Pro tip: If anyone is more concerned about something than you are, just say that they’re “hand-wringing” and “clutching their pearls.” That conclusively refutes their position and you never have to consider it again.
ESPN is now a gambling-promotion network that finds sports useful.
Watching Reddit imitate Elon’s Twitter reinforces an important point: People who want a topic-based online discussion platform already had one that’s not vulnerable to corporate clowning: Usenet.
Angus was waiting for me to get home from my journey, and don’t tell me or my family that he wasn’t.
Iowa
I like Nick Carr’s description of the Vision Pro as a “face tiara for elite beings of a hypothetical nature.”
Very excited about this forthcoming book from Deb Chachra. All the hidden places in the built environment!
This photo of Mykha (from the Chicago Sun-Times) really captures her spirit.
I’m back in my old stomping grounds of Wheaton, Illinois today, and I just learned that one of most memorable people I’ve ever met, Mykha Trinh, died six years ago. When our son Wes was a baby, we’d go to her little restaurant and after she cooked amazing meals for us she would hold Wes and walk him around the restaurant so we could eat in peace. Everything she had, including her time and energy, she gave to others.
To me, the Vision Pro doesn’t look like something to use, it looks like something to be sentenced to - by an especially cruel judge.
Kansas. I was listening to the Eno/Eno/Lanois Apollo music as I drove through this landscape and it was strangely fitting.
Sunrise over Waco this morning
Eric Adler: “It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. When we undervalue the study of world languages, we shut the door to true cosmopolitanism and all the awe and wonder it inculcates. We deny students the opportunity to participate in and engage deeply with other cultures, to fathom how our language shapes our view of the world, and to do the hard work that fosters meaningful cross-cultural interactions and mutual respect.”
The poet Tennyson had many siblings. Once a visitor to the family home found a boy lying on a rug in front of the fireplace. The boy got up and introduced himself: “I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.“
Let me tell you something, friends: This is something special. You’ll have to wait a while to read it, but trust me, you’ll want to.
The American National Biography is not as consistently good, but there are some fine entries there too. 📚
Currently reading: Lots of biographies from the Dictionary of National Biography. I love these: Detailed enough to be informative, but readable in one short sitting. Biographical short stories. 📚
In an interview Andy Summers once said “If you’re using alternate tunings, you just don’t know enough chords.” Yeah, but Andy can do things like this with his chord-making hand. Not fair.
My friend Rick Gibson found this in an old issue of the Bell System Technical Journal.
Ezra Klein: “Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described … the ‘boring apocalypse’ scenario for A.I., in which ‘we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.’” This is precisely where I think we’re headed.