Quote | Chris Aldrich

History cannot tell us the origin of wheat

Quoted Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by

Jean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.

An aphorism which should be more broadly known, particularly as fearmongers begin to attack the public going into election cycles. I thought I’d make an ironic motivational poster out of it.

Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas’s excellent Eat This Podcast

Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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Quoted Slack chat by

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.

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Quote from The Master Switch by Tim Wu: History shows a typical progression

Quoted The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire by Tim Wu (Vintage)

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.

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I’ll meet you tonight under the moon.

Replied to a post by

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.

Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), comedian
in The Cocoanuts (1929), written by George S. Kaufman

Meet me under the moon. — I’ll meet you tonight under the moon.

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A lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget

I also believe a lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget.

Paula Wagner (1946– ), producer
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.

David Quammen (1948 ― ), science, nature, and travel writer
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

Bookmarked Physicists Hunt for the Big Bang's Triangles (Quanta Magazine )

“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.”

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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.

César A. Hidalgo (1979- ), Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and the director of the Macro Connections group at The MIT Media Lab
in Cesar Hidalgo on economic complexity: Why information grows | Economist.com on June 15, 2015

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