“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Welcome My Son

Cliff Gerrish makes a good point about Aetna insurance: 

You mistake those words for a message from a human making a statement about a state of affairs. Rather it is a representation in words of a state in a database. That data has been attached to the network identity of your son.

Pink Floyd said it this way,

"Welcome my son, welcome to the machine. Where have you been? That's alright, we know where you've been." 


Yes. Except I reckon the lyric should in this case be "That's alright, we think we know we're you've been, although this only corresponds to the database state Cliff mentioned. You bought a guitar to punish your ma, etc. etc."

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