Quote of the week

"Act in such a way that your humility may not be weakness, nor your authority be severity. Justice must be accompanied by humility, that humility may render justice lovable." Gregory the Great

On Dropping the Debt by the Bishop of Durham, Dr. N. T. Wright

On Dropping the Debt by the Bishop of Durham, Dr. N. T. Wright:
NT Wright discusses, in a condensed manner, the rationale behind forgiving third-world debts. As usual, he writes in a very clear, methodical manner, but ends, somewhat uncharacteristically with the following emotional excerpt from the Jubilee Debt Campaign:

Just imagine that, when your uncle died, you discovered your family had inherited his debts...

Just imagine that the banks seized your home and much of your parents’ wages, forcing you all to live on a rubbish tip...

Just imagine that you were turned away from school, because the money had been used for debt repayments...

Just imagine that when your sister went to hospital to have her baby, they turned her away too...

Just imagine that, having only polluted stream water to drink, several of your brothers and sisters sickened and died...

Just imagine that you see your parents worn out by work and worry, and you know that you will inherit the debt...

This isn’t imagination! This is the tragic reality of the lives of hundreds of millions of young people in the poorer countries.

I've Been to the Mountaintop

Forty years ago tonight, Martin Luther King gave his last speech (tomorrow is the anniversary of his assassination. It's an incredibly moving speech that was truly prophetic with chillingly immediate fulfillment, as well as intermediate and long-term fulfillment.

Watch here and remember...then act.

Part 1 of 2



Part 2 of 2



And here's the last minute showing actual color footage...

Kevin Kelly says Creation needed as well as Evolution

Really? Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine, author of "Out of Control" which popularized the power of the "hive mind" to the general public says you need God, too? Well, no, not really.

But those contemplating the merits of theistic evolution will find his recent blog entry The Bottom is Not Enough quite thought provoking. I'm going to ponder it further myself before writing more.

But I will say I think he brilliantly elucidates one of the core drivers of the Web 2.0 business craze:

What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much 'hive' in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
...ad infinitum.

The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control.

Timeless quotes from the man who altered our view of time

Max Kalehoff has gathered a collection of quotes for Albert Einstein he thinks would make great chapter titles for a book on marketing. You can read his commentary on them here: Online Spin: Blog Archive: Move Over, Seth Godin, Einstein’s Here.

Here are the quotes themselves:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

“Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.”