If you haven’t read Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” it is a classic and a chief example of why he is a writer of the first class. The title is unfortunate, which he admits in the […]
Category: Thought
Killer Robots
The fear of robots has been there from the beginning — where I’m including creations like Frankenstein. At a mythological level, robots are our dark reflection. (They often look like us.) They instantiate our creeping […]
Waves of Creativity Unto Death
Hokusai didn’t produce his internationally-recognized masterpiece “Great Wave Off Kanagawa” until he was in his 70s. You can track the evolution of the composition in the images below, which were created in 1797, 1803, 1805, […]
The Shape of the Universe
The model described in this article — the “Big Bounce” instead of the Big Bang — is potentially a big deal. Quanta Magazine: Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang This new simulation is merely […]
Carnival of Loss
Much of the media we consume is self-consciously mythic, which doesn’t necessarily mean it has swords and wizards, although obviously some of it does. It means it fills the role of myth. Back before culture […]
(Art) The Strange Uniformity of Madness II (QAnon)
There is a kind of conformity of vision in cognitive nonconformity, which I have pointed out before. It has always suggested to me that, although the content of these people’s beliefs couldn’t be more divergent, […]
(Curiosity) The Real Threat of Deepfakes
This is a video of President Nixon giving a speech he never made. The speech itself is real. It was prepared in advance of the 1969 moon landing should something go wrong. The MIT Center […]
(Curiosity) Holy Crayola!: Modern History in Crayon
World historians typically divide the previous two centuries into the “Long Nineteenth Century,” stretching from the French Revolution (1789) to the First World War/Russian Revolution (1917), and the “Short Twentieth Century,” running from the inter-war […]
Bias
The older I get, the more accusation of bias seems a hallmark of very small thinking. It’s like accusing someone of morning breath. There’s an implicit conceit that suggests whatever follows is unbiased. You can […]
Weights and Measures
From our throne here at the pinnacle of the present, the reforms of the past seem rather quaint. We read in grade school history textbooks, for example, that it was quite an achievement for Hammurabi, […]
