I had borrowed an abridged copy of Treasure Island from the library to read at home (fwiw, didn’t go down that well, will possibly try again later, or … perhaps it’s just not relatable? Not sure)
Was wondering what movie adaptation s had been made, and sure enough, found several.
One from the 1950s, one more recent, several animated ones, and one from 1990. I watched the trailer for this last one.
The trailer called out that Charleston Heston was playing Long John Silver, but the kid playing Jim Hawkins looked strangely familiar.
Some sort of monthly curated links has been a staple here for about a decade now (I started with a breakdown by category, but towards the end had just a “bag of links”).
In an effort to consolidate and de-duplicate (because, why not!), I’m trying an experiment — I’m going to leave the curations in my shared Roam graph, and just surface them better there.
A long essay on the war in Ukraine. Goes against the grain but has a thorough overview of a lot that has been overlooked in the coverage over the last year
Beauty in the philosophy of cosmism is not an aesthetic category, but an ontological one. Beauty is a measure of creation’s perfection, its spirituality, goodness, and fullness
The protest against mortality, the hunger for immortality and resurrection, bestowed an initial impulse to human creativity. Fedorov remarks that it was out of a feeling of loss, out of protest against death that the first artistic monuments appeared
Sometimes I wonder if we’re just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
A talk on “Intelligence beyond the brain“, some notes:
Single-celled organisms are intelligent too
“Intelligent problem-solving in morphospace”
We can bio-engineer at a low-level, but not at a high-level
Cells can “recruit their neighbors” !!
Radically self-organizing
Experiments (some weird ones) show chemical intervention can “repair hardware defects”
Goddamnit, geeks have been righteously complaining about “feature-itis” and retreating to their hermit kingdoms for so long. Here is one such complaint all the way back in 1999 (!)
Friedman describes the paradoxes we’ve been led to, in the absence of clear priorities
I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.
For all these reasons, I think it no longer makes sense to cling on to the GPL and copyleft. Let them go. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt a permissive license for your projects (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0), and then focus your energies on the things that will really make a difference to software freedom: counteracting the monopolising effects of cloud software, developing sustainable business models that allow open source software to thrive, and pushing for regulation that prioritises the interests of software users over the interests of vendors.
There have always been “mega-building projects”. In the past, these were large hydro-electric projects, and more recently skyscrapers competing to be the tallest building.
Today one such mega-project is “the line”, which aims to cut across the desert in a narrow strip blanketed by sheer glass walls.
I find this ridiculous, but hey I’m not the one spending half a trillion on it, so I’m happy to watch them try.
I want humanity to build something gigantic, but my desires had tended towards something functional, like a large space station, or a space elevator, or some such.
None of his buildings were ever realized1, but his are the sort of ideas I can get behind.
My favorite2 is the “Cenotaph for Newton” (image above), but all his buildings exude some sort of quality I cannot name.
This is something I wish would be made in the world today. It can be.
These are all within our ability to make, lacking only the will to make them. I don’t particularly care who makes them, as long as they exist and are accessible.
Well, except for residential work, like this, which still shows his influence. ↩
Biased by having recently read an astonishing account of his life. If someone deserves a monument like this, it’s him. ↩
The longer I am a software engineer the longer I begin to understand that the soft skills are much more important than all the technical skills. For me software engineering is much about dealing with my insecurities and coming to term with my weaknesses. I also feel that it is a lot about dealing with your ego and a lot with cooperating with colleagues and bosses. The longer I am a software engineer, the more I understand that developing software is not about writing code but communicating with people.
Remembering the Queen; from an article in the Atlantic:
The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley—all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War.
“The conception of monarchy as a way of life is not easy to explain to those who are unaccustomed to it,” Morrah wrote in 1958, just six years into Elizabeth II’s reign. “To peoples whose social system and patriotic tradition are founded upon revolt against a distant or authoritarian king—to the Americans and the French, for example—it is apt to seem a paradox. Such as these are inclined to suppose that the British people only continue to tolerate their ancient monarchy because its real content has been emptied out of it by political progress.” But this was not true, Morrah argued. The British monarchy is one of the few institutions in history to have voluntarily ceded power, whether it be Charles II accepting the existence of Parliament or Elizabeth II paying income tax.
The Queen is dead; long live the King. The world must now discover, after a reign that lasted seven decades, what England, and Britain, is without her.
Something I learned: hyper-legiblefonts (I never thought about how “blurry letters” would be so hard to distinguish!)
Modernity has a strong apocalyptic feeling to it, in the biblical meaning of the word, which means “the unveiling”, the event when we see and know reality in all of its forms as it truly is. If we are in a stagnant period of history in which we are not having real technological progress but rather we just optimize screens to get people addicted to click ads, maybe the way out of this mess and to get actual innovation is to get on your knees and pray that God will illuminate you on how to build a warp drive.
On luxury doomsday bunkers (Manages to be ridiculous and frightening at the same time!)
Abacus Noir 