Friday, September 23, 2011

Delicious Philosophy of Firtz

            I am linking my reader’s to my soulmate in this post, a user on delicious.com named Fritz Freiheit. He is a very interesting character. He is super active, as he has over thirty thousand bookmarks, and many of his bookmarks are in philosophy. Naturally, this really attracted me, because many users on delicious, even if they have philosophy bookmarks, do not have a very high percentage of their bookmarks under philosophy. Fritz likes a few things more than philosophy though; he is very interested in opensource software, writing, and SciFi. Those are great topics because they often explore philosophy as well. He Fritz is more of a cataloguer than a commenter though. He organizes his tags pretty well, but has so many they get a bit messy in some areas. He doesn’t follow through a huge amount of the time, but he does maintain his own website FritzFreiheit.com, where he posts his own opinions on various things.
            Looking through his philosophy bookmarks I uncovered some spectacular resources for readers of my blog. One of them is the website of futurist, inventor, and technology philosopher Ray Kurzweil, and a link to a post where Kurzweil explains how computational complexity will revolutionize philosophy as we know it (Link). Articles like this are great for readers of my blog because they compliment my discussion of philosophical issues in every day life. Thinking about how computers will affect our very ability to think about such daily philosophical issues is itself a philosophical issue my readers will be interested in.
Another great resource I uncovered through a link to a post covering eighty eight truths about living life, is a site that discusses philosophy as applied to being human, and living pragmatically (Link). This is a useful resource for my readers because I usually focus on somewhat more theoretical issues, and leave the pragmatic solutions to my readers. This site gives more pragmatic philosophies for how to live a better life, plus I can’t cover all possible topics. I am very impressed with Fritz’ ability to consistently gather such great resources and bookmark them. It looks like there are new bookmarks on a weekly basis, if not daily, so readers of my blog will want to stay current with his profile, and website.
            Fritz’ other interests, especially physics, and opensource software, should be interesting to my readers as well. Opensource software has a controversial history rooted in philosophy of technology, and the consequences of the opensource movement have had an impact on many people’s lives. For example, the movement produced the Linux operating system that is now used on most professional servers, which helped enable the rapid growth of the Internet. That is philosophy directly affecting the global populace, and that kind of thing is interesting to readers of my blog. Additionally, Fritz linked to an article about CERN finding particles moving faster than the speed of light today, which means that Einstein could be proven wrong after nearly a century. The philosophical implications of such a discovery are unknown for now, but they will certainly be far-reaching. I am sure people interested in philosophy will want to keep current with such advances in science. These qualities make Fritz a phenomenal user to keep track of, and I recommend all of my readers do so immediately.