Doll Hospital
— Section of American Girl Doll store
Common Herbarium Pests & Visitors
— Sign
Giving the Middle Finger Is a 'God-Given' Right, a Quebec Judge Says
New York Times headline
It's almost impossible not to go back in time anymore.
— Lian on digital file backup systems
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.
For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought.
— Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, "Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT," The New York Times
Do not underestimate objects, he advises... Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects.
— David Foster Wallace via Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Shangri-La
— Ski Run
A hike.
— Lily
The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living—his way of meeting and making peace with the day.
— John Szarkowski via Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
“Sure, that’s my grandma from the photo album,” Noë explained in our most recent conversation. “But if you take it out of the context of the photo album and put it on a wall in a gallery, what the heck is it anymore? It’s no longer clear what it is, what it is trying to show or what it is for — what it is a tool for doing.”
— Blake Gopnik, "The Supreme Court May Force Us to Rethink 500 Years of Art," The New York Times
I don't want to make plop art - sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture.
— Rachel Whiteread via @postul8_
Finally: according to Heidegger, "We are what we say to one another."
— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Movements are lies that are agreed on.
— @jerrysaltz
These books are 57mm high and 47mm wide – about the same length as a mouse's tail. In around 1800, the publisher John Marshall came up with the idea of helping children learn by reading books to their dolls.
— @britishlibrary
As a threshold matter, the photograph is persuasive because it is constructed of the same stuff as every-day experience.
— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Most young people now watch TV with the subtitles on
18-24yr olds: 61%
25-49yr olds: 31%
50-64yr olds: 13%
65+yr olds: 22%
— @esaagar
I change titles pretty often.
— H (I might have misheard him)*
The most dramatic photos from the train derailment in #eastpalestine Ohio weren't taken by photojournalists.
— @patrickwitty
As his [Gingrich's] second wife would say of him, "He has to be historic to justify his life."
— Neal Gabler, Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009
Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries. It's hard to wrap your head around. And this is, I mean, even that's just the end of a very long road. The 100,000 years before that, it's not like that was that different. So there's been people like us, that have emotions like us, that have physical sensations like us, for so, so long.
— Tim Urban, "Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #360"