Richard Rorty

The pope recently said: “A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition – one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made.

Daniel Postel, “Last Words from Richard Rorty,” The Progressive, June 02007

Three Talks on GUIs

Three different ways of envisioning the future of computer interfaces and data manipulation…

1 – Blaise Aguera y Arcas: “Photosynth”
Data visualization and tag reuse at its best; fluidity and beauty all coming from Microsoft. Who would have thought? Apparently, not even the speaker himself! :-)
7 minutes & 12 seconds.

2 – Anand Agarawala: “BumpTop”
An old idea—the computer desktop as physical space—implemented to mimic aspects of physical reality like weight and momentum.
4 minutes & 51 seconds.

3 – Aza Raskin: “Away with Applications”
The command-line interface meets the desktop and its applications…a long talk but the demos are worth watching.
1 hour, 26 minutes & 30 seconds. Includes two Q&A sections which you can skip. The first one starts around minute 40 and lasts about 15 minutes; the second one starts at the end of the talk proper and goes until the end of the video.