"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
An Uber driver told me that the Republicans relate to the US like a noisy distressed toddler would to its mother, and the Democrats like a the same mother to her child. Cheap insults aside, the truth is in the synthesis: our countries are simultaneously petulant and our parents.
Oliver
I read “The Great Shark Hunt” by the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson.
Oliver
I love Hunter S. Thompson’s prose. Most focus their praise on the drugs and chaos, but his writing is just good ; it’s free from cliché, balanced, gripping — he’d be one of the best writers in history if he wrote about cars or the stock market. X
Oliver
Another UNIX aphorism: “Worse is better.” Richard P. Gabriel, who coined the phrase, does better work here than “Less is more.” It’s provocative, but silly enough for people not to get carried away with it.
Oliver
Doug McIlroy, in The UNIX Philosophy, “Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program.” reminds me of Edmund Burke, on society as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Oliver
My wife: “I’m going to remember to treat work like a video game today, and not dwell on outcomes.” Me: “Beat the boss!” My wife: “I am the boss!” Me: “Yes, and the battle against your own mind is the battle of battles.” X
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I read from Stanislaw Lem’s wonderful work, Golem XIV, featuring lectures given by a sentient military supercomputer.
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Reading Lem’s GOLEM this morning, with an intelligent computer lecturing humans on how we are deficient for having no sense of our insides, I realized that it’s the same for our minds: imagine if you could actually see the structure of your cognition.
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I’ve never got it when people say “that’s just semantics.” Semantics is the study of meaning in language; what if you told someone trying to fix your puncture that they were about to remove the wrong wheel, and they said: “That’s just mechanics!”
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“On some grave questions, there is no difference to be split; one does not look for a synthesis between verity and falsehood; the sun does not rise in the east one day and in the west the next.” — Christopher Hitchens
Oliver
