even before I die.

I read, and admire, the new philosophy and research being done on embodied cognition and suspect that if we externalize how we come to have concepts, that this will have as much impact on us as externalizing our memory did when we figured out how to code words and meaning using signs, and then later when we figured out how to spread our sets of signs through the book and the printing press and, of course, much later, through the internet. Each of these profoundly impactful changes works partly because they externalize something we already do – externalizing our language, translating sound and concept into signs that can be transported over much vaster distances and time than can the simple speaking voice and memory codified like in epic or story, once told orally to those around, but now told to a vastly increased audience.

Anyway, watch this and see if the embodied character of the invention gives you the same feeling of being clairvoyant.

via Wimp

The ingenuity of life is just phenomenal.

via Wimp

Flatland was one of my very favourite books as a kid. Seeing Sagan speak about it was wonderful.

via wimp.com

The poet Robinson Jeffers developed a concept called inhumanism. The idea is to shift the metaphorical center of the universe away from what it is to be human to the larger non-human world — in other words, to be able to appreciate the startling beauty of existence human beings need to be able to recognize our limited role, and therefore, our actual place in the greater organization of all-that-is.

That’s all good as far as I am concerned. The problem is that in much of Jeffers’ work there is still that moral stain of “what should be.” Morality, a human invention to meet our evolutionary needs, is not inhuman.  Judging our place in all-that-is through the lens of what-should-be falls short of the idea of booting us out of the center of the universe.
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