Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i music-and-culture på
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Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i inside-daily-page på
Daily Page began with a simple idea: give people a place to write, one page at a time.
But I have always imagined that the site could become something more than a writing hub. Not louder, not more addictive, not more complicated for its own sake. More inhabitable.
One long-term idea I have been working toward is something I think of as the Activity Forest: a calm, explorable landscape where a person’s writing gradually becomes a place.
In this version of Daily Page, each post might eventually appear as a tree. Not as a badge, not as a score, not as a little reward pellet dropped from a machine, but as part of a persistent forest that grows out of the work someone has made over time. Older posts could become trees you can return to. Related pieces might sit near each other. A favorite essay might stand beside a path. A collaboration might leave traces in the landscape around it.
Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i philosophy-corner på
There is a particular kind of athlete who has existed for much longer in fiction than he has probably existed in anything resembling pure form in real life. He is enormous. He plays football, wrestles, lifts weights, or does all three. He is not especially troubled by abstract questions. If somebody uses a four-syllable word around him, there is a reasonable chance that the joke will be that he does not understand it. He may be good-natured or he may be a bully, but either way his body seems to have consumed most of the resources that otherwise might have gone toward interiority. In the old cartoon version of the archetype, he may literally begin a sentence with “duh.”
Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i society-power-and-economy på
There is one part of libertarian thought that has always made intuitive sense to me.
Governments are powerful.
They can tax you. Regulate you. Fine you. Imprison you. Conscript you. Search your property. Decide what kinds of businesses may legally exist and under what conditions they may operate. Even a democratic government, constrained by constitutions and elections, possesses powers that an ordinary individual does not.
It therefore makes sense to be suspicious of allowing that power to grow without limit.
Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i neuroscience på
A nervous system cannot work by excitation alone. Neurons need ways to encourage other neurons to fire, but they also need ways to restrain them, sharpen their timing, filter competing signals, and prevent activity from spreading indiscriminately through a network. In the vertebrate brain, much of that inhibitory work depends on a small molecule called GABA, short for gamma-aminobutyric acid. GABA is commonly described as the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter, and that is a useful starting point. But it can also make inhibition sound simpler than it really is. GABA can make a neuron less likely to fire, change how strongly it responds to incoming signals, influence when it fires, or even increase activity elsewhere in a circuit by inhibiting another inhibitory neuron. The deeper story is not simply that GABA acts as a brake. It is that nervous systems use inhibition as one of the basic tools for organizing activity.
Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i neuroscience på
Descriptions of the nervous system can sound contradictory.
Neurons are often said to carry electrical signals. But we also hear constantly about neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and GABA: chemicals that neurons use to communicate with one another.
So which is it?
The useful answer is: both.
A typical neural signal repeatedly changes form. Within a neuron, information can travel as an electrical change in the cell membrane. At most synapses, the junctions between neurons, that electrical signal is converted into a chemical one. The receiving neuron then converts the chemical message back into an electrical change of its own.
Mere...Skabt af: roberto.c.alfredo i music-and-culture på
There is something peculiar about listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with the dates in mind. Wilco recorded the album largely before September 11, 2001, and delivered it to Reprise in the middle of that year. Yet when the record finally received its conventional release in April 2002, it seemed uncannily suited to the world in which it arrived. Songs were filled with damaged communication, weary affection, American imagery, mechanical interference and moments of almost casual dread. “Jesus, Etc.” contained images of shaking tall buildings and escaping voices. Another song was called “Ashes of American Flags.” The album itself ended with a mysterious radio voice repeating the words “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” through a growing wall of noise. None of this was written in response to September 11, yet after September 11 it became nearly impossible for listeners not to hear at least some of it through that experience. Contemporary and retrospective criticism alike noticed the effect. The catastrophe seemed to have placed a new frame around music that already existed.