drmstream[writing]

The 1920’s are char­ac­ter­ized as a decade of pros­per­ity. Though ini­tially eco­nomic in nature, this pros­per­ity dif­fused into all other are­nas of Amer­i­can life. It was the age of the flap­per, of speakeasies, and of triv­ial spend­ing. It was an era that threat­ened the image of the Vic­to­rian woman — — timid, con­ser­v­a­tive and polite […]

Eru­dite and thickly-written essay in The Chron­i­cle Of Higher Edu­ca­tion by David Barash speak­ing to the need of “a gen­eral the­ory of indi­vid­u­al­ity.” It’s back to the the­ory of self for us. In part, the resis­tance encoun­tered by human socio­bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian psy­chol­ogy, evo­lu­tion­ary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ulti­mate” inter­pre­ta­tions thus […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]

via mjperry.blogspot.com More peo­ple, liv­ing longer, con­sum­ing more resources, increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion, dri­ves inno­va­tion. I look back over my life­time and believe that the sin­gle biggest force of change has been the growth of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion from 150 mil­lion to 300 mil­lion and the global pop­u­la­tion from about 3 bil­lion to 7 bil­lion. One major […]

via youtube.com This city was a thriv­ing port at the end of the Bronze Age, occu­pied 5000 years ago. A team of arche­ol­o­gists sur­vey­ing it real­ized, as they cat­a­loged the arti­facts, that the town was older than they had imag­ined. It has been sub­merged for cen­turies, rest­ing peace­fully in shal­low waters on what once was […]

There’s a lot of con­cern about employ­ment in the U.S., jus­ti­fi­ably so, as a mul­ti­tude of com­pa­nies have trimmed their work­force to reflect cur­rent or antic­i­pated down­turns in results. Here are some use­ful charts from the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics: The first looks at the growth in the labor force over the past 10 years. […]

The dan­ger of this time is that you stop to watch, won­der about what will come next. The para­me­ters that you assessed the future with — eco­nomic, social, polit­i­cal — are all at play. You can’t assume, and now there isn’t much con­fi­dence that you can project either. What does the utter cli­mate of uncertainty […]