“Anything big happening?” he asked of the quantum information theorist.
Syndicated copies to:Quotes
Chris Beckstrom (chat.indieweb.org)...holy crap this stuff [IndieWeb] is great. When I started getting webmentions from social media using Bridgy I flipped. It's like we're in the future!!!
I remember the early days of Twitter when people were excited about what it was and what it could do. Even then I don’t think people were as excited as Chris Beckstrom was when he made what is certainly the IndieWeb quote of the week this morning.
Syndicated copies to:💬 The race to be wrong first is always live-tweeted.
"The race to be wrong first is always live-tweeted."
I’m gender fluid, so I can help out!
–a Girl Scout’s 8 year old brother proudly exclaiming an excuse for helping sister when stopping by the house today to peddle Thin Mints.
Quote from The Master Switch by Tim Wu: History shows a typical progression
History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel--from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century's transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television, or film. History also shows that whatever has been closed for too long is ripe for ingenuity's assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again.
I’ll meet you tonight under the moon.
Rick Mendes (Rick Mendes)“I’ll be your friend in daylight. I’ll treat you as a comrade in every gas-lit ballroom. But alone, under moonlight, I’ll not pretend that I want you for anything but mine.” - Courtney Milan #quote
I’ll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now, you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.
in The Cocoanuts (1929), written by George S. Kaufman
A lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget
I also believe a lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget.
on finance in the entertainment industry
in Paula Wagner Turns to Producing on Broadway in The New York Times on 11/4/12
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David Quammen on Books
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
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Physicists Hunt For The Big Bang’s Triangles | Quanta Magazine
Syndicated copies to:“The notion that counting more shapes in the sky will reveal more details of the Big Bang is implied in a central principle of quantum physics known as “unitarity.” Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former.”
Two Types of Hipsters
In the U.S. there are two types of hipsters: those who know how to program and those who serve coffee.
in Cesar Hidalgo on economic complexity: Why information grows | Economist.com on June 15, 2015
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How to Steal a Million
Some satiric commentary on the American condition
Labels! Labels! It’s working with the Americans that’s given you this obsession with labels and brand names.
counter-scolding his daughter who has called him a fraud
in How to Steal a Million (1966)
Then, just a bit later in the film:
We live in a crass commercial world with no faith or trust!
ironically speaking to his daughter after forging and selling several major artworks
in How to Steal a Million (1966)
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On Being a Secretary
The philosophy of how to have a fulfilling secretarial position.
For five years he [Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)] served as personal secretary to, yes, Francis Bacon. In fact, I’ve noted over a course of years that the job of a secretary can be utterly fulfilling just in case one’s boss happens to be Francis Bacon.
in Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, Lecture 28 “Hobbes and the Social Machine”
Sir Francis Bacon smacks down Republican party front-runners
Advice for laying down the law of the land
A
s I watch the unfolding of the 2016 presidential election, I find myself wondering more and more where I can register to vote for the “scientific party?”
The electorate seems to want to focus primarily (only?) on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which our country was founded. Though I have no qualm with these principles, they seem to miss the firmer and primary base upon which the country was built at the dawn of the Age of Reason.
THOSE WHO HAVE TAKEN UPON THEM TO LAY DOWN THE LAW of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own.
in the preface to Novum Organum (1620)
Read the original 1620 edition in Latin
Syndicated copies to:Can computers help us read the mind of nature? by Paul Davies | The Guardian
Paul Davies waxes poetic about the application of physics, chemistry, and information theory to biology, genetics, and the origin of life.
For too long, scientists focused on what we can see. Now they are at last starting to decode life’s software.
“A soup of chemicals may spontaneously form a reaction network, but what does it take for such a molecular muddle to begin coherently organising information flow and storage? Rather than looking to biology or chemistry, we can perhaps dream that advances in the mathematics of information theory hold the key.”
in Can computers help us read the mind of nature? in The Guardian
I’m a sucker for references to math and pastry
Math is about understanding processes and not just eating end results.
W
hat can I say? I’m a sucker for references to math and pastry.
“One of the wonderful features of math is that, like with pastry, it can use quite simple ingredients to make very complicated situations. This can also make it rather offputting, like making puff pastry. Actually, I don’t think puff pastry is that difficult if you follow the instructions carefully. But even if you don’t want to try doing it yourself, perhaps you can still enjoy the fact that such simple ingredients can turn into delicious puff pastry. Math is about understanding processes and not just eating end results.”
in How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books, 2015)
