Chairman of IBM on world market for computers

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

Also:

What happened to the hot badge?

“And if you are the partying type, all you have to do is don your `Hot Badge’ which has electronic information about your taste in food, music, hobbies programmed in it. When you enter a social gathering, it automatically takes you to other like-minded pe ople who are wearing similar badges!”

http://www.hinduonnet.com/businessline/2001/05/13/stories/141339g3.htm

The creation of the mass mind - J. B Priestley

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

The ending is always negotiable

The ending is always negotiable.

I don’t know what this means - but I wrote it down 10 years ago - then put the scrap of paper in a box - and now I’ve typed it out and put it on here and it’s in your brain.

Good luck!

machine consciousness - an emergent property of neural centres which interact

“Maybe I’m being an arrogant human; but I don’t know where this leap into greater overall ’smartness’ would come from. I think they’ll have peculiar characteristics - they’ll use language very well, yet have the sentience of a slug. “

Introduction of survival element?

Science: The mind machine
Independent, The (London), Mar 23, 1998 by Charles Arthur

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19980323/ai_n14144812

Television has become a mirror

“Television has become a mirror in which the public likes to recognize itself,” Pivot said. “The public either likes to see itself, or it likes something very far away, exoticism. Culture is neither of those.” Even when programs feature “popular” culture, rap musicians from the Paris suburbs, for example, the emphasis is not so much on what they perform as on how they got there, Pivot says, how they “made” it, so that the viewer can relate and dream how he might “make” it and be a celebrity too.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/04/02/pivot.t.php

A Cultural Icon Slams the Poverty of French TV

By Katherine Knorr

Published: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1998

Three sexes

In ”Palimpsest,” Mr. Vidal endorses the passage in Plato’s ”Symposium” where Aristophanes tells his dinner companions that there were once three sexes, people shaped like globes: male, female and hermaphrodite; they were divided by the king of the gods for behaving offensively and have ever after sought reunion, to make themselves whole again.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2D61139F93AA25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

The commissar vanishes

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Few have been taught to any purpose

“Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.” Sir Joshua Reynolds - English painter

Hockney on Art

Hockney on Art (Paperback)
by David Hockney (Author)

Perspective is tyranny  a renaissance invention ( but seen in photography)?

But perspective is the least truthful - cos humans don’t see images that way - human eye engages emotionally. It remembers what the back of the object looks like. Single viewpoint is not the best view. Eye circles and spends time with objects.

Only painting can recreate this real way of seeing - cubism etc

Gandhi

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”

Mahatma Gandhi

Evolutionary theory

Darwin’s evolutionary theory is hopelessly reactionary to feminists (that women are inferior - fit only for domesticity) ?.

Genes do not work in a vacuum - they are subject to physical laws - the properties of matter.

“Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed,” D’Arcy W. Thompson wrote in his celebrated book On Growth and Form, first published in 1917. “Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science.”

In Cheshire, UK, owners of expensive houses park their expensive cars next to the gates - so passers by can see they have a lot of money. Then they have to walk up their long drives…

Life is when 350 genes are assembled… survive and replicate.

Are humans still evolving? - short term evolution in severe climate changes of Tibet - also the impact of central heating. Book by Chris Wills - Children of Prometheus

mobutu and kabila

mobutu and kabila

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8310

The savage satire of `1984′ still speaks to us today

The savage satire of `1984′ still speaks to us today
Independent, The (London), Jun 8, 1999 by Bernard Crick

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990608/ai_n14231422

“One could put them differently, but I see seven main satiric thrusts: the division of the world by the super states; the mass media as an agent of “prolerisation”; power-hunger in general and totalitarianism in particular; the betrayal by the intellectuals; the abuse and degradation of languages for purposes of control; the rewriting of history for political purposes; and the theses of James Burnam (who believed that the social systems of the seemingly totally antagonistic USA and USSR would come to converge in an authoritarian techno-managerial capitalism - perhaps like China today?). “

the philosopher and the ‘Chinese room’

Turing said machines can be considered intelligent if they can hold a conversation and we can’t tell if they are machines.

John Searle disagrees - machines can post back symbols without understanding them.

Martin Cohen (1999?) Independent.