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54971e0
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Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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dbc1b0f
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Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.
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life
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0cbb002
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Anyway that's a large part of what economics is--peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d17f56e
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Could we do both?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cb3b65e
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Who programmed this thing?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6b2258a
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Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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defd5ec
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So who else did you convince?" "Well, I got Joe to potty train himself, and then I convinced Anna to leave the kids at home and go with me on a vacation to Jamaica."
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boldness
dreams
funny
life
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2339805
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Round and round and round we go, And where we stop, nobody knows.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8153f44
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Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that f..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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03e541a
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Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b232532
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Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cogni..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f4fa604
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Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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843d1e8
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When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6c43a23
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It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don't you?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2b56783
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It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6725be6
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Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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299a6a0
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They were somewhere near Chelyabinsk 56, someone said. You don't want to go there, a Russian added. One of Stalin's biggest messes.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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db93f73
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Aldrin cycle
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f0b4eb2
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In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a f..
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equality
greed
power
wealth
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8a03e4d
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was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6764c08
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I'm told finance doesn't require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it's more just advanced programming,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d676abb
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I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big." "I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn't do it thinking, Hey, now that I'm president I'll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c5d4f14
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history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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68844b4
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Sheer dumb sentience.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae63f02
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Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller.
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reincarnation
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d2cb14a
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Please Jeff? You're sounding scary." "I'm just saying! Besides, what's scarier than right now?"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3da7e4c
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But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?" "It is, it is. Believe me."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6d81795
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Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to be..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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71e82b7
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In times like these," he would say, "everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That's the glory of these times. They have woken us up."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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756030c
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But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4fe0db3
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There is no such thing as purity. It's an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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484a0f5
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Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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26d2b0d
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From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d463d86
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Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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282ebc2
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Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition--the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4845930
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These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded. They were only the most prominent of many good ideas to be proposed, and please feel free to add your own favorites, as certai..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cc72b20
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Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity. Then, if you go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world." "But the results are impossible!" "Not at all. There are other dimensions fo..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e0a7e97
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policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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425d1d1
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The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescope..
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conciousness
exploration
mars
sax-russell
space-exploration
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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604e463
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There remained a main melody, or a path through a maze--a maze that was like the delta of the Po. He seemed to look down on it as he sang it. A great number of channels were weaving down a slightly tilted plain. Each channel was a mathematical specialty--some of them shallow and disappearing into the sand, but most making their loop and reconnecting to other flows. A few were the kind of deep channels that ships would use. Upstream they coa..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d8715b8
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A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d7222a4
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Heather the midwife, the herb woman, the loudmouth, the witch, the crone, the horrible hag, the deadly poisoner. A very busy and bossy old woman, small and bent and proud to have three teeth left, two opposed. The spider was her animal, and it was said she turned into one sometimes.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1e470a2
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and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d20c8a8
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Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners--it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |