"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or
Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the
properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and
whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And
particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing
it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took
advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or
abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they
pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that
All deities reside in the human breast."

"Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but
everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going
to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was
reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as
they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
demonology. I'd never heard of them, but they existed, and I'm
convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library
of Congress would've been the only source."

Dr. Bob's Last Drink

"Dr. Bob assured her that he would not drink. He said that
alcoholics, even those who had stopped drinking, would have to begin
to learn how to live in the real world. She finally agreed and off he
went. Dr. Bob kept his promise to Anne. That is, until he boarded the
train to Atlantic City."

"Wilson, an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober by helping
other alcoholics through the Oxford Group in New York, was in Akron on
business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing.
Recognizing the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics
he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Sieberling,
one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group."

"The only thing that can keep a drunk sober is telling his story to
another drunk."

Reblog: we need a better lexicon to talk about collaboration

The word "open" is frequently used in a vacuous way. So for example,
"Open Access" essentially just means "Access". We need to use a
richer lexicon to describe the dimensions of productive,
collaborative, and educational projects.

The terms "NC", "ND", "SA", "By", and "Zero" from Creative Commons
provide a limited way to talk about rights (or, rather, restrictions)
attached to resources, but they don't say very much. For the sake of
comparison, there are 82 tags used on Slashdot, and although most of
them aren't relevant to us, there are probably more than 5 that are.
It seems that as a movement we are stumbling around in the dark,
without even a shared taxonomy (much less a theory or practice) of
sharing.

The four freedoms are somewhat more descriptive, but they are by now
fairly obvious. Like, duh, of course we should be able to run
software for any purpose (anyone who thinks otherwise is actively
seeking to be repressed). Of course we should study and change
software if we're interested in that (but not every software project
has documentation that makes learning curves effective). We learned
about sharing on Sesame Street. The bit about derivative works follows
directly from the above.

But in the words of Jonathan Swift: "Let no man talk to me of these
and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glympse of hope,
that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them
into practice."