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Jim Kent & the Genome Data

O’Reilly Network: Keeping Genome Data Open [Apr. 05, 2002]

“Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private, commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month, because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.”

A hero indeed! One of the spin-offs from now using GNU/Linux is that it is easier to see how locking away human knowledge for the benefit of the rich is just evil!

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O’Reilly Network: Inventing the Future [Apr. 09, 2002]

“Weblogs. These daily diaries of links and reflections on links are the new medium of communication for the technical elite. Replacing the high-cost, high-octane, venture-funded Web site with one that is intensely personal and built around the connectivity between people and ideas, they are creating a new set of synapses for the global brain. It’s no accident that weblogs are increasingly turning up as the top hits on search engines, since they trade in the same currency as the best search engines–human intelligence, as reflected in who’s already paying attention to what.”

“connectivity between people and ideas” – that is what I like about it.

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Danger to the planet in dismissing the soul in tech

Cliff Bostock – Writings
Hillman Speaks: The topic is depression and the man is confounding
by Cliff Bostock

“This curious habit of exempting certain areas of inquiry from his own method of reversal permeated the weekend. While valorizing shattering, the suffering of depression, he seemed unwilling to look at what mania itself might be asking of value. To my own mind, mania, as a social descriptor, may be telling us we really do need to speed up our attention, that if we live on a dying planet, we need to begin merging our bodies with new forms of technology. It is in media – the internet, the cell phone, the television – that we see the most visible expressions of consciousness speeded to “manic” rates. There was just no opening in Hillman’s (anti-technological, anti-speed) cosmology to discuss this in a serious way.”

“Indeed, the entire room seemed unwilling to go that way. One man spoke negatively of the way the “window to the world” has been replaced by “Windows ’95.” It is a great mystery to me how people in archetypal psychology offhandedly dismiss the idea that technology itself might be ensouled, that in a world on the apparent verge of environmental disaster, our survival might well depend on our capacity to take on new forms of embodiment. There has been a lot of (optimistic) writing in recent years about the internet as a group mind that may be the planet’s salvation.”

A nice essay on depression from yr 2000. This is also a link which in turn links to a lot of writing by Cliff Bostock. Look for his article on Archetypes for example…

The whole essay follows:

Continue reading “Danger to the planet in dismissing the soul in tech”

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Microsoft Has Shelved Its Internet ‘Persona’ Service
By JOHN MARKOFF
NY Times egistration req.

Posting something likes this here makes me think: How is this part of exploring Psyberspace?

Freud had the triad of Id, Ego and Superego. Jung also defined/discovered contours of the psyche, the collective unconscious, Self, Shadow, Anima and Animus and of course Persona.

Just the connection with Jung’s Persona means the item is of interest. But it goes deeper than that. Just as Persona is a way of describing the structure of the soul or at leasts its contours, .NET fits in somewhere as part of one of the the contours of psyberspace, which have not as far as I know been clearly named/discovered/created.

The passport, virtual ID bots (like Persona) or whatever, present interesting questions: Who owns them and manages them? What will my persistent virtual ID contain – what happens when you finger me? How can that be done? How should it be done on the net? How does my virtual ID relate to me? Is a home page a virtual ID?

And then I think: How does my persona relate to the real me?

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Psychological roots of political life

Free as in Freedom
Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software

The whole of this book is online.

amazon

“”If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution,” Stallman wrote. “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”

I like that line from Chapter 7. I think that reward could well come from taxes – more govt payment for free software.

Edit: 20 April 2002

“I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern,” Sarah said, explaining her attraction to Stallman.

My wife immediately threw back the question: “What was the issue?”

“Crushing loneliness.”

Fascinating comment… the idea we do political things for personal reasons. I buy it. I am glad RMS has such a psychologically minded friend – I hope it is working out for them. But there would be an interesting twist to entertain: He had to set up a life of crushing loneliness so that he could fulfil his destiny as a political leader.

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