Realizations after watching a play
(a draft originally written July 2023) Watched a performance of Matilda this weekend. This was such an old-school experience. We were told turn off all phones, not take any photographs or record an…
A Stephen Hawking (and then some) for our time
Picked these up at Barnes and Noble today I discovered Carlo Rovelli through "Helgoland" and "Reality is not what it seems", but he really has an amazing ability to write about ot…
Thoughts on Micro.blog
I annually review the places I write at -- whether long pieces, or short pieces, or a few words, or just images. One of these was a foray with Micro.blog, and I was wondering whether it might replace…
Futuristic Sci-Fi
I saw this for the first time 15 years or so ago, but the sheer shock -- of trying to reconcile what I was watching with the current time and when it was made, and everything happening at that time, a…
Filterworld, Flatworld
From a book review in last Friday’s WSJ:, for this book:…
2024
Something I've been saying recently is: "I don't know what's going to happen this year, but whatever happens, it's going to be unprecedented!" To put things charitably: We’…
Best of Lex
Had been recommending Lex Fridman to my wife for a while, and she finally tried it out, with one of the best episodes of all, the one with Yuval Noah-Harari. She later asked me about other possible o…
Interceptors
Patriot missiles are in the news again I remember the name from the Gulf War (the "first" Iraq war for the younger folks), when the idea of one missile knocking out another one ("Scuds…
War Journalism
It's rare to see this, but ideally there'd be much more of it. A gritty account of a few days at the front, courtesy the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-counteroffens…
(Untitled)
All’s fair
Marked out the takeaway from an article about Ukraine (From WSJ, the Jan 5, 2024 issue)…
"Live" Objects
An interesting new paper on "Live Metacircular Runtimes" (or, to put it a bit edgily, "making live objects great again" 😀) The examples and focus are from "the Smalltalk sc…