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News Briefs 06-11-2009

How many multiverses are there?

Mucho thanks to RPJ

Quotes of the Day:

In earlier times, it was easier to control a million people than to kill a million people. Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama’s top foreign policy advisor

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
-Ghandi

It is the duty of the Patriot to protect his country from it’s government.
-Thomas Paine

When you give up your freedom for security, you will end up with neither.
-Benjamin Franklin

Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
-Thomas Jefferson

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-John F. Kennedy

  1. Multiverse — a new mall
    [quote=Perceval]How many multiverses are there? [/quote]

    More than there are links in Kat’s Monday news.

    And does ET speculate on the appearance of Michael Shermer?

    1. Fancy a challenge?
      Speaking of multiverses, how about we do the news in verse in future?

      Could be the start of a new web phenomenon, but I don’t think I can be bothered!

      1. No manches!
        Dude, count me out. I can barely write the news in a comprehensible format as it is. I will leave that challenge to you native English-speakers 😛

  2. killing story telling
    Let us be honest, storytelling as a significant source of culture has been dead for centuries. Storytelling is dead when mechanically generated copies of the story become more significant than human telling of the story. Books have been the death of storytelling, not the internet.

    The Iliad or the Legend of Gilgamesh were better than told by a competent story teller. In a printed book, they are dead. Sure the content survives and it’s very interesting, entertainment-wise, culturally, scientifically and all that.
    But the telling of these stories has stopped long ago.

    There may be remnants of storytelling in live theater, in live music in small settings. Probably a significant remnant is in universities, the rare professor who gives good lectures. But these have little effect on our culture. Our culture has been dominated by soulless copying.

    Sure the stories are preserved much better than before they were written down. But they are not told any longer.

    1. Storytelling’s death was greatly exaggerated
      Completely disagree, Earthling. Storytelling is very much still alive — the world is just awash in zillions of zircons these days, and it’s harder to find the diamonds. I’ve read too many good books, op-ed pieces, and feature articles to say the art of storytelling is lost.

      However, I do agree that the internet/twitter/phone-texting is killing the written word. My sister and a friend are both teachers, and the quality of writing (despite their best efforts to teach kids) is going downhill fast. For example, journalism students at a Queensland UNIVERSITY were required to submit work via Twitter.

      “Some students’ tweets are not as in depth as you might like. But I don’t know if getting them to write an essay is any more beneficial,” said Jacqui Ewart, senior lecturer at the university.

      Not BENEFICIAL?! They’re WRITERS for crying out loud!!! Thankfully, most of the students complained.

      And don’t get me started on everyone with a blog thinking they’re a writer. There’s a fine skill to writing, and most people just don’t get it. And these skills are being lost rapidly to instant technological gratification. But hey, in 10-20 years time, my currency as a writer will be much more valuable. 😉

      1. staleness
        What I mean is the dynamics have been lost for a long time, as far as cultural significance goes.

        When we read a good book, essay or something like that, the story is stable. It does not change when we read it the second time. When you listen to a good storyteller, this is not the case, they story is new every time it is told. It even changed in the middle as the teller interacts with the audience.

        What you refer to, and the original article as well, is storywriting, which is a somewhat different skill. And it is probably true that the traditional storywriting is endangered with the currently modern very short formats.

        But the article has it wrong when it blames the tools. The internet doesn’t kill this or that. Lazy people not willing to pay attention to more than 140 characters kill ideas.

        1. Finding meaning
          I was referring to storytelling in the first paragraph of my post, and storywriting in the rest. I know the distinction, and I understand, and agree with, why you stress it. Meaningful storytelling (both personal and cultural) is rapidly being lost to us. And I wonder if the loss of languages is somehow connected to the loss of storytelling. I linked to this article a few weeks ago and said more than words are lost when languages become extinct. We used to blame television, and then pop music, and now the internet… when really, it’s our loss of ‘meaning’ in our lives and the world that is at the crux of the matter.

          There’s a wonderful Melbourne actor who performs a one-man reading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol every year. The words are the same, but it’s how he reads those words that brings the story’s meaning to life. I’ll try and find a video of his performance, it’s brilliant. Alas, he’s one diamond among a zillion zircons of meaningless celebrity mediocrity.

          Also, rational, left-brained intellect is today’s meme — metaphor and meaning is definitely not in flavour. Even Dawkins has publicly stated that he thinks myth and stories are damaging to young minds. No wonder storytelling is hard to find these days!! I know from personal experience that I’m considered a self-indulgent fool who’s wasting his time pursuing creative storytelling. It’s a societal/global SuperEgo bullying the Id, and unfortunately it’s winning.

          1. I’m with Earthling on this one
            Storytelling started dying off the minute Guttenberg fired up his printing press, and after radio invaded the rural world. Not that it was a bad thing for human evolution, but now a good written story is personnal to the reader, as opposed to a tale in front of the fire told by someone who mastered the art. Quite sad, but that’s evolution. What the Internet brought is mediocrity into the mix. Doesn’t help that most kids today are illiterate. Walk by a school in any neighbourhoods around the world and listen to the slang or read how they write, that’s an insult (in every single language on Earth). Short hand expressions like “C U L8R” make me cringe 😉

          2. correct replication and dynamics
            I thought about some of this more. Obviously we have gained
            a lot by recording our speech more precisely, and making the copies more available. Tremendous benefit has been the result.

            Along however came some negative developments:
            when things are written down, they are taken to be a true
            recording of what was said. One of the consequences are fundamentalist beliefs of various kinds. People believe
            that what’s written in the Bible or the Koran is the
            direct word of God, as opposed to what some writers agreed on to put in the book.

            More everyday problems – try to cross a border with your pet dog or cat. What counts is that you have papers saying the animal has been vaccinated. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter.

            You like your uncle’s farmland? Bribe some local official to issue a death certificate for your beloved uncle. You can be the owner of a nice productive farm with no money down.

            Or back to books and good stories – once you have published
            your story, you are stuck with that version. You can’t
            improve on it – people will denounce you for recycling your old work, you washed up has-been.

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