Tribune de Genève

Nicholas Negroponte

“People will say ‘no, no, no’ — of course you like your libraries,” Negroponte said. But he cited the report that sales of books for the Kindle recently surpassed sales of hardcover books.

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“It’s happening. It not happening in 10 years. It’s happening in 5 years,” he said.

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By “dead,” he of course doesn’t mean completely dead. But he means that digital books are going to replace physical books as the dominant form.

Alan K. Henrikson

"There is no such thing as empty space on a map." This declaration, though exaggerated, indicates Harley's view that the "silences" on maps, as he distinctively termed them, could be as meaningful as the geographical and other data actually drawn or written on them. "Assuming the world to be a place where human choice is exercised," Harley contended, "the absence of something must be seen to be as worthy of historical investigation as is its presence. So it is with cartography".

Harley's interest was in the stories that maps do not tell. His interest grew out of his encyclopedic knowledge of cartographic history and his extensive and eclectic reading in subjects outside the field, including postmodernist literary criticism and social theory.

J. B. Harley, Paul Laxton, J. H. Andrews

In contrast, the idea of a power internal to cartography stresses that power is not separate from knowledge. It is an integral part of the practices that create knowledge and of the way maps—as a particular form of knowledge—work in society. It is universal, being found wherever maps are made, but equally it creates a local knowledge dependent on context. The focus of inquiry, therefore, shifts from the place of cartography in a juridical system of power to the political effects of what cartographers do when they make maps. We find that cartographers cease to be "nonpolitical agents" in society, above or beyond politics. Inasmuch as power traverses the everyday workshop practices of map making, the atlas maker—albeit often unwittingly—was inevitably concerned with the manufacture of power.

Joseph Rouse

And power does not merely impinge on science and scientific knowledge from outside, but power relations permeate the most ordinary activities in the praxis of science. Scientific knowledge in this sense is never removed from "power issues" but actually arises out of these power relations. In this sense, then, knowledge is power and power is knowledge.

I.F. Stone

Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

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Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

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Mr. Truman thinks of himself as a liberal. It is at once something subtler and more human than hypocrisy which leads him to say, "We must take our stand on the Bill of Rights. The inquisition, the star chamber, have no place in a free society." The same capacity for inviting war in the name of peace made it possible for him to launch star chamber loyalty purges and peacetime sedition prosecutions while preaching civil liberties.

George Wald

Is it to have a chance to live? We don’t ask prosperity. We don’t ask security. But a decent chance to live, and to work out our destinies in peace and decency. That’s the problem. Without more assurance than we now possess that this generation has a future, nothing else matters. It’s not good enough to have given it tender loving care, to have supplied it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don’t mean anything unless that generation has a future. And we’re not sure that it does.

Norman Solomon

Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe.

In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick.

Diplomatic facades routinely masquerade as realities. But sometimes the mask slips – for all the world to see – and that’s what just happened with the humongous leak of State Department cables.

No government wants to face documentation of actual policies, goals, and priorities that directly contradict its public claims of virtue. In societies with democratic freedoms, the governments that have the most to fear from such disclosures are the ones that have been doing the most lying to their own people.

The recent mega-leaks are especially jarring because of the extreme contrasts between the U.S. government’s public pretenses and real-life actions. But the standard official response is to blame the leaking messengers.

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But what kind of “national security” can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?

Jason Ditz

The Obama Administration is hard at work attempting to “acquire” Julian Assange from either the British or Swedish government. They’re not really sure what they can charge him with, but they’ll think of something, probably.

But concerns about the prospect that Assange is about to “disappear” into some US black hole for his role in the publication of information severely embarrassing to the US government is finally starting to rise not just among human rights groups, but in official circles as well.

“It’s just astonishing what is happening,” noted the UN’s top Human Rights official Navi Pillay, adding that the US moves against them are “potentially violating WikiLeaks’s right to freedom of expression.”

Brazilian President Lula expressed “solidarity” with Assange, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned his detention as “undemocratic.” US officials have condemned Assange as a terrorist on the basis of his publications, and top US presidential hopefuls have expressed support for assassinating him.

Michael A. Lindenberger

Thanks to nearly a century of cases dealing with the clash between national security and the freedom of the press, the Constitution provides enormous protection for publishers of state secrets. Those who leak the secrets in the first place — government officials, even soldiers, for instance — can and are prosecuted, such as Army private, Bradley Manning, now sitting in a military prison after having been charged with illegally downloading secret files amid suspicions that he gave them to WikiLeaks.

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But if WikiLeaks was wrong to publish the cables, what of the newspapers that also published the secret documents? After all, WikiLeaks gave the documents to the New York Times and a number of other papers around the world well in advance, and the newspapers have spent the past week publishing story after story related to their findings — and in some cases, have published the secret cables themselves.

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But the law is too broad a brush to try to draw a distinction between WikiLeaks' indiscriminate posting of the cables — which Burns called "nihilistic" — and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times, Abrams said. How do you draft a law that targets WikiLeaks but leaves intact our system of press freedoms?

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The only real ammunition America has to protect state secrets, most legal observers agree, is the Espionage Act of 1917, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson amid fears of domestic unrest and possible sabotage as American entered the First World War. It's a broadly worded act, still on the books, that on its face would make stealing or sharing secrets from the government a federal crime — if a jury agreed that doing so harmed America or aided a foreign power. But Abrams said courts soon recognized that such a broadly worded statute could "make illegal many things that American newspapers publish every day. It was over-broad and covered much too much material." As a result, the Supreme Court spent most of the 20th Century steadily narrowing the Espionage Act's reach when it comes to the news media's publication of secrets.

Esfandiar Rahim Mashai

These documents are not authentic. The national interests of the United States and its allies are behind this. They see the world through their eyes, pursue their own goals, and draw the conclusions that suit their purposes. ... America wants to portray itself as the leader of the world, as master of the destinies of nations. It wants to play off the regimes in the region against one another. It wants the world to believe that we are divided. It wants to legitimize its presence and influence in the region. ... No, the United States is behind this deliberate leak. The Americans are trying to paint the world in black and white. They underscore the differences among nations and want to show everyone that peace is only possible in cooperation with them. ... I don't want to get into individual documents and their authenticity. But I have no doubt that a US government plan is behind this disclosure. When someone wants to suggest something, they include fake information with real information so as to create a certain impression. That's why each country has to analyze the documents that relate to it, which is what our experts in Tehran are doing now. ... We are only examining them to figure out the Americans' tricks. ... Anyone can access the site. Why should be block it? We are a great nation that doesn't have a problem with such disclosures. Our nation is smart enough to see through this campaign.

Jason Ditz

Columbia University’s Office of Career Service is said to have passed around an email warning students that if they read WikiLeaks or make comments related to the releases it would render them ineligible for any government jobs in the future, based on a warning sent by a former student working at the State Department.

State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson insisted the warning wasn’t an official Department directive but added that making public comments or posting links to WikiLeaks content wasn’t “a good move for any US citizen.”

Efforts across the US government to restrict access to the documents are having limited success, although Sen. Joe Lieberman (I – CT) did succeed in getting the WikiLeaks website removed for a few hours following a threatening phone call to Amazon.com.

Beyond the State Department, the US military is also said to be trying to curb access to the content among active duty personnel, with attempts to visit any media website from the military’s open network resulting in a warning message not to read anything related to the WikiLeaks release. The Social Security Administration has also sent an alert to all its employees warning them that reading anything related to the WikiLeaks release could subject them to “federal criminal statutes for unlawful access to or transmission of classified information.”

Even the Library of Congress is getting into the game, with attempts to visit the website at the Library resulting in a warning that the site is “malicious content” and has been blocked.

Eric Lipton

In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.

The directive applies to both government computers and private devices that employees or contractors might have, as long as they are accessing the documents on nonclassified government networks. It does not advise agencies to block WikiLeaks or other websites on government computer systems, a White House official said Saturday. And it does not prohibit federal employees from reading news stories about the topic. But if they have accidentally already downloaded any of these documents, they are being told to notify their “information security offices.”

The Department of Defense, in its own directive to military personnel and contractors, says that simply viewing these documents, without proper authorization, will violate long-standing rules even though they are accessible to the public at large on Internet sites.

"Viewing or downloading still classified documents from unclassified government computers creates a security violation," a spokeswoman said in a statement on Saturday.

The effort, while understandable, seems entirely futile, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington nonprofit group that has combated government efforts to keep certain government documents secret.

“It just may be a little too late for the government to push these documents down the memory hole,” Mr. Rotenberg said, adding that his center did not support the initial public release of the material. “This is Orwell thought police in the age of the Internet, as these are already so widely accessible on servers around the world.” The Library of Congress has joined in the push, blocked visitors to its reading rooms, or anyone else using its computer system, from accessing the WikiLeaks site, noting that “unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.”

The moves have not apparently discouraged staff at WikiLeaks, as the organization continues to post Twitter feeds mocking the efforts to limit access to the documents, including one note on Saturday reading: “Digital McCarthyism: U.S. Military Tries to Intimidate Soldiers Into Not Reading Wikileaks”.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

It's not a question of worry. It's, rather, a question of whether WikiLeaks are being manipulated by interested parties that want to either complicate our relationship with other governments or want to undermine some governments, because some of these items that are being emphasized and have surfaced are very pointed.

And I wonder whether, in fact, there aren't some operations internationally, intelligence services, that are feeding stuff to WikiLeaks, because it is a unique opportunity to embarrass us, to embarrass our position, but also to undermine our relations with particular governments.

For example, leaving aside the personal gossip about Sarkozy or Berlusconi or Putin, the business about the Turks is clearly calculated in terms of its potential impact on disrupting the American-Turkish relationship.

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Seeding -- seeding it is very easy.

I have no doubt that WikiLeaks is getting a lot of the stuff from sort of relatively unimportant sources, like the one that perhaps is identified on the air. But it may be getting stuff at the same time from interested intelligence parties who want to manipulate the process and achieve certain very specific objectives.

The Australian

New embassy cables, released by WikiLeaks to Fairfax newspapers today, reveal the influential right-wing Labor MP has been one of the embassy's best ALP informants, along with former frontbencher Bob McMullan and current MP Michael Danby.

The documents say the Minister for Sport had been secretly offering details of Labor's inner workings even before his election to the Senate in 2007, dating back to his time as general secretary of the party's NSW branch from 2004.

Senator Arbib was one of the "faceless men" who was instrumental in the decision to oust Kevin Rudd and install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister in June.

The documents also identify Senator Arbib as a strong backer of the Australia-US alliance.

Jason Ditz

The Obama Administration’s cables railing about Germany’s Free Democratic Party in general and leader Guido Westerwelle (now Germany’s Foreign Minister) in particular came with references to an unnamed informant the US had on the inside of the FDP who was eager to report on the party’s internal meetings to the US embassy.

According to Helmut Metzner, Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s (now former) chief of staff, he is that informant, and he has been sacked for being a US mole, the direct confirmed firing to come out of the WikiLeaks cables leak.

The Obama Administration was said to have serious reservations about the Free Democratic Party’s commitment to limited government and individual liberty ahead of September 2009′s election, and expressed hope that Chancellor Angela Merkel could be convinced to foil their agenda to protect her “legacy.”

The cables never named Metzner, but referred to him as “a young, up-and-coming party loyalist” who was providing the US embassy with information. Publicly, Westerwelle appeared contented to let the matter drop until Metzner confessed to his role as the mole.

Socyberty

The attempts to control opinion in the democracies of this world are commonplace. Newspapers, radio, television, and the web all present examples of efforts to control opinion. Contrasted to this democratic impulse to persuade the citizenry is the old army adage, “When I need an opinion from you I’ll give you one.”

In terms of news broadcasts, TV was an evolutionary step after radio, and cable TV was another step after broadcast TV. The web followed cable TV, promising more opportunities to exchange opinions and ideas. Inevitably, the elite in a democracy attempt to control opinion. On the Internet, that effort is reflected in consolidation of the resource by big names like Google and Yahoo, by video media, and by rating systems that rely on questionable estimates like “Percentage of Global Internet Users”. This last concept bounces like rubber; it is reminiscent of the TV rating systems, shaky estimates of numbers that can’t be proven.

Will communication remain free? Almost certainly it will. It is a futile exercise to attempt to control it because it is a natural right.

Will the web remain free? Hopefully it will. To the extent that it does not, free expression will migrate to other avenues.

David Hume

Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

Nancy Snow

What's so fascinating about all these propaganda efforts in the War on Terror is how reconstituted they appear. The United States has a one-hundred-year history of marrying commerce with politics and tapping public relations to “brand” America abroad. President Woodrow Wilson told the International Congress of Salesmanship to "go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy and convert them to the principles of America." That was in 1916. Is today all that much different? No, not really, but it's more intensified now because we have the technology age to aid the efforts to brand the product America, and we have the unpredictable dark cloud of that catch-all new enemy, terrorism, magnifying our efforts.

Jacques Ellul

Nothing is worse in times of danger than to live in a dream world. To warn a political system of the menace hanging over it does not imply an attack against it, but is the greatest service one can render the system.

The Economist

The first attacks may indeed be just “a few days away”. But another sort of war is already under way, one in which journalists are already playing an important role as a conduit or filter, though not just the scribblers and broadcasters from the West. It is the propaganda war. That word has come to have a derogatory meaning, of the dissemination of untruths. In this case, America's task is (in truth) to disseminate truths, about its motives, about its intentions, about its current and past actions in Israel and Iraq, about its views of Islam. For all that, however, this part of the war promises to be no easier to win than the many other elements of the effort.
Success in the propaganda war is a vital preparation for military action; it will be vital if the coalition of allies is to be maintained during that action and amid the inevitable setbacks; and it will be most vital of all if defeats of these particular terrorists are to be followed up, as they should be, by a wider effort to make the ensuing peace more secure, within Central Asia and the Middle East as well as at home.

Howard Zinn

If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

André M. Timpanaro, Carmen P. C. Prado

In the last decade the Sznajd model has been successfully employed in modeling some properties and scale features of both proportional and majority elections. We propose a version of the Sznajd model with a generalized bounded confidence rule—a rule that limits the convincing capability of agents and that is essential to allow coexistence of opinions in the stationary state. With an appropriate choice of parameters it can be reduced to previous models. We solved this model both in a mean-field approach (for an arbitrary number of opinions) and numerically in a Barabási-Albert network (for three and four opinions), studying the transient and the possible stationary states. We built the phase portrait for the special cases of three and four opinions, defining the attractors and their basins of attraction. Through this analysis, we were able to understand and explain discrepancies between mean-field and simulation results obtained in previous works for the usual Sznajd model with bounded confidence and three opinions. Both the dynamical system approach and our generalized bounded confidence rule are quite general and we think it can be useful to the understanding of other similar models.

F. Slanina, H. Lavicka

There is significant convergence between statistical physics and mathematical sociology in approaches to their respective fields. Ising model, the single most studied statistical physics model, finds its numerous applications in sociophysics simulations. Conversely, sociologically inspired models pose new challenges to statistical physics. We believe this is the case of the Sznajd model we are studying here.
The model of Sznajd-Weron and Sznajd was designed to explain certain features of opinion dynamics. The slogan “United we stand, divided we fall” lead to simple dynamics, in which individuals placed on a lattice (one-dimensional in the first version) can choose between two opinions (political parties, products etc.) and in each update step a pair of neighbours sharing common opinion persuade their neighbours to join their opinion. Therefore, it was noted that contrary to the Ising or voter models, information does not flow from the neighbourhood to the selected spin, but conversely, it flows out from the selected cluster to its neighbours.

Bangkok Post

With its unsavoury reputation for prostitution and crime, it came as no real surprise to find child pornography openly and widely on sale in the seaside resort of Pattaya - although the vendors are far more cautious than their Bangkok counterparts.

Jacques Ranciere

For Plato, the demos is the intolerable existence of the great beast which occupies the stage of the political community without ever becoming a single subject. The name which accurately qualifies it is ochlos: the common rabble or, in other words, the infinite turbulence of collections of individuals who are always at odds with themselves, living rent by passion and at the mercy of desire. On the basis of this observation an original duplicity can be defined, a relationship between philosophy and the political which is both thoroughly immanent and radically transcendent, prohibiting the existence of any such thing as 'political philosophy'.

John Dunn

What we mean by democracy is not that we govern ourselves. When we speak or think of ourselves as living in a democracy, what we have in mind is something quite different. It is that our own state, and the government which does so much to organize our lives, draws its legitimacy from us, and that we have a reasonable chance of being able to compel each of them to continue to do so. They draw it, today, from holding regular elections, in which every adult citizen can vote freely and without fear, in which their votes have at least a reasonably equal weight, and in which any uncriminalized political opinion can compete freely for them.

Pakistan Defence

Charles Waldstein

Our motto must be: liberty, fraternity and inequality. Democracy must never degenerate into ochlocracy.

JATIS

As a short form of lyric poetry, tanka (Japanese poetry) stresses the beauty of life and nature, and a feeling of yearning is an important element.

What is sought within this simple form is to express the essence of this yearning with a depth in which all the emotions are intermingled.

The vivid expression of that which has touched the heart has the power to evoke a wealth of associations.

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

I.

AESTHETICA (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologėa inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi ratíonís,) est scientia cognitionis sensitiuae.

2.

Naturalis facultatum cognoscitiuarum inferiorum gradus solo usu citra disciplinalem culturam auctus AESTHETICA NATURALIS dici potest, et distingui, sicuti logica naturalis solet, in connatam, ingenium pulcrum connatum, et acquisitam, et haec denuo in docentem et utentem.

The British Society of Aesthetics

The Society is established to promote study, research and discussion of the fine arts and related types of experience from a philosophical, psychological, sociological, scientific, historical, critical and educational standpoint.

James W. Manns

It is hard to imagine a subject matter being more capricious and elusive than aesthetics. It is easy enough to characterize it as the philosophy of art — or, to capture a greater portion of the aesthetic tradition, the philosophy of art and beauty — but once said, we right away find ourselves face-to-face with the slippery question "What is art?" (or the equally slippery question "What is beauty?").

Denis Diderot

Beauty is a term we apply to an infinitude of beings; but whatever differences there may be among these beings, it must be the case either that we falsely apply the term beautiful, or that there is in all these beings a quality of which the term beauty is the sign.

Elbert Hubbard

Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

断捨離

Joshua M. Neff

We tend to say the same thing at the same time or email each other at the same time. It’s just one of those things.

9E66th

Tit

The New York Times

Khalil Gibran

One day you will ask me which is more important? my life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

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And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

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But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Andrew Batson

One widely touted solution for current U.S. economic woes is for America to produce more of the high-tech gadgets that the rest of the world craves.

Yet two academic researchers have found that Apple Inc.'s iPhone—one of the most iconic U.S. technology products—actually added $1.9 billion to the U.S. trade deficit with China last year.

How is this possible? Though the iPhone is entirely designed and owned by a U.S. company, and is made largely of parts produced by other countries, it is physically assembled in China. Both countries' trade statistics therefore consider the iPhone a Chinese export to the U.S. So a U.S. consumer who buys what is often considered an American product will add to the U.S. trade deficit with China.

Violeta Parra

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto

Me dio dos luceros que, cuando los abro

Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco

Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado

Y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo

Tina Rosenberg

Dr. Rey took a challenge that most people would assume requires more money, personnel and technology and solved it in a way that requires less of all three. I am not a romantic who wants to abandon modern medical care in favor of traditional solutions. People with AIDS in South Africa need antiretroviral therapy, not traditional healers’ home brews. If you are bitten by a cobra in India, you should not go to the temple. You should go to the hospital for antivenin. Modern medical care is essential and technology very often saves lives.

Facebook

i.B

The world becomes even more interesting when somebody walks next to you.

Histoire & Voyages

Sur les traces de Tamerlan et des conquérants d’Asie centrale : les Perses, Alexandre le Grand, les Arabes, Gengis Khan... découvrez celles qui furent considérées longtemps comme les trois plus belles villes du monde : Samarcande, Boukhara et Khiva. Au milieu des sables, le mirage des dômes d’un bleu éclatant et les revêtements de faïences ont attiré et fasciné conquérants et voyageurs de tous temps.

火星网友

当年投胎选了hard模式，结果生在中国，还好没选very hard，不然生在朝鲜了...

神一样的回复：

选择professional模式，更杯具。生在了阿富汗和伊拉克

Hell模式 埃塞俄比亚，苏丹，刚果，扎伊尔

easy模式大概是在北欧那片吧～normol应该是美日欧

hell模式真情提示：请先完成very hard再尝试

选择hard模式下次投胎有机会获蛋甕Y爱生活eaven模式。

从玩家数量来看，还是玩hard的多啊~

也不一定啊，人家选了Hard模式，加外挂，加加速，神装比那些选择easy模式的裸装备不知道好玩儿多少倍呢

増子直純

過ぎたるシアワセはきっと俺ダメにする　貧しいながらも清く正しく

喰うために汗を流して　エンヤコラ働こう

そして生きるために唄おう　明日を生きるために

＿＿＿＿

人のため　義理のため　死ぬのが武士道

愛のため　夢のため　生きるが俺道

Jargon File

Users /nm./: collective term for those who use computers. Users are divided into three types: novice, intermediate and expert.

• Novice Users: people who are afraid that simply pressing a key might break their computer.
• Intermediate Users: people who don't know how to fix their computer after they've just pressed a key that broke it.
• Expert Users: people who break other people's computers.

PRQ

Refugee hosting

Our boundless commitment to free speech has been tested and proven over and over again. If it is legal in Sweden, we will host it, and will keep it up regardless of any pressure to take it down.

Confidentiality

We defend your integrity to the end. With our discreet customer relations policy we don't even have to know who you are, and if we do, we will keep that knowledge strictly confidential.

Technical proficiency

The PRQ team has a solid background in computer networking, security, hardware, and software. Most of us have been online for over 10 years. We can assist you with almost anything - keeping your servers secure, mitigating DDoS attacks, or keeping your high-traffic websites up and running smoothly. To make this possible, we run our own fully multi-homed backbone network (AS33837), with the capacity needed both to handle large DDoS attacks and to provide excellent connectivity to customers with bandwidth utilization ranging from a few Mbps to several hundred.

Interflora

Le jour de la Saint-Valentin, le 14 février, est connu comme la fête des amoureux. Les couples en profitent pour s’échanger cadeaux et comme preuve d’amour, ainsi que des roses rouges afin d’exprimer leur passion.

A l’origine de cette fête, on retrouve un prêtre romain, du nom de Valentin. Au IIIème siècle, l’empereur Claude II le Gothique interdit le mariage, les fiancés faisant de mauvais soldats, en raison de leur amour et attachement à la famille. Saint-Valentin, qui mariait les couples en secret, fut démasqué et arrêté.

On raconte que pendant sa captivité, il se lia d’amitié avec la fille aveugle de son geôlier, à laquelle il rendit miraculeusement la vue. Avant d’être exécuté, Valentin fit parvenir à cette fille des feuilles en forme de coeur.

Il fut décapité à Rome le 14 Février 268, et canonisé par le pape Alexandre VI au 15ème siècle. Depuis, il est considéré comme le saint patron des amoureux, et l’on fête l’amour chaque 14 février.

太田富雄

井上伸一郎

さてこの度、角川書店は来年の東京アニメフェアへの出展を取りやめることにいたしました。マンガ家やアニメ関係者に対しての、都の姿勢に納得がいかないところがありまして。

Josh Groban

retournons avant la guerre, avant la fin

avant le besoin de toutes ces prieres

aucun mal, aucun bien, aucun mot croche

ni mots malins que l'on dit quand on n'sait pas

sous un ciel bleu, ciel sans nuage, retournons la-bas

sans orage, retournons la-bas

au jardin des sans pourquoi

je t'ai vue te promener la-bas, sous l'arc-en-ciel

brillante comme une etincelle dans la nuit

ou je t'ai vue aussi, tombant du ciel

comme une larme de st laurent, disparaissant

dans un ciel blue, ciel sans nuage, retournons la-bas

sans orage, retournons la-bas

au jardin des sans pourquoi

МакSим

Такая нежность на зеркалах

Где тени поз в дошкольном платье

Рисуют нежность на телах, а в глазах лето

Бесконечно ещё так нежно

Больше не забыть это лето

Ветром по щекам будет где-то

Осень целовать. Жаль наверное

Ветер не умеет так нежно

Река рассвета скрывала ночь

Мерцанье слёз. О, это лето

Сгорало в сотни тысяч звёзд в любовь одето

Роняло небо лучик света

西部邁

あの日あの時、私は集団心理の力学がいかに素早く転変するものであるかを痛感した。同時に、自分の少々果敢な姿が実は滅びの姿にほかならぬことを強く感じとっていた。それから一ヶ月後に逮捕されて独房に入り、またその後に続いたいくつもの長い裁判の過程において、自分のオツムが蒸発乾燥していくのか沈思黙考に入っていくのかはっきりしないという奇妙な感覚にとらわれつつ、「人が左翼であるのは、その新旧のいずれかを問わず、人が右翼であるのと同じように、人が莫迦になるための近道である」という真実を少しずつ学んでいった。また、あの宣伝カーの上での仲間に向かってのネガティブ・キャンペーンは、何ほどかは自分にたいしても発したものであったことを認めねばならぬ、と納得しもしはじめたのである。

Jose Luis Marroquin

There is ... a basic issue that is only very seldomly discuscussed: What do we mean by "visual experience"? Very often the problem of vision is oversimplified, and to "see" a scene is identified with the task of computing a verbal description of it. This problem is difficult enough, but it is important to recognize that there is much more in visual perception than assigning verbal labels to "objects".

If we pay attention to what we actually see, instead of thinking about it, we find that our visual experience is richer than any verbal description. This fact becomes evident as we observe a pictoric representation of a landscape - i.e., a non-verbal description - and compare the visual image with a literary description of the same scene or, further, with a list of the "objects" it contains. Moreover, we all recognize that certain visual patterns have qualities such as simplicity, elegance, unity, beauty, harmony, etc., but all these words denote experiences which are almost impossible to be described verbally, and which cannot be explained by a theory which considers visual perception merely as the assignment of verbal labels.

Gert J. Tonder, Michael J. Lyons

We present an investigation into the relation between design principles in Japanese gardens, and their associated perceptual effects. This leads to the realization that a set of design principles described in a Japanese gardening text by Shingen (1466), shows many parallels to the visual effects of perceptual grouping, studied by the Gestalt school of psychology. Guidelines for composition of rock clusters closely relate to perception of visual figure. Garden design elements are arranged into patterns that simplify figure-ground segmentation, while seemingly balancing the visual salience of subparts and the global arrangement.

i.A.s

The Smiths

優恵

Hajine Tachibana

Darren Jones

The global economy while rarely stable has undergone a recent seismic shift. All Insignificant Things Must Disappear is an attempt to uncover new ways of thinking about what has become an encompassing event. ...

This almost unprecedented crisis has opened up a range of social and cultural consequences that we are still struggling to comprehend. Artists, so often acting as barometers for society’s evolution have a role to play in navigating this latest challenge. By offering alternative ways of seeing the volatility of recent times, All Insignificant Things Must Disappear aims to foster discussion and consideration for the road ahead.

Trinity Wall Street

Estimate of Giving - Pledging Our Financial Resources

I/We pledge $ _______ every ( ) Week ( ) Month ( ) Year to Trinity Wall Street for 2011.

( ) I/We pledge to give to God through offerings to Trinity Wall Street as I am/we are able.

( ) Please do not send weekly offering envelopes

( ) Please send information about electronic pledging (debit or credit)

( ) I/We have remembered Trinity Wall Street in my/our will

( ) Please send information about planned giving

You can make your pledge online at trinitywallstreet.org/congregation/stewardship

...all shall give as they are able,

according to the blessing of the Lord

your God that he has given you.

Deuteronomy 16:17

St Francis of Assisi

He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

Nigel Dwyer

Paintings and sculptures were used in two ways. First as a means to communicate the word of God and Jesus Christ to a largely illiterate community, It does seem that in mediaeval times the clergy really went to town with this, covering much of the wall space of their churches with vividly painted murals or with narrative carvings of bible stories. Stained glass in the windows was used to similar effect a tradition that still continues. The inside of these churches really must have been a wonder to behold for a largely serf or peasant congregation, illuminating even transcending lives which were, probably, not only short and brutish, but also rather dull and colourless.

The other main use of visual art was to produce devotional aids. Probably this is where sculpture came into prominence. There was of course the risk that such effigies might actually be worshipped and thus be a source for idolatry. Certainly most of these objects whether carved in wood or stone were polychromatic suggesting an attempt to make them as lifelike as possible. Later on this issue became one of those all too common excuses for violent confrontation in the church.

David Carrier

The relationship between artistic originality and finance is complex. In the early seventeenth-century many northern artists moved to Rome, which then was prosperous. But by the late eighteenth-century, Paris was an important art center, and Rome a backwater. But then the defeat of France by Prussia in 1871 did not cause the art world to move to Berlin. Degas, who copied Dinner at the Ball by his German contemporary Adolph Menzel, is the greater artist. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the center of the art world was in Paris. Then after World War Two, it moved to Manhattan. To some extent, then, art follows the money, which is why so many Mainland Chinese artists recently have been exhibited in Chelsea.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

After violating my wife, the robber, sitting there, began to speak comforting words to her. Of course I couldn't speak. My whole body was tied fast to the root of a cedar. But meanwhile I winked at her many times, as much as to say "Don't believe the robber." I wanted to convey some such meaning to her. But my wife, sitting dejectedly on the bamboo leaves, was looking hard at her lap. To all appearance, she was listening to his words. I was agonized by jealousy. In the meantime the robber went on with his clever talk, from one subject to another. The robber finally made his bold brazen proposal. "Once your virtue is stained, you won't get along well with your husband, so won't you be my wife instead? It's my love for you that made me be violent toward you."

While the criminal talked, my wife raised her face as if in a trance. She had never looked so beautiful as at that moment. What did my beautiful wife say in answer to him while I was sitting bound there? I am lost in space, but I have never thought of her answer without burning with anger and jealousy. Truly she said, … "Then take me away with you wherever you go."

This is not the whole of her sin. If that were all, I would not be tormented so much in the dark. When she was going out of the grove as if in a dream, her hand in the robber's, she suddenly turned pale, and pointed at me tied to the root of the cedar, and said, "Kill him! I cannot marry you as long as he lives." "Kill him!" she cried many times, as if she had gone crazy.

Rudolf Steiner

The one leads to a knowledge of the Sun state of the past; the other represents a future form of the earth existence—namely, that into which the earth will have been transformed when the fruits of all that takes place on it and Jupiter have merged into the forms of that future world. What can thus be observed of this future world may be characterized in occult phraseology as the Venus condition.

-ilonQua-

European Commission

In fact the new digital media can permit a wider distribution of cultural and creative content, because the reproduction is cheaper and quicker and creates more opportunities for authors and content providers to reach new and larger – even global - audiences. The internet is also a driver of greater pluralism in the media, giving both access to a wider range of sources and points of view as well as the means for individuals – who might otherwise be denied the opportunity – to express themselves fully and openly.

John Wood

Increasingly, in the new open innovation model, innovative products are made public before being finalised, through the so-called permanent beta approach, because such large-scale deployment brings insights that would not be evident in a protected environment. A parallel change is likely to happen in science: results will no longer be solely delivered as a finished product (the publication of a journal or book) but as draft products, in order to enable wider feedback and subsequent improvement, enabled by the sharing of rough data, facilitating serendipitous innovation. This will also help to meet the demand for improved knowledge transfer.

Tony Hey

In the next five years, we undoubtedly will collect more scientific data than we've collected so far in the whole of human history.

Scientists won't be able to look at every piece individually but instead will need to use computing tools to aid in the interpretation of vast amounts of information. There's a unique role right now for computer science and the IT industry to help scientists explore their data.

Soon, it will be impossible to do any kind of science without computational tools – and the more advanced and powerful, the better for the scientist and the science.

Roger Barga

We view researchers as extreme information workers, who in order to carry out a project must search and navigate a range of web services, access remote data and compute resources, share and manage document collections, and collaborate in virtual teams.

Chase Creek

Anna Gavalda

Je croise des gens. Je les regarde. Je leur demande à quelle heure ils se lèvent le matin, comment ils font pour vivre et ce qu'ils préfèrent comme dessert par exemple. Ensuite je pense à eux. J'y pense tout le temps. Je revois leur visage, leurs mains et même la couleur de leurs chaussettes. Je pense à eux pendant des heures voire des années et puis un jour, j'essaye d'écrire sur eux.

Taerim Kim

梶井基次郎

いったい私はあの檸檬が好きだ。レモンエロウの絵具をチューブから搾り出して固めたようなあの単純な色も、それからあの丈の詰まった紡錘形の恰好も。――結局私はそれを一つだけ買うことにした。それからの私はどこへどう歩いたのだろう。私は長い間街を歩いていた。始終私の心を圧えつけていた不吉な塊がそれを握った瞬間からいくらか弛んで来たとみえて、私は街の上で非常に幸福であった。あんなに執拗かった憂鬱が、そんなものの一顆で紛らされる――あるいは不審なことが、逆説的なほんとうであった。それにしても心というやつはなんという不可思議なやつだろう。

その檸檬の冷たさはたとえようもなくよかった。

Claude Adrien Helvetius

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Rex Stout

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Whoever would do good in the world, ought not to deal in censure. We ought not to destroy, but rather construct.

Gene Roddenberry

Cogley: What's the matter? Don't you like books?

Kirk: Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space.

Cogley: A computer, huh? I got one of these in my office. Contains all the precedents, a synthesis of all the great legal decisions written throughout time. I never use it.

Kirk: Why not?

Cogley: I've got my own system. Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn't so important, I'd show you something--my library. Thousands of books.

Kirk: What would be the point?

Cogley: This is where the law is, not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized... do you want to know the law, the ancient concepts in their own language, learn the intent of the men who wrote them, from Moses to the tribunal of Alpha 3? Books.

Alice Drummond

Sydney Smith

No furniture so charming as books.

Charles F. Kettering

Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.

Samuel Johnson

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

渡部亮

内外を問わずビジネスの世界で，最も基礎的な基本要因（fundamental fundamentals）となっているのは，貨幣，法，言語である。これらの三要素はいずれもパワー（権力）の源泉であり，いわばビジネスの三種の神器と言える。国際ビジネスでは，擬似貨幣としての株式（エクイテイ），契約のベースとなる英米法（コモンロー)，国際言語としての英語が三種の神器となっている。

RomanceStuck.com

Kiss is ... to touch or caress with the lips, as in affection or greeting.

But a kiss can be so much more. A kiss can express and arouse so many different emotions and feelings.

One of the best things about kissing is that it never gets boring! There are so many different ways to vary a simple kiss that will keep you occupied for hours!

It seems that the modern romantic kiss most likely evolved as a way of unconsciously testing the genetic fitness of a potential mate. While this may be the underlying reason as to why we began kissing, it's not really the main reason as to why we continue to practice it. The reason is simple: it feels good, it evokes feelings of passion, and it's a physical connection between ourselves and our partners.

佐藤卓

がんばるとかいっしょうけんめいとか、

表に出すなっていうふうに思うんですね。

がんばるとかいっしょうけんめいとかって、

あたりまえだっていうことです。

Charles H. Turner, Alfons Trompenaars

1. Universalism vs. particularism (What is more important, rules or relationships?)
2. Individualism vs. collectivism/communitarianism (The individualist culture sees the individual as the end and improvement to communal arrangements as the means to achieve it. The communitarian culture sees the group as its end and improvements to individual capacities as a means to that end.)
3. Neutral vs. emotional - egalitarian vs hierarchical (Do we display our emotions?)
4. Specific vs. diffuse - analytic rational vs synthetic intuitive (How separate we keep our private and working lives)
5. Achievement vs. ascription (Do we have to prove ourselves to receive status or is it given to us?)
6. Sequential vs. synchronic (Do we do things one at a time or several things at once?)
7. Internal vs. external control - inner directed vs outer directed (Do we control our environment or are we controlled by it?)

松岡正剛

ブッタもイエスも、親鸞も世阿弥も、ケプラーも古田織部も、 みんな異質のかたまりで、例外者だったんです。それが、のちのち衣鉢が継承され、 評価されるうちに、 偉人になっていっただけです。 でも、ほんとうは偉人ではなくて、異人だったんです。

John Rawls

Two Principles of Justice:

(a) Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; and

(b) Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).

Long Island Crisis Center

Jared M. Diamond

The Japanese are fanatics for fresh food. A container of milk in a US supermarket bears one date: the expiration date. In Japan a milk container bears three dates: the date the milk was manufactured, the date it arrived at the supermarket, and the expiration date. Milk production in Japan always starts at one minute past midnight, so that the milk that goes to market in the morning is today's milk. If the milk were produced at 11:59 p.m., the date on the container would have to indicate that the milk was made yesterday, and no Japanese person would buy it.

As a result, Japanese food-processing companies enjoy local monopolies. A milk producer in northern Japan cannot compete in southern Japan because transporting milk there would take several days. These local monopolies are reinforced by the Japanese government, which obstructs the import of foreign processed food by imposing a ten-day quarantine, among other restrictions. So the Japanese food-processing companies are not exposed to domestic or foreign competition, and they don't learn the best methods in the international trade for producing food. Partly as a result, food prices in Japan are very high: beef costs $200 a pound; chicken costs $25 a pound.

Some other Japanese industries are very different: the steel. metal, car, car parts, and electronics industries in Japan have higher productivities than their US counterparts. But the Japanese soap, beer, and computer industries, like the Japanese food-processing industry, are not exposed to competition, do not apply the best practices, and thus have lower productivities than the corresponding industries in the United States.

Ian Buruma

Like earthquakes and other natural calamities common in the Japanese isles, jealousy, pollution and death simply happen. They will always be with us. But they do not occur because of a sinful act. The concept of sin was, and still is, alien to Japanese thought. The Japanese gods (kami) are like most people, neither wholly good, nor completely bad. There is no Satan in Japan.

Eli Neiburger

The purpose of libraries when they were created was not to purchase commercial content for use by the community but to store and organize the content of the community. Popular materials have fueled a huge boom for popular libraries, but libraries were created to protect and ensure access to things like [local texts and history] for the communities that produced them, not to subsidize access to the hottest new clay tablets from Babylon. It’s these unique things that don’t exist anywhere else, and that matter more to our own communities than anyone else, that have the future for libraries. It’s not just data about the community, but also creations of the community that libraries can enable by giving patrons access to production tools, event venues, and – most importantly – a permanent, non-commercial, online home for our patrons’ creative works, making the library the publisher – putting the emphasis on the library as a platform for the community and less emphasis on having enough copies of the hot new thing.

The cat is out of the bag. Everyone is a publisher. The 20th-century [library] brought the world to its community. The 21st-century library brings its community to the world.

Robin Marantz Henig

Today's federal effort to develop an efficient machine for credibility assessment has been compared to the Manhattan Project, the secret government undertaking to build the atomic bomb. This sounds hyperbolic, to compare a high-tech lie detector to a weapon of mass destruction, but Tom Zeffiro, who made the analogy, said that they raise similar moral quandaries, especially for the scientists doing the research. If a truly efficient lie detector could be developed, he said, we might find ourselves living in "a fundamentally different world than the one we live in today."

Metropolitan Club

Tribune de Genève