Eat smart today because you’ll have to do it again tomorrow.

Eat This, Not That! (page 16) David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding

Thoroughly enjoying the quips in the writing and getting totally grossed out by chain restaurant menus.

on the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe…

George Orwell, 1984 (page 103)

Still Human? Some observers refer to the post-Singularity period as “posthuman” and refer to the anticipation of this period as posthumanism.  However, to me being human means being part of a civilization that seeks to extend its boundaries.  We are already reaching beyond our biology by rapidly gaining the tools to reprogram and augment it.  If we regard a human modified with technology as no longer human, where would we draw the defining line?  Is a human with a bionic heart still human?  How about someone with a neurological implant?  What about two neurological implants?.. [page 374]

Seem like crazy-talk?  Just ask Dick Cheney.

Textbooks, with or without the bundled DVDs, are…”The Hummer of higher education.”

Judy Baker and Anya Kamenetz “The Real Cost of College Textbooks” NYTimes online.

Still, some might read this book and say, “hey, I’m going to give running a try, and then discover they enjoy it.  And of course that would be a beautiful thing.  As the author of this book I’d be very pleased if that happened.  But people have their own individual likes and dislikes.  Some people are suited more for marathon running, some for gold, others for gambling.  Whenever I see students in gym class all made to run a long distance, I feel sorry for them.  Forcing people who have no desire to run, or who aren’t physically fit enough, is a kind of pointless torture.  I always want to advise teachers not to force all junior and senior high school students to run the same course, but I doubt anybody’s going to listen to me.  That’s what schools are like.  The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about Running (p. 45)

I ran like a 12 minute mile in high school (sad I know).  I remember not being able to run even a 1/4 mile (once around the track), but that any student that ran it under 8 minutes got a free soda.  No soda for me!

Maybe the PE teacher should have given me a diet soda…

Mr. Yunus states. “When we were in the caves we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began … As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because [they] stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”

From The Little Big Things, by Tom Peters

people first, people second, people third, people ad infinitum

That’s the way I like to do business.

From The Little Big Things by Tom Peters

…a video version of the course supplemented with a set number of hours of live teaching support, either delivered remotely by a…grad student, or live and in person from a local instructor, for a charge somewhere between zero and several thousand dollars, with credit awarded by your local institution.  The existence of such an option–call it MIT on Demand–might even enhance the MIT brand, as OCW already has.

A company called StraighterLine already offers and important version of this idea: accredited online college courses for $399 per course, which includes ten hours of one-on-one tutoring.  But the course credit is granted by just four small, unknown, community and for-profit colleges.  This approach is half a step away from really  blowing things up. It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online, on-demand education.

Anna Kamenetz, DIY U (pg 128)

The Post Office Department of the United States is an Ass.

Mark Twain, Who is Mark Twain

Nothing has to be paid but the rest of the debt; and here I stand, nobly paying it—out of your pockets. That is the way with debts; they just dump along, from shoulder to shoulder, and you never know who has got to foot the bill at last.

Mark Twain, Who is Mark Twain?