6. “But if life itself is good and pleasant (...) and if one who sees is conscious that he sees, one who
hears that he hears, one who walks that he walks, (...) whenever we perceive, we are conscious
Aristotle. that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that
we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist...
8. We strive toward an objective analysis of our surroundings in
order to understand our shortcomings and get better.
9. In 1883, Nietzsche described the idea of the Übermensch/
Superman as a goal for humanity.
10. Nietzsche's Overman or Superman is a human being who
generates values in accordance with data that he collects from
his environment. He employs his intuition (regarding good and
evil) to form values and then tests them empirically and without
prejudice. That which works, promotes his welfare and
happiness and helps him realize his full range of potentials - is
good. And everything - including values and the Superman
himself - everything - is transitory, contingent, replaceable,
changeable and subject to the continuous scrutiny of Darwinian
natural selection. His values are: self-realization, survival in
strength, and continual re-invention. Overcoming is not only a
process or a mechanism - it constitutes the reason to live.
11. A 100 years later, Marshall McLuhan analyzes the relationship
between us and our surroundings and proclaims that “the
medium is the message”.
12. We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our
tools shape us. - Marshall McLuhan
18. And ends with the discovery of new information that not only helps us
perform tasks faster and better. but anticipates our future needs.
19. We’ve started whole trends in product design around the tools that can
track us, and we even came up with a word to describe the drive towards
an objective learning of oneself - the Quantified Self.
20. The Quantified Self as a term and as a group was formed in 2007 when
Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, former Wired contributors, began looking at
some new practices that seemed, loosely, to belong together: life logging,
personal genomics, location tracking, biometrics. These new tools were
being developed for many different reasons, but all of them had
something in common: they added a computational dimension to ordinary
existence.
21. 1.Why the fascination with sensing devices?
2.How do we track activity?
3.Where does my project fit?
22. An odometer for measuring distance was first described by Vitruvius
around 27 and 23 BC. The Roman empire needed to measure the
empire’s roads and thus understand the size of the provinces.
23. We also have evidence of a Chinese odometer in the form of a mechanical carriage.
At one li, a mechanical-driven wooden figure strikes a drum. When ten li is traversed,
another wooden figure would strike a bell with its mechanical-operated arm.
24. Pedometers were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The modern-day pedometer is commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
25. Today pedometers come in thousands of packages and within
products, helping us measure our all-day activity.
26. Tracking is a powerful tool.
Measuring accomplishments makes heroes out of all of us.