- Stumbled across Notion (seems incredibly useful, and clearly one of the apps that seem to herald our post-file future, but for me, still in a trial mode)
- Learnt of the story of Anna Akhmatova
- Some people take Cthulhu way too seriously
- Something for the Pynchon fans: some of the reading he did for Gravity’s Rainbow
- If this title/subtitle isn’t interesting (“The Communal Mind: Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet”), a short excerpt:
A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my thoughts were being dictated. I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air, if Twitter was shut down for crimes against humanity, what would we be losing? The bloodstream of the news, the thrilled consensus, the dance to the tune of the time. The portal that told us, each time we opened it, exactly what was happening now. It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself.
- More on Oumuamua
- My love of pen and paper led me to JetPens recently
- If you like that sort of thing: an interpretation of the carvings on the “vulture stone” at Gobekli Tepe as depicting a comet strike
- I’ve mentioned the Soviet N-1 moon rocket before, here’s a lot more detail
- Of fossil forests in Antarctica, and the Permian extinction
- Of a mite that lives inside of, and feeds on, honey bees
- “Is the hard problem in consciousness connected to the hard problem in physics”?
Abacus Noir 