Sunday, January 31, 2021
It just goes to show--be careful what you put out into the world.
— David on Lily still practicing tapping her fingers together with each hand one finger off
Saturday, January 30, 2021
To Mandelbrot, art that satisfies lacks scale, in the sense that it contains important elements at all sizes... A Beaux-Arts paragon like the Paris Opera has no scale because it has every scale.
— James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Friday, January 29, 2021
If one scientist announces that a thing is probably true, and another demonstrates it with rigor, which one has done more to advance science? Is the naming of a conjecture an act of discovery or is it just a cold-blooded staking of a claim?
— James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Thursday, January 28, 2021
i like to free associate and ask ben random 'would you rather' questions and today i asked
"would you rather be chrissy teigen, or me"
and he said chrissy teigen
"would you rather be chrissy teigen, or me"
and he said chrissy teigen
— @lilyhadabird
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
"If it has a sign that has a menu with a speaker that you talk into, a window whre you give your money to a person, and a window where you pik up food." - Liz Diller, on what makes a building Architecture
— @dank.lloyd.wright
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
The equations describing the motion of air and water were as well known as those describing the motion of planets. Astronomers did not achieve perfection and never would, not in a solar system tugged by the gravities of nine planets, scores of moons and thousands of asteroids, but calculations of planetary motions were so accurate that people forgot they were forcasts.
— James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Monday, January 25, 2021
Why does nature appear quantized? Because information is quantized.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Sunday, January 24, 2021
“This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now."
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Such processes run in one direction only. Probability is the reason. What is remarkable—physicists took a long time to accept it—is that every irreversible process must be explained the same way. Time itself depends on chance.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Friday, January 22, 2021
Anything that goes into the record speaks directly to the future.
— Tenet
Thursday, January 21, 2021
For a while, until it became impractical, the telephone companies tried to maintain a record of every message.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
— Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
A difference in JPEG compressions.
— SS telling me about a study where machine learning picked up on an accidental difference in input, paraphrased.*
Monday, January 18, 2021
But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt, juxtoposition of elements.
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constiutency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED... The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self concoiousness in the language's users and creators
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Saturday, January 16, 2021
For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one.” The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea—is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first.... Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Friday, January 15, 2021
Technology isn't destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.
— M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
Thursday, January 14, 2021
When you're over 40, your age becomes a protected class.
— New School Title IX coordinator
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
For a story to ask these sort of questions, we first have to finish it.
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
I remembered Aldus Manutius, who 40 years after the printing press, put the book into its modern dimensions by making it fit into saddle bags.
— Alan Kay via M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal