Bryan Appleyard rails against transhumanism:
"What I like about transhumanists is their naked, unapologetic radicalism. Like Mustapha Mond debating with the Savage in Brave New World, they simply ask, what's so great about human life as it now is? If, for example, human immortality makes all your art meaningless, so be it, Shakespeare was all predicated on suffering we no longer have to endure."
Transhumanism is a creed I have some sympathy for,even if their proponents seem to be more occupied by the gadgetry and style of it than the philosophical implications
But I like to think that humanity, immortal or not, will have the capacity to understand the suffering that Shakespeare predicated his work on. If mortality is to be such a rare thing in the future, then our future selves may well be affected far more by the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet than we are now in a world where death is an ever-present reality.
Ultimately the only thing that will truly, utterly make Shakespeare not just meaningless, but futile, is death. Death of the species makes all art pointless while a boundless, extended life makes Shakespeare not only more accessible (Finally, I have time!) but more urgent and stark.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Get rid of the Green Party!
Did David Suzuki, Canada's very own adorable old rascal, call for the end of the Green Party? 2 3
"There shouldn’t be a Green Party"
But wait!
"I really think we’ve got to drive the green agenda so it becomes everyone’s agenda," Suzuki said to an Agora audience of about 150.
"There shouldn’t be a Green Party"
But wait!
"I really think we’ve got to drive the green agenda so it becomes everyone’s agenda," Suzuki said to an Agora audience of about 150.
"But until they understand that, yes, this has got to be the way we all act, it’s going to continue to be a political football.""
So, David Suzuki envisions a day when the Green Party is no longer needed and this counts as a "rebuke" to the Green Party itself? Canadian politics cant be that boring can it?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
At times like this...
I'm bloody glad we have two earnest, boring scottish economists running the country with bags under their eyes and their hair in a shambles.
As opposed to the rosy-cheeked, well-rested, sneering cherubs of the pin-striped, Vivat Bacchus, Islington set that got the world into this mess.
Jasper to Calgary!
An exhilirating, LONG drive through the mountains, foothills and plains of Alberta. Calgary by way of Jasper, the Columbia Ice-Fields, Lake Louise and Banff. Photos when I get them.
One quarter of the return journey, in one of my favourite Youtubes:
Watch the hi-def version here, always wanted to film the journey from Stoke to Chester...not sure as that was quite as exciting as the routes I drive nowadays though.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Averting Human Extinction
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
"The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct."
"Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain unrecognized.)"
And citing NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:
"The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species."
I've long considered the Universe a mostly sterile place, and our place in it explicable only by the odds of our being here being only slightly less infinitesimally small than the Universe is huge. We've relied on dumb luck to survive so far, coddled in an evolutionary breathing space between mass-extinction events, our time will run out on Earth and the only fundamental way we can survive is to harness our natural instinct toward curiosity and innovation, we're in a race against the universe.
"The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct."
"Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain unrecognized.)"
And citing NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:
"The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species."
I've long considered the Universe a mostly sterile place, and our place in it explicable only by the odds of our being here being only slightly less infinitesimally small than the Universe is huge. We've relied on dumb luck to survive so far, coddled in an evolutionary breathing space between mass-extinction events, our time will run out on Earth and the only fundamental way we can survive is to harness our natural instinct toward curiosity and innovation, we're in a race against the universe.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Palin the Sportscaster
The VP debate was a pretty drab, empty affair for me, all I got from it was the body-language, and I'm not the only one; Roger Ebert:
"Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo.""
And Jonathan Raban:
"Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness."
I couldnt get the image of Palin the Sportscaster out of my mind. Trained in that infuriating American TV habit of addressing the camera rather than the human-being they are ostensibly talking to. A dead-eyed, condescending and phoney habit I've loathed since I watched British presenters struggle with it during our coverage there of American football.
Palin treated the debate as she would a sportscast, her at-hand clutch of empty sporting cliches replaced with a clutch of empty, trite soundbites about the 'media' or 'hockey-moms' or 'mavericks'.
"Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo.""
And Jonathan Raban:
"Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness."
I couldnt get the image of Palin the Sportscaster out of my mind. Trained in that infuriating American TV habit of addressing the camera rather than the human-being they are ostensibly talking to. A dead-eyed, condescending and phoney habit I've loathed since I watched British presenters struggle with it during our coverage there of American football.
Palin treated the debate as she would a sportscast, her at-hand clutch of empty sporting cliches replaced with a clutch of empty, trite soundbites about the 'media' or 'hockey-moms' or 'mavericks'.
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