Life can get difficult at times when you try not to fit the box, and I’ve learned many things navigating the Kinsey scale.
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Ambiguity
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Subluminal
Slower than the speed of light, but not by much
Category Archives: mood
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Great America
As a French national, my favorite US landmark has always been the Statue of Liberty. Its beacon is now waning.
I always thought these words would reverberate forever in the Husdon bay :Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
But it seems someone in his golden tower got bored and decided otherwise.
small fingers but giant mushroom clouds
Ubris
Living in the Bay Area has a lots of perks, notably the climate and the people who live here– some are driven, and some maybe too much.
The Silicon Valley became fertile and successful when entrepreneurs started bringing hardcore scientific advances to the masses, with companies such as Fairchild Semiconductors, or innovative technologies, with companies such as Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center.Nowadays, the silicon in the valley is mostly gone (I often joke that among my friends living in the Silicon Valley, I am the only one actually working on silicon… yet I don’t live in the valley:), and tech companies that have nothing to do with actual τέχνη. Yet the dreams of technology to save us all are still pretty alive. But it seems that it all has to do with hubris, or PR at best, and it is hurting actual science and those who make it. Continue readingBertrand Russell, on Free Will
Happy New year !
The notion of free will is a very interesting one, and as we are living in a time where people are talking of robot intelligence and where people are still adamant about religion and what they call or perceive as “freedom”, I think it’s only fair to remind this brilliant excerpt from “Religion and Science” by the late Bertrand Russell, that among all the great things he wrote struck me with its clarity and depth.
(yeah, I’m bootstrapping on Maria Popova’s Brainpickings !)
Psychology and physiology, in so far as they bear upon the question of free will, tend to make it improbable. Work on internal secretions, increased knowledge of function of different part of the brain, Pavlov’s investigations of conditioned reflexes, and the psycho-analytic study of the effects of repressed memories and desires, have all contributed to the discovery of causal laws governing mental phenomena. None of them, of course, have disproved the possibility of free will, but the have made it highly probable that, if uncaused volitions do ever occur, they are very rare.
Gamification of terror ?
note : please do not take this post as an offense against facebook, the social network. I have great respect for their work, and I have many good friends working there. But sometimes, things get a little out of control due to emotion, and I want to make sure my non-French friends can visualize these things we’re being bombarded of, since facebook has territory bubbles.
Facebook telling me my friends have “checked in”
It’s the same kind of feature that was deployed during the last Nepal earthquake. But let me explain why things are *subtly* different in the context.
Continue readingWhen the rubber hits the fan
Things are starting to look stark
when empty promisesHot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology – WSJmeet empty markets
Techpocalypse is coming. Two questions remain: When and who? – Pando
There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. – Norman Mailer
There should be an app for that
Some days, it is hard to make a sense of the current times…
All these people trying to sell me things that I don’t need…
A million guys walk into a Silicon Valley bar.
No one buys anything.
Bar declared massive success.
– Paul Stamatiou
skype twilio wash.io gyft spotify arduino wise.io lyft appify vimeo Shyp venmo swyft uber paypal box youtube tumblr drupal dropbox roku flickr virtualbox heroku grindr yo akamai tinder what's app quora happn wechat pandora pando snapchat mongo tilt vmware airbnb misterbnb affirm yesware wevorce homobile stripe xendit spoonrocket readability square squarespace braintree salesforce slack lifesum meerkat splunk Wag taskrabbit periscope
High on life
I’ve discovered the joy of roller skating in San Francisco. Truly amazing:)
You can get all the drugs, the alcohol, anything you want to get you high, but no matter what, it’s gonna run its course, you’re gonna come down. When you get high on life, out there with dancing, you can go higher than you can even imagine, cause you can stay as long as you want to stay there. And when you do want to come down, there’s no side effects, and you didn’t pay a thing, it’s totally free.
It was a sunny day, I slowed down a little bit :
Modern Poetry
I like to encounter poetry, where you don’t expect it.
Here is some, in loose leaves.
Bristlr: The Tinder for Beards
Beard lovers and beard-
havers, rejoice! This app is
here to shave the day.
Mark Kozelek’s Perils from the sea :
(I’ll keep updating this post!) Continue readingMarguerite Duras, 1985
Alexis Madrigal just published my translation of Marguerite Duras (Fusion.net)
Here’s an excerpt :
In the 2000s, there will be only answers. The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers, in fact. I believe that man will be literally drowned in information, in constant information. About his body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure.
Alexis Madrigal is the Silicon Valley Chief at Fusion, and a former senior editor at The Atlantic.
He is my favorite writer about the implication of technology on our daily life, alongside with Evgueny Morozov and Sean Gourley, even the the latters tend to be too dark and serious sometimes.
edit Feb 10th, 2015 : now the newsletter’s name has turned into Real Future.