ThoughtLets

A light sprinkling of comments from recent round-tables (Philo B'fasts) and other conversations:

"What do we know? We can't answer that question!" (JC)
Death was omnipresent until early this century, the early 1900's. Everybody saw infants and parents die, at home. Now we're much more hung up on death than people used to be. (BD + ^z)
"Fortunately they ran out of time — or they would have had my guts for garters!" (MF)
Emotion is an underappreciated facet of corporate culture. People aren't simply thinking machines. We have feelings, irrational or pre-rational, that form a basis for our social behavior: loyalty; honesty, even when it hurts; working hard, even when nobody's watching. And emotions aren't strictly outside one's control — not in the long run. People can cultivate worthy emotional reactions, like pre-programming an autopilot to correctly handle crisis situations when there's no time to think things through. (JB + ^z + ...)
"The human mouth has only 5 kilobits bandwidth." (PD)
When we think we have a measure of control over something, then we begin to blame people for not doing anything about it. Folks with crooked teeth used to just have to live with them; now we ask why they don't get braces. Given modern psychochemicals, will we soon wonder why somebody isn't happy all the time? Shades of Brave New World! (BW + ^z + ...)
"Connect, Cooperate, Collaborate — if you fail, you die." (CH)
"Conspiracy is a form of collaboration!" (LM)

Friday, October 06, 2000 at 05:37:31 (EDT) = 2000-10-06