“You got to tilt a windmill sometimes.”
– Palmer Luckey
It’s called “Planned Obsolescence” . A phrase I didn’t know existed. It’s the number one killer of great products every year.
This is for all the super hardcore turbo nerds out there.
-
-
Christopher sighed thankfully and settled down to enjoy being an invalid. He drew pictures, he ate grapes, he read books, and he spun out his illness as long as he could. This was not easy. The next morning his wound was only a round itchy scab, and on the third day it was hardly there at all. On the fourth day, the Last Governess made him get up and have lessons as usual; but it had been lovely while it lasted.
It took seventy pages before I uncovered the first bit from The Lives of Christopher Chant I wanted to capture. A few things:
1. This is my itinerary for the next time I fall ill – Draw pictures, read books, eat grapes.
2. Diana Wynn Jones labels Christopher an invalid during his recovery. Haha.
3. Seventy pages in, I’m not sure where this story is going.
Jones, Diana Wynne. The Lives of Christopher Chant. United Kingdom: HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2008. pg71
-
It was clear to Willie and to Jean that Mops was exceptional. She was the only girl who kept a commonplace book; they used to talk about “Mops and her Book of Quotes.”
If you didn’t already need a reason to commonplace. “Mops” gives you another; it automatically makes you exceptional 🙂
It’s details like these that keep me returning to biography so often.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 38
-
Her consolations were the poetry she knew by heart, and the sound of the sea.
– Hermione Lee, on Penelope Fitzgerald attending the Deerhaddnn School
Homesick? Lonely? Overwhelm? Recite a poem you know by heart. This is the balm, the antidote. The consolation.
If you don’t have a few memorized, begin today. Add them to your quiver. The sound of the sea, if you can get near enough is a bonus.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 35
-
Babbage saw digital computers as instruments by which to catalog otherwise inaccessible details of natural religion — the mind of God as revealed by computing the results of his work. He believed that faster, more powerful computers would banish doubt, restore faith, and allow human beings to calculate fragments of incalculable truth.
“A time may arrive when, by the progress of knowledge, internal evidence of the truth of revelation may start into existence with all the force that can be derived from the testimony of the senses,”
Of course George Dyson gives Charles Babbage his flowers.
With us entering the AI age, it’s fascinating how faster, more powerful computers don’t banish doubt or restore faith. They instead create more questions. Even with U.S.S. Enterprise levels of compute, some truth will remain incalculable.
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg42
-
Like that inaccessible landscape, her childhood rhyme sheets vanished, over time, into the distance. Later, she would collect others, and put them up on her own children’s walls, but all her life Fitzgerald regretted the loss of those first ones. In old age she wrote to a fellow enthusiast: “I’m perhaps the last person alive who used to go to sleep as a child with a coal fire and the PB rhyme sheets on the walls.”
It’s true you know. The images and words we hang on our walls remain inaccessible landscapes. Look at the art around you. The images, are they not portals to some glorious worlds? This doesn’t change as an adult. In adulthood one forgets.
Penelope Fitzgerald knew this.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 31
-
“Sneakers are for doing stuff”
– Tom Sachs
I haven’t been this hyped for a pair of sneakers in ages. Honestly it’s the story, this seventeen minute video that turned the dial. The Mars Yard aren’t Marty McFly’s Mags or Jordan 11s. But like Jordans they have that feel of “If I only had a pair I could be a full time, famous artist, in Manhattan.
-
“Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt — to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.”
– John Adams
Adams understood the weight of public life. He carried on. Citizens us all, public or private, carry on.
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 214 -
Happy 4th of July. As a holiday meditation, consider that many of the things that fill people with understandable fear for our national future – polarization, extremism, radicalization, mutual incomprehension across cultural and moral and theological chasms – are also in their own way signs of national vitality. It’s good that so many people from so many different backgrounds still find the American future worth fighting over. It’s potentially good that freaks, weirdos and eccentrics have an increasing share in our politics alongside levelheaded moderates. It’s potentially good that far right and further left are both seeking reimaginings of the national narrative, incompatible as those imaginings may seem. We face a difficult situation in the world and a bad, late-imperial-seeming choice in November — but many of our derangements are also indicators of a heathy discontent with the comfortable decadence of developed societies. From multiple perspectives the American experiment appears at risk — but better to be at risk than to be settled, torpid, stagnant. Maybe these are just the things you tell yourself when you’ve just had a fifth child. But I think there’s a good chance, a very good chance, that my children will inherit an America quite different from any of our past golden or silver ages, but still the best place to be born and live and flourish in this age of the world.
Ross published this last year on X. Wanted to capture it here.
Happy Fourth of July!
-
Watts advocated not just listening to lectures but taking detailed notes, then reworking the notes themselves-all of this imprinting the knowledge deeper in the brain. Faraday would take this even further.
Attending the lectures of the popular scientist John Tatum, each week on a different subject, he would note down the most important words and concepts, quickly sketch out the various instruments Tatum used, and diagram the experiments. Over the next few days he would expand the notes into sentences, and then into an entire chapter on the subject, elaborately sketched and narrated.
Excellent example of “active” learning. Taking notes is the first step. Reviewing and reorganizing the notes is the alpha.
As read from Mastery, by Robert Greene
Greene, Robert. Mastery. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2012. pg97
Floodlights and Goalposts 