The Great Geek Manual

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

- Leonard Bernstein

As our brain is plastic and remoulds itself in accordance to our daily activities, prolonged computer use can have a profound effect on the way we think, feel and behave. We can learn to react more quickly to visual stimuli and improve many forms of attention. We develop a better ability to sift through large amounts of information rapidly and decide what’s important and what isn’t. In this way, we adapt to cope with the massive amounts of information appearing and disappearing on our mental screens from moment to moment.

- Dr Gary Small of UCLA in “What the web is teaching our brains,” November 24, 2009.

Despite the dwindling amount of content posted here over the last week, I’d like to assure all (both) my readers that I am not, in fact dead. I’ve just had a computer melt down.
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All of the biggest technological inventions created by man – the airplane, the automobile, the computer – says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.

- Mark Kennedy

Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time.

- The 2009 Horizon Report

We’re not seeing now and haven’t seen for some time the production of grand philosophical systems. No philosopher, and nobody else either, keeps track of what’s going on simultaneously in say, physics, biology, psychology and the other disciplines down the line. It’s too big for one brain. The job of relating different areas to one another and of making their overall projects understandable and accessible, remains. But if it can’t be done in one grand synthesis, we must find a better way to do it.

Instead of one grand picture, what we need is a series of overlapping pictures in which we get visions of particular areas of philosophical inquiry and try to assess what has been achieved, where we stand today and where we are or should be going in the future.

The big questions have become more complicated and more intricate.

- Scott Soames, author of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volumes 1 and 2.

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?

- Steve Polyak

1906
A US patent is issued to inventor Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, an electrical engineer, for the crystal detector, one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts, until the later development of the later triode vacuum tube. His patent describes the device as “a means for receiving intelligence communicated by electric waves.”

1920
KDKA becomes the first radio station credited with broadcasting regularly scheduled professional programming.

1931
The first commercial teletype service was introduced by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

1947
A permanent television is installed on a seagoing vessel for the first time.

1950
The NTSC color television system comes into effect as a standard in the US.
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