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Save the world from home
— in your spare time!
Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, Man Alive! puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs.The book's objectives are precise and concise: To take the claim of justice away from the state, the mantle of intellectual authority away from the academy and the experience of reverence away from the church. It puts all of those things back where they belong — in your mind. There is no middle-man on truth.
More by Greg Swann
FREE Willie
A 100% FREE collection of some of the best of the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories. You will want to read all of my books, but here is a cost-free way to get started.Buy my books at Amazon.com
Shyly’s delight
Work, play and love like a Labrador.
Print | Kindle
Nine empathies
Apprehending love and malice.
Print | Kindle
Father’s Day
More Married. More Husband.
More Father. More Man.
Print | Kindle
Loving Cathleen
A Love To Live Up To
Print | Kindle
Sun City
Loved ones die. Life goes on.
Print | Kindle
Losing Slowly
How Las Vegas lost its mojo – and how to get it back
Print | Kindle
Christmas at the speed of life...
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's Christmas stories
Print | Kindle
The Unfallen
A love story
Print | KindleMy other writing isn't collected in one place, but here's a shopping list for finding the best of it:
- Greg Swann writes – fiction and early essays.
- PresenceOfMind.net – a weblog I maintained in the early years of the new millenium.
- BloodhoundBlog – a national real estate weblog I started and contribute to. Much of the content there will be real estate related, but everything I write is focused on the self, and this is best represented in the longer essays.
- SplendorQuest.com – a weblog devoted to celebrating the uniquely human life.
New at SelfAdoration.com- Silent cinema in three quick glances: Emily Brownbangs at the conception of guile.
- Love at first sight, twenty-five years later: Someone to thrive with.
- My only points of disagreement with Ayn Rand, libertarianism and scholarship in general: Everyone has been wrong about everything, going back forever.
- Ayn Rand and me – why my homework is late…
- An infinity of souls.
SplendorQuest done socially
Start the day dancing: Sex and Gasoline by Rodney Crowell.
Guerrillas in our midst: An anthropologist studies the hacker movement — and goes native.
When you’re starting off as an anthropologist, you aim is to explore a subculture your peers have yet to uncover, spending years living with the locals and learning their ways.
That’s what Gabriella Coleman did. She went to San Francisco and lived with the hackers.
Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years living in the Bay Area, studying the community that builds the Debian Linux open source operating system and other hackers — i.e., people who pride themselves on finding new ways to reinvent software. More recently, she’s been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief.
When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group’s monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco’s Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out.
Now, she’s written a book on her experiences: Coding Freedom: The (more…)
Start the day dancing: Run Right Back by The Black Keys
Salman Khan talks to Charlie Rose about the founding of the Khan Academy.
Commenting on this post on the Khan Academy, Joe Brady fingered this YouTube video, Salman Khan talking to Charlie Rose about the origins of the Khan Academy:
Further notice: Salman Khan’s book on the Khan Academy experience: The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.
Start the day dancing: Darling Be Home Soon by Joe Cocker
Yo, poor boy! Stop sniveling. Compared to your grandparents, you are rich, rich, rich!
Refrigerator-freezer
Sears’s lowest-priced no-frost refrigerator-freezer in 1956 had 9.6 cubic feet, in total, of space. It sold for $219.95. (You can find a lovely black-and-white photograph of it on page 1036 of the 1956 Sears catalog.) Home Depot today sells a 10 cubic-foot no-frost refrigerator-freezer for $298.00. (You can find it in color on line here.)
Therefore, the typical American worker in 1956 had to work a total of 219.95/1.89 hours to buy that 9.6 cubic-foot fridge – or a total of 116 hours. (I round to the nearest whole number.) Today, to buy a similar (actually, slightly larger) no-frost refrigerator-freezer, the typical American worker must work a total of 298/19.79 hours – or 15 hours. That is, to buy basic household refrigeration and freezing, today’s worker must spend only 13 percent of the time that his counterpart in 1956 had to spend.
Kitchen range
Sears’s lowest-priced 30″ four-burner electric range, with bottom oven, was priced, in 1956, at $129.95. (You can find this range on page 1049 of the 1956 Sears catalog.) Home Depot sells a 30″ (more…)
YouTube is fast becoming my favorite TV station.
We got rid of cable TV earlier this year. When we’re actually interested in watching video, we select Netflix, DVDs and on-line streaming, in that order. To the extent that we were watching commercial/cable TV at all, it was the kind of mindless not-watching that is the indicia of time that is at least 98% wasted. So we ditched the cable box — and the cable bill — and we haven’t missed it.
We’ve played a bit with Crackle, but even better than that is plain old YouTube. Not for three-minute rock videos or five minute bark-a-thons but for full-length movies and — especially sweet for me — concert videos.
Here are The White Stripes from 2003:
The video was shot by an amateur from the balcony, so the audio quality isn’t the best. But the whole show is there, and I can “watch” it from my desktop computer while I’m working on other things.
If you follow the YouTube link for that video, you’ll get suggestions for other full-length concerts. Free movies are just a click away, too.
Imagine no schoolteachers: Salman Khan brings free on-line education to anyone who wants it.
The quotes below are culled from an interview with Salman Khan in MIT’s Technology Review, which I saw by way of Instapundit. I’ve reversed the order of the questions and answers I’m highlighting, putting them in their order of importance to me, but I encourage you to read the entire article. Free on-line education is a revolutionary change in the way things are done in the world, and you have a front-row seat on what should prove to be a thrilling drama.
So: Who really wants a free, high-quality on-line education?
In your mission statement, you talk about education for “anyone.” You don’t say “everyone.” What have you learned about the real demand for knowledge?
I don’t think I thought that deeply about it when I wrote it. When I started this, I thought this might be interesting for people like me when I was 12 years old—fairly motivated. And who knows how large a class of people that is. Most sites for the motivated have tens of thousands of users, if that. We are close to 6.5 million unique users per month. But if you look at the engagement—who is really ultra-into this and spending a lot of time with the videos—well, it’s (more…)