Friday, June 23, 2023
Every single time he'd go to "Pick a point in the future where we're both happy. 10 years, 20 years from now, and lets work our way back."
— Chris Voss, "Chris Voss: FBI Hostage Negotiator | Lex Fridman Podcast #364"
Thursday, June 22, 2023
In hindsight, it's exactly like building flying machines. People spent a lot of time wondering about how do birds fly, you know. And that turned out to be really hard. Have you seen the TED Talk with a flying bird?... Yeah, it flies around the audience. But it took 100 years longer to figure out how to do that than for the Wright brothers to build the first airplane because it turned out there was a much easier way to fly.
— Max Tegmark, "Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development | Lex Fridman Podcast #371"
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Now I am looking back, so whatever I say about Edward at 15 is colored by my, you know, all my experiences that happen in the meantime, my current views and so on.
— Edward Frenkel, "Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox - Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #370"
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
It's been inventoried.
— General Gibson, Asteroid City
Monday, June 19, 2023
There's a famous web comic that's titled Cytogenesis, which is about how something, an error is in Wikipedia, and there's no source for it, but then a lazy journalist reads it and writes the source, and then some helpful Wikipedian spots that it has no source, finds a source and adds it to Wikipedia. And voila, magic.
— Jimmy Wales, "Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia | Lex Fridman Podcast #385"
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Today’s sense of unease is a stark contrast with the heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was a period when a theorist could declare that the fall of communism marked “the end of history” — that liberal democratic ideas not only vanquished rivals, but represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”
— Patricia Cohen, "Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True," The New York Times
Saturday, June 17, 2023
Lily probably shouldn't read beyond the last post.
— Dad in a text as he shares story of how a snake got into the birdhouse
Friday, June 16, 2023
You could buy 6 BigMacs with 1 hour of minimum wage in 1980, but today you can't even buy one, despite minimum wage more than doubling.
— @wallstreetbets
Thursday, June 15, 2023
There are days where motivation is in short supply and I wonder out loud what the hell I'm doing with my life moving piles of junk from one flat surface to the other. Then there are days when a miraculous survivor of a 3-foot panoramic photograph of the floor of the 7th National Baptist Convention lands in my lap.
— @midwesternamericana
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Sage Gloss
— Tile
Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Before aerial bombs and synchronized machine guns were perfected, aviators had few weapons which could harass the enemy on the ground. One weapon occasionally used was darts. They were most effective if dropped in small quantities from about 1,000 feet by the observer in observation airplanes. Dropped over a column on the road or trenches, the darts were noiseless and did not warn those on the ground to take cover. The idea was revived during the Korean War with slightly heavier darts for use against enemy motorized convoys and troop concentrations. They were dropped in very large quantities from bombers at great height, and had enough energy to crack an engine block.
— Item description, "French Dart, World War I," West Point Museum
Monday, June 12, 2023
I feel like I'm inside of a snow globe that's inside of a closet.
— Lily
Sunday, June 11, 2023
The measure of a commercially successful newspaper is not simply how well it reports the big events, but what it does when there are no dying statesmen, bloodthirsty desperadoes, or heinous crimes to write about. Hearst succeeded in New York not only because he knew how to report the big stories, but because he was a master at constructing news from nothing. News is not a phenomenon that exists in the real world, waiting to be discovered. Wars have been fought, tornadoes have raged, and hundreds of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered without ever becoming “news.” An event becomes news only when journalists and editors decide to record it. More often than not, what determines whether an occurrence is newsworthy or not is the ease with which it can be plotted and narrated so that readers will want to read about it.
— David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
Saturday, June 10, 2023
You may not win the race, but you'll always be my horse.
— Morris saying a Buck Offit quote
Friday, June 9, 2023
A Portrait of David consists of 75 life-size photos of men and boys named David. One David of each age from one to age 75 was selected from those who responded to my call for Davids which was placed in the local newspapers.
— @micahlexier
Thursday, June 8, 2023
For years, I've been collecting the dust on buildings as a historic record of the atmosphere. Preservationists typically throw out this dust layer as "insignificant". Yesterday we collected some of the dust directly from the air at the Preservation Technology Lab @columbiagsapp @columbia.
— @oteropailosstudio
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
It was never easy to tell where reporting ended and fiction began. As Michael Robertson, the author of Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, observes, this mingling of genres was common to "journalistic discourse at the turn of the century... Newspaper reporters and readers of the 1890s were much less concerned with distinguishing among fact-based reporting, opinion, and literature," The cult of objectivity which would define journalistic standards—if not always journalistic practices—later in the twentieth century was not yet in place. What readers expected of their newspapers was not literal, but figurative truth. They wanted a map of the city with the "feel" of events, the "sense" of being there.
— David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
“Your mom is getting old,” I said to my wife. “When you’re FaceTiming with her, would you rather see her deepfake digital avatar, or a crummier video call where she’s holding the phone camera up to her face at an unflattering angle?”
“The latter,” she said without hesitation. “That’s real."
— Brian X. Chen, "A First Try of Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro Headset," The New York Times
Monday, June 5, 2023
At least one witness has stated that Tank Man was not the only person to have blocked the tanks during the protest, but Tank Man is unique in that he is the only one who was photographed and recorded on video.
— "Tank Man," Wikipedia
Sunday, June 4, 2023
I ordered more becuase I need them right away.
— Emily on ordering more ladybugs*
