Archive for the 'Books / E-Books' Category

Google To Scan 800,000 Books & Manuscripts From Indian University

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on May 22, 2007
in Books / E-Books, Freedom of Information and Web News
. 0 Comments

Need to dig up some information from a centuries-old text on ayurvedic medicine? Soon you’ll be able to do so from the comfort of your living room. Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

“Written in both papers and palm leaves, there are around 100,000 manuscripts in our library, some dating back to the eighth century,” said the vice chancellor of Mysore. “The effort is to restore and preserve this cultural heritage for effective dissemination of knowledge.” He also added, cryptically, that the University plans to “patent them before making them available on public domain.”

booksGoogle has been aggressively expanding its Book Search program to include non-English library materials. It recently announced a deal with the University of Lausanne to scan a large collection of French-language works, and the new partnership with Mysore will digitize works in Sanskrit and Kannada. These schools lack the fear of Google displayed by the French government, which has so far introduced projects like Gallica and Quaero to challenge the search giant without any apparent success.

ars technica

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A Sacred Text for the 21st Century

Published
by
michaelgarfield
on April 19, 2007
in Books / E-Books, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Literature/Poetry, Nature of Reality, Philosophy, Poetry and Religion
. 0 Comments

[What follows are the foreword and excerpts from a pioneering new book about trans-faith spirituality.]

I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision – the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the café trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you’ll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives – that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution – the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that, with his new book, Suicide Dictionary. What Paul doing for us – the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory – is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. And, I would like to note, Paul is a name with quite a pedigree for getting the word out.

one mind village

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Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 ~ 2007

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 16, 2007
in Books / E-Books and Personal
. 0 Comments

vonnegut
chicago tribune

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The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 16, 2007
in Anthropology, Books / E-Books, Entheogens/Psychedelics, Occulture and Personal
. 0 Comments

For fans of the literary con, it’s been a great few years. Currently, we have Richard Gere starring as Clifford Irving in “The Hoax,” a film about the ‘70s novelist who penned a faux autobiography of Howard Hughes. We’ve had the unmasking of James Frey, JT LeRoy/Laura Albert and Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized large chunks of her debut novel, forcing her publisher, Little, Brown and Co., to recall the book. Much has been written about the slippery boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the publishing industry’s responsibility for distinguishing between the two, and the potential damage to readers. There’s been, however, hardly a mention of the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster: Carlos Castaneda.

If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.

Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called “a separate reality.” Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.” They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the ‘90s, was studying at Stanford in the early ‘70s when he read the first two don Juan books. “I was a searcher,” he recently told Salon. “I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors.”

salon

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The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on April 12, 2007
in Activism, Anthropology, Art, Books / E-Books, Civil Rights, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Freedom of Information, Futurism/Transhumanism, Hacks, Help Yourself, Human Rights Violations, Inc. Shenanigans, Language, Literature/Poetry, Media, Memetics, Mind/Body/Spirit, Mindhacks, Nature of Reality, Occulture, Philosophy, Poetry, Political, Religion, Resistance, Sexuality and Society/Social Systems
. 1 Comment

taz

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1.8 Million Ancient Indian Manuscripts Go Online

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on February 23, 2007
in Books / E-Books, Freedom of Information and History/Archaeology
. 0 Comments

The government has created an online database of 1.8 million ancient texts to promote them as treasures of the country and to preserve millions of neglected manuscripts. Out of the five million manuscripts, 1.8 million have been documented.

As the manuscripts were lying neglected, the ministry had set up a National Mission for Manuscripts with the aim to locate them through a nation-wide surveys and then to document and catalogue them.

IBN

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The Comforts of Madness: Novelist J G Ballard Explains Why Consumerism is a New Fascism

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on September 16, 2006
in Books / E-Books, Economics, Fundamentalism, Inc. Shenanigans and Neoliberal Globalization
. 0 Comments

J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children’s encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. “Selling is like wooing a girl,” says Ballard. Ballard “believed in” The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, ”’Go and read The Eight Volumes.’ That was her name for them,” he chuckles. “It was the nearest thing to television.”

Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.

indy uk

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Dalai Lama Challenges the Idea of Neurologically Situated Consciousness In New Book

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on September 15, 2006
in Books / E-Books, Consciousness/Psych/Brain and Religion
. 1 Comment

IN HIS RECENT REVIEW of the Dalai Lama’s book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, George Johnson criticizes the Dalai Lama for opposing “physical explanations for consciousness, invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff, an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science.” [1] While it is certainly true that mainstream science insists that there must be a physical explanation for consciousness, the empirical evidence supporting this view is tenuous. Since scientists have devised objective means of measuring all kinds of physical phenomena, it is remarkable that no scientific instruments can detect whether or not consciousness is present in inorganic matter (e.g., computers or robots), in plants (e.g., insect-eating plants), or in animals (e.g., single cells, insects, human fetuses, or normal human adults). Given that consciousness is invisible to all known means of scientific measurement-–unlike all other kinds of physical phenomena-–the burden of proof for the physical status of consciousness should be on those who make this assertion, not on those who question it.

Scientists have established that specific neural processes are necessary for producing specific conscious mental processes in humans and some other animals. In this way, correlations have been identified between brain and mind processes. Brain processes are detected with the third-person methods of biology, but mental processes are directly observed only by means of the first-person perspectives of individuals introspectively monitoring their own states of consciousness. This evidence proves that certain neural processes are necessary for producing specific mental events in humans, but not that they are sufficient causes of consciousness, nor does this indicate that consciousness itself is a physical phenomenon. Moreover, while many scientists believe that mental phenomena are emergent properties of brain, no one has ever objectively measured any mental event emerging from the brain, so that, too, remains an untested hypothesis that can be taken for the time being only on faith.

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Intelligent Intelligent Design

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on March 14, 2006
in Books / E-Books and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

Surprisingly, Autodesk founder John Walker sides with intelligent design, but not by a deity—by post-Singularity intelligences creating a reality simulation: “What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe. There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light. There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.

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Wil McCarthy’s “Hacking Matter” Available for Free

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on January 1, 2006
in Books / E-Books, Nanotechnology and Physics
. 0 Comments

Wil McCarthy’s incredibly compelling book, Hacking Matter, has been released in a free pdf form. It’s great that the book can now be freely shared.” Hacking Matter is a science book about Wil’s research on “quantum dots”—configurable “mezzoscale” (larger than nano) machines that can be controleld with software to mimic the properties of different elements.

Link to site.
Link to book (pdf).

Candid Video of William S. Burroughs From August 1996

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on December 26, 2005
in Art, Books / E-Books, Local - Lawrence, Kansas and Personal
. 0 Comments

I came across this video on our town website, Lawrence.com, as Burroughs spent the last years of his life here in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s about 20 minutes of amature video of Bill just hanging out with friends (including Steve Buscemi and Allen Ginsberg), shooting the shit and being his charming self.

bill burroughs

Library of Congress Launches Effort to Create World Digital Library

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on December 16, 2005
in Books / E-Books, Freedom of Information, Technology and Web News
. 0 Comments

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library’s initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first.

The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University. The full text is available at www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches.

In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online “rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa.”

library of congress

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Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on November 24, 2005
in Books / E-Books, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Mind/Body/Spirit, Organization/Systems/Chaos, Philosophy and Society/Social Systems
. 1 Comment

During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world’s cultures are now available to us. In the past, if you were born, say, a Chinese, you likely spent your entire life in one culture, often in one province, sometimes in one house, living and loving and dying on one small plot of land. But today, not only are people geographically mobile, we can study, and have studied, virtually every known culture on the planet. In the global village, all cultures are exposed to each other.

Knowledge itself is now global. This means that, also for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us—the knowledge, experience, wisdom and reflection of all major human civilizations—premodern, modern, and postmodern—are open to study by anyone.

What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential—about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth—and put it all on the table? What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us? What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?

Sound complicated, complex, daunting? In a sense, it is. But in another sense, the results turn out to be surprisingly simple and elegant. Over the last several decades, there has indeed been an extensive search for a comprehensive map of human potentials. This map uses all the known systems and models of human growth—from the ancient shamans and sages to today’s breakthroughs in cognitive science—and distills their major components into 5 simple factors, factors that are the essential elements or keys to unlocking and facilitating human evolution.

Welcome to the Integral Approach. (pdf)

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Googling Your Genes – Chapter 26 of “The Google Story” by David Vise

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on November 20, 2005
in Books / E-Books, Computers, Health/Bio-Tech and Web News
. 0 Comments

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google’s expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology. Their goal—through Google, its charitable foundation, and an evolving entity called Google.org—is to empower millions of individuals and scientists with information that will lead to healthier and smarter living through the prevention and cure of a wide range of diseases. Some of this work, done in partnership with others, is already under way, making use of Google’s array of small teams of gifted employees and its unwavering emphasis on innovation, unmatched search capacity, and vast computational resources.

“Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,” Brin says. “We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply.”

He and Larry want to make it easier for users to find the right information faster, and the company is pouring the bulk of its resources into enhancing the breadth and quality of search. This involves wholly different methods of searching that may eventually make today’s Google seem primitive. As these evolve, the search mechanisms of the future will produce better answers to queries, just as Google is superior to the early search engines that preceded it.

“The ultimate search engine,” says Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

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The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

Published
by
DrQuickbeam
on November 20, 2005
in Books / E-Books, Consciousness/Psych/Brain, Entheogens/Psychedelics and Ethnobotany/Botany
. 2 Comments

It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, “they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.”

Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist’s repertory.

Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients’ mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug’s more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one Professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.

mescaline.com

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