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Welcome to Muse & Reason, I'm Dr Robert N. Winter and this is my public Memex. A place for articles, essays and jottings.

This site is loosely divided into the categories of art, history, philosophy, politics, publishing, social comment and technology.

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Tempus Fugit

As Apple's privacy respecting posture gives way to the pull of marketing dollars through making user data the product, their third way begins to fall short.
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On Replies and ‘Reply Guys’

We do well to live and let live, we also do well to post and let post. Devote what limited energy we are gifted with to thought and the formulation of our views and let the 'reply guys' reply. They are, generally, all sound and fury signifying nothing.
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Ghost Writers — Rise of the Machines

Ultimately, I do not think the problem is that we are building machines so ‘smart’ that their output is indistinguishable from human compositions. The problem is that we are educating humans whose output is so illiterate, and devoid of experience, it is indistinguishable from computer generated text.
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An Opportunity Afforded

This is why some people will look at a library and see a wealth of opportunity, while others will see the same space and same books and apprehend only barriers to entry or exclusion from a world in which they think they have no part to play.
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Reading More Efficiently And Effectively

I can well picture 'Hitch', cigarette languidly hanging from the corner of his mouth, hand clasped around a whisky glass, tossing the book toward the wastepaper bin, and then leaning back in his chair. Content in the knowledge he had repaid the reading in the only way fit.
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CR III Royal Cypher

The design of the CR III cipher was produced by the College of Arms and continues a tradition of heraldry that has bound individual monarchs to the institution of monarchy for over a thousand years.
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Twenty Years of Firefox

Little did I know how consistently Firefox would be my window to the World Wide Web, nor how its security, and in time privacy focus, would shape my understanding of what it means to be online.
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At A Journey’s End

I have a thesis of which I am proud, and a marriage to my beautiful wife Halaina — who has been a constant source of love, joy, and support as I laboured in the archives.
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Teflon Leadership

Those who rise to the top jobs, do so not because they are better leaders or have fewer blots on their copybook — it is because they are better able to shrug off criticism and weather the blistering attacks that are directed at all holders of public office.
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A Peer’s Tube

Winter Ink PeerTube will allow for the documenting and preservation of videos to which I can link in my ongoing speculations about life and art. Links, and the content they reference, which are permanent and will always work. A necessity to promote the adoption of individually-owned and controlled sovereign spaces which enable an open and healthy web.
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Intellectual Warehouse

While access to information is now relatively more widespread than in the past, the modern paywall can often prove to be as much of a hurdle to access as the price of manuscripts was in yesteryear.
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The New Cathedral Door

Does it truly safeguard that which is dangerous and true while restricting that which is dangerous and false, and does it arrive at this determination through a process of deliberation; or, does it merely replace one arbitrary determination for another about that which is dangerous.
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Jotting – Protect Duty

While I am not keen on the idea of self-policing, lest we go the way of some American states, I do wonder if society may not be better able to protect its citizens if its citizens were more involved in that self-same protection. Be it physical, intellectual or cyber.
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Jotting – WHO

Lightblub Moment ON FRIDAY, APRIL 30, the WHO quietly updated a page on its website. In a section on how the coronavirus gets transmitted, the…

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Hail, Lobster!

The moment when left leaning popular culture overreached itself and instead of fascist shaming a once obscure academic into silence, brought back into popular use what had long been taboo and empowered the very thing they thought they were destroying.
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Tool Time

Consider that a UI should assume the user doesn’t have a high level of software experience, nor is willing to learn how to use the command line to undertake some level of personalisation.
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Bitcoin’s Dirty Little Secrets – Environmental

I have long been concerned with the negative human impact on our environment and while I am some way off from thinking the world is on fire, it is clear that business as usual is going to leave a decidedly lessened planet for our children. Thus my spotlight on the ecological effects of our choices is slowly widening and most recently has taken in cryptocurrency.
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Lacklustre

Today… what can I say about today… it was nothing out of the ordinary, very lacklustre indeed. Neither terrifying nor exhilarating, sad nor happy, downcast…

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The Void

I love to give back to those who give so much to me, but sometimes this sucks all my powers of concentration. This is the height of mental indigestion.
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Catharsis

At times, writing alone is not action enough to free my thinking from its melancholy trends. In such times I turn to that most lyric of the muses, Euterpe.
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‘I’ and ‘Me’

The notion that the 'significant symbols,' found in the harmony between the projected and received understanding of the gesture which transports meaning between employee and manager, are not fixed, but are subject to continual recreation allowing infinite flexibility when assessing project planning.
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Company Men

In Calcutta a statue was erected to Lord Bentinck, Governor-General of India. Its inscription bears citing at length as it is testament to the moral…

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Madmen Raging Against the Sacred

The Fourth Crusade veered from its original aim, the reconquest Jerusalem, and ended in the sack of Constantinople; earning for itself the ignominious title of the crusade against fellow-Christians.
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The Lions Roar

After entering a score of passwords, and wrapping tinfoil around my head to ensure the CIA were not tracking me...
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