self-sustaining

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:I’ve always wanted to be self-sustaining and able to grow my own food. All I lack is land and skill. ~ Susan Juby,

2:The market is the creator of social wealth and the wellspring of self-sustaining economic development. ~ Li Keqiang,

3:NASA ‘working definition’ of life, for example: life is ‘a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’. ~ Nick Lane,

4:And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality . ~ Hans Hofmann,

5:I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life. ~ Charles Stross,

6:Universal education is not only a moral imperative but an economic necessity, to pave the way toward making many more nations self-sufficient and self-sustaining. ~ Desmond Tutu,

7:Efforts to ease regulations and reform the nation's tax system have helped put this self-sustaining recovery on track, The numbers prove our policies have not been wrong. ~ Shinzo Abe,

8:If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer,

9:Pleonastico perché lo sviluppo è già di per sé una self-sustaining growth ("crescita autosostenuta") [...]. Ossimoro, perché lo sviluppo in realtà non è né sostenibile né durevole. ~ Serge Latouche,

10:It is a glorious occupation, vivifying and self-sustaining in its nature, to struggle with ignorance, and discover to the inquiring minds of the masses the clear cerulean blue of heavenly truth. ~ Hosea Ballou,

11:I don't enjoy the work that I do. It's just that it's not self-sustaining anymore. The way that I like to make records - they're expensive records to make and just can't afford to do it anymore. ~ Natalie Merchant,

12:I think buildings should imitate ecological systems. Ecological systems in nature before we had human beings you know interfere with them exist in a state of stasis - they are self-supporting, self-sustaining. ~ Ken Yeang,

13:A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threads—financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private—knit together into a single, self-sustaining web. ~ David Graeber,

14:As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested. ~ Muhammad Yunus,

15:merely aimed to provide citizens with the basic minimum standard needed to be self-sustaining. Wealth accumulation was permitted and even applauded, as long as it did not disrupt the normal functioning of society at large. ~ Michael Hudson,

16:People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it's self-sustaining. ~ Mick Jagger,

17:We’ll do our business in the East Room. It’s my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again. ~ Stephen King,

18:A flawless, self-sustaining loop, an immaculate system in which trust and cooperation can never take root. Progress becomes impossible, for all strangers are potential enemies, the ‘other’ who must be hunted down until the last bullet is spent. You ~ Rick Yancey,

19:We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living. ~ Richard Dawkins,

20:Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. ~ Jared Diamond,

21:Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe’s urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. ~ Jared Diamond,

22:Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down. ~ Peter Straub,

23:No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. ~ Paul Davies,

24:Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,

25:To me, the most important thing - aside from meeting people's physical needs, whether that's education, health care, clothing, food, a roof over their heads - is changing the mind-set and educating people. And most of all, most important, is empowering people and making them self-sustaining. ~ Madonna Ciccone,

26:I knew how to block out my issues in a sprint, but in marathons I ran out of gas. Consistency became a critical problem. On days that I was inspired, I was unstoppable. But other days I would play bad chess. The time had come for me to learn the science of long-term, healthy, self-sustaining peak performance. ~ Josh Waitzkin,

27:the amygdala itself is a recipient of neuromodulatory inputs means that its processing is also boosted during arousal. As the amygdala drives arousal and arousal in turn drives the amygdala, a self-sustaining reentrant loop is engaged that helps keep the brain and body revved up as long as the threat remains.75 ~ Joseph E LeDoux,

28:For mindfulness is the knowing quality of awareness, the core property of mind itself. It is strengthened by sustaining, and it is self-sustaining. Mindfulness is the field of knowing. When that field is stabilized by calmness and one-pointedness, the arising of the knowing itself is sustained, and the quality of the knowing strengthened. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn,

29:If it costs $1 billion per person, there will be no Mars colony. At around $1 million or $500,000 per person, I think it’s highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony. There will be enough people interested who will sell their stuff on Earth and move. It’s not about tourism. It’s like people coming to America back in the New World days. ~ Ashlee Vance,

30:For every true statement there is an opposite one that is also true; that language and the confines of time lead people to adhere to one fixed belief that does not account for the fullness of the truth. Because nature works in a self-sustaining cycle, every entity carries in it the potential for its opposite and so the world must always be considered complete. ~ Hermann Hesse,

31:It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world. ~ Jim Holt,

32:As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested. The company’s success is judged each year not by the amount of profit generated, but by the number of children who escape malnutrition in that particular year. ~ Muhammad Yunus,

33:stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness—then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good. ~ Ashlee Vance,

34:Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me. ~ Melissa Broder,

35:for many people conversion is simply a matter of aligning their religious life with that of their family, friends, and neighbors who already have joined—thus creating a self-sustaining network of growth. Finally, for many people of privilege and ambition, their abandonment of paganism was a matter of opportunism—many people professed Christianity or were discreet about their paganism in order to gain social and political advantages. ~ Rodney Stark,

36:Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness—then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good. ~ Ashlee Vance,

37:It is the hope of those who work toward the breakout from planet Earth that the establishment of permanent, self-sustaining colonies of humans off-Earth will ... make human life forever unkillable, removing it from the endangered species list, where it now stands on a fragile Earth overarmed with nuclear weapons. Second, the opening of virtually unlimited new land areas in space will reduce territorial pressures and therefore diminish warfare on Earth itself. ~ Gerard K O Neill,

38:Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown. ~ T F Hodge,

39:Most people believe a new idea must be fully baked and ready-for-primetime. That is like saying a newborn child should have a college degree and be self-sustaining on day one. Like children, new ideas need to be nurtured, shaped, and protected. People often hold back ideas since they are not ready to defend sharp criticism. Companies that celebrate "creative sparks" and reserve judgment while ideas mature are the ones that enjoy significantly more creativity and innovation. ~ Josh Linkner,

40:Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science. ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi,

41:She brought close together numerous cell units and, by grouping them into a self-sustaining sphere of co-operation, elaborated a larger unit. It was not a mere agglomeration. The grouping had its caste system in the division of functions and yet an intimate unity of kinship. The creative life summoned a larger army of cells under her command and imparted into them, let us say, a communal spirit that fought with all its might whenever its integrity was menaced. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man,

42:Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos. ~ Martin Rees,

43:Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events. ~ James Lee Burke,

44:The South Koreans built a self-sustaining economy with a cumulative aid input from the US of only $15 billion since 1950 by avoiding confrontation with America and by cooperating with erstwhile enemy Japan. Pakistan received $40 billion in bilateral US aid over the same period. Instead of utilizing aid as a catalyst for indigenous growth, Pakistan has ended up becoming dependent on aid. Donor funding serves as a substitute for revenue generation while wars and terrorism have deterred investment. ~ Husain Haqqani,

45:Warm winds and cold winds charged into the system--the collision of temperatures that keeps a baby spinning, breathing. The goal is to get that rotation to be self-sustaining. It's an art, no doubt, to calibrate your inputs so that you fight off homeostasis, keeping a young storm in that growth state. A tornado farmer is always in pursuit of a paradox: consistent instability. As Estelle and our girls would tell you, if I have one talent, its for this: knowing what a developing storm needs to stay angry, to live on. ~ Karen Russell,

46:I’d have a nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft constructed in Earth’s orbit,” I said. “I’d stock it with a lifetime supply of food and water, a self-sustaining biosphere, and a supercomputer loaded with every movie, book, song, videogame, and piece of artwork that human civilization has ever created, along with a stand-alone copy of the OASIS. Then I’d invite a few of my closest friends to come aboard, along with a team of doctors and scientists, and we’d all get the hell out of Dodge. Leave the solar system and start looking for an extrasolar Earthlike planet. ~ Anonymous,

47:A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine. ~ Ryan Holiday,

48:Ownership is the one thing that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix,” argues the education expert Stefanie Sanford of the College Board. More often than not, she says, when citizens feel a sense of ownership over their country, when teachers feel a sense of ownership over their classrooms, when students feel a sense of ownership over their education, more good things tend to happen than bad. You get outcomes that are much more internally generated and therefore self-sustaining. And where ownership doesn’t exist, where people feel like renters or transients, more bad things tend to happen. When ~ Thomas L Friedman,

49:A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something. ~ Ryan Holiday,

50:We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day,” Musk said. “The thing that’s important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work—in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars—there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you’d need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years. ~ Ashlee Vance,

51:Scholars in South Asian Studies departments and liberal think-tanks see India through a secular lens based on Western ideas of human rights. They deploy subaltern studies and postmodern theories to deconstruct the Indian state as a catastrophe constructed artificially by colonialism, and to show its very nature as oppressive, undemocratic, inherently anti-minority, anti-women and anti-Dalit. They export these models to their Indian counterparts, forming a self-sustaining system. They also feed these visions into media and government hearings. Thus, these two supposedly opposing intellectual streams converge to provide an image of India as a frontier necessitating Western intervention. ~ Rajiv Malhotra,

52:The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. ~ Paul Davies,

53:Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness—then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good.”

If some of the things that Musk says and does sound absurd, that’s because on one level they very much are. On this occasion, for example, Musk’s assistant had just handed him some cookies-and-cream ice cream with sprinkles on top, and he then talked earnestly about saving humanity while a blotch of the dessert hung from his lower lip. ~ Ashlee Vance,

54:Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse. Out of the passions of our clay it rises.

We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived.

We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.

We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty,
when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.

We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received.

We have religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our own heart.

We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is
larger than ourselves. ~ Ralph Helfer,

55:Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by the standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person is forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of greatest importance. Pg. 105 ~ Walter Rodney,

56:The simplest form of nuclear reactor requires no equipment at all. If the right quantity of uranium 235 is gathered in the presence of a neutron moderator—water, for example, or graphite, which slows down the movement of the uranium neutrons so that they can strike one another—a self-sustaining chain reaction will begin, releasing molecular energy as heat. The ideal combination of circumstances required for such an event—a criticality—has even aligned spontaneously in nature: in ancient subterranean deposits of uranium found in the African nation of Gabon, where groundwater acted as a moderator. There, self-sustaining chain reactions began underground two billion years ago, producing modest quantities of heat energy—an average of around 100 kilowatts, or enough to light a thousand lightbulbs—and continued intermittently for as long as a million years, until the available water was finally boiled away by the heat of fission. ~ Adam Higginbotham,

57:By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. ~ John Banville,

58:This necessitated each village be self-supporting and self-sustaining. And, if you looked at 1100’s Europe, you would see that the types of jobs and professions the villagers took on reflected this fact. You had the butcher, the farmer, the blacksmith, the clothier, the knight, the baker, the goldsmith and of course the all-important grog maker. Everybody had a job or a task that carried their weight in the village. What you did NOT have was the professional activist, the social worker, the starving artist, the trophy wife, the socialite or the village welfare bum. Everybody had a job and everybody’s job provided vital and required services and products to the village. Now, the reason we understand this is because a village is a small enough entity for us to wrap our brains around. We see the little village with the little cows and the village people walking in the muddy streets. But ask yourself this question: How is a country any different than a village? ~ Aaron Clarey,

59:One of the most telling statistics regarding multiples is that 97 percent of them have had a history of severe childhood trauma, often in the form of monstrous psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. This has led many researchers to conclude that becoming a multiple is the psyche's way of coping with extraordinary and soul-crushing pain. By dividing up into one or more personalities the psyche is able to parcel out the pain, in a way, and have several personalities bear what would be too much for just one personality to withstand. In this sense becoming a multiple may be the ultimate example of what Bohm means by fragmentation. It is interesting to note that when the psyche fragments itself, it does not become a collection of broken and jagged-edged shards, but a collection of smaller wholes, complete and self-sustaining with their own traits, motives, and desires. Although these wholes are not identical copies of the original personality, they are related to the dynamics of the original personality, and this in itself suggests that some kind of holographic process is involved. ~ Michael Talbot,

60:TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something. ~ Ryan Holiday,

61:An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background. ~ Daniel Kahneman,

62:Then there was neither non-existence nor existence,
Then there was neither space, nor the sky beyond.
What covered it? Where was it? What sheltered it?
Was there water, in depths unfathomed? Then there was neither death nor immortality
Nor was there then the division between night and day.
That One breathed, breathlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other. In the beginning there was only darkness, veiled in darkness,
In profound darkness, a water without light.
All that existed then was void and formless.
That One arose at last, born of the power of heat. In the beginning arose desire,
That primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who searched their hearts with wisdom,
Discovered the link of the existent to the non-existent. And they stretched their cord of vision across the void,
What was above? What was below?
Then seeds were sown and mighty power arose,
Below was strength, Above was impulse. Who really knows? And who can say?
Whence did it all come? And how did creation happen?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
So who knows truly whence this great creation sprang? Who knows whence this creation had its origin?
He, whether He fashioned it or whether He did not,
He, who surveys it all from the highest heaven,
He knows—or maybe even He does not know. —Rig Veda, X.129 ~ Shashi Tharoor,

63:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. ~ Eric S Raymond,

64:There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step. ~ Elon Musk,

65:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. ~ Eric S Raymond,

66:Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another
manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a
linguistic form rather than DNA."
"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an
infection?"
"Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked
out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once
that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a
simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will
live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how.
Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating
piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its
temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had
accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had
ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring
binders.
"The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.'
That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of
information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be
especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he
was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human
being, just like us.
"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were
carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not
thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few --
perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in
order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of
this viral civilization.
"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same
routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the
brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian
language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common
deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common
with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new
me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked."
"Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making
me?" Uncle Enzo says.
"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it
out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human
consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning
of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about
abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes
from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to
reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was
opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us
the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world
-- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component. ~ Neal Stephenson,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *