[ExI] olympic opening ceremonies

[Anders Sandberg]

Seeing Brunel and his team of dancing victorian engineers was great fun.

"Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early 
Victorians.  He was short, ripped, had big sideburns, smoked 50 cigars a 
day, AND KICKED EVERYONE'S ASS!!"
-2D goggles

C.f. http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/talk-to-the-hand/


On 28/07/2012 04:46, spike wrote:
> Brits, may evolution save the queen.  I hope your athletes win a pile 
> of medals, a tall, wide and deep pile of them.

Evolution save the queen? That actually makes sense. Britain seems to be 
based on the meta-principle that you are allowed to add new stuff as 
long as you keep all the old. Layer upon layer, just like how evolution 
builds organisms by exapting previous systems and adding superstructures 
on top of them. Hence weird things like the City of London being a 
10,000 inhabitant town inside the city *called* London, with a special 
representative in parliament  and voting rights for medieval guilds and 
corporations. Or Oxford University, built on institutions that were 
originally monastic lodging-houses and kept together by a library and a 
shared distrust of the townspeople. Or that Magdalen Street is not 
pronounced "Magdalen" but "Maudlin" - but the church on it, St. 
Magdalen, has the normal pronounciation...

Of course the downside is that all the existing weirdness constrains the 
functionality of anything new. I doubt we are ever going to see good 
railway services or plumbing here since they have to follow the patterns 
set by early pioneers. But the cool thing about a seriously retrofitted 
society is that everything is unique and complicated... which is of 
course also a major annoyance.

(As for myself, I think I feel about as British as I feel Swedish... I'm 
probably just an internationalist with a fondness for north-west Europe. )

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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