History, sort of
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“I’m from the government, and…”
It’s difficult to fully understand complex structures. That’s kind of tautological; “complex” already means “difficult to understand”, at least in part. But never fear; I have a point, and it’s this: in the same way we understand the complex physics of the universe by using simplified models that are “close enough” in most cases, we understand the… Continue reading
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Freedomism
“Freedom” is a word you see a lot lately, at least in the US. But nobody knows what it is. Or more to the point, everybody knows what it is, but each individual idea is different. Two recent books have new and thoughtful takes on what freedom might be. The Dawn of Everything by David… Continue reading
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Originalism is always fabrication
Ben Thompson, whose site Stratechery is interesting, well-written, and afflicted with tunnel vision about “the web” being collection of business deals, just posted this: The original web that we know and love was the human web; that’s why advertising was the preferred business model, and Google was the big winner. Nonsense. I can’t tell whether he means personal… Continue reading
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Independence Declaration
Calendar-wise, we’re nearing the neighborhood of Independence Day in the US, and it occurs to me that France was the most important ally of the revolutionary American colonies — in fact, France provided the word “declaration,” as in Declaration of Independence. In typical US fashion, we celebrate that document’s signing on July 4, but it… Continue reading
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Lexical ketchup burst
You’ve heard of “generation X.” It may or may not have come from a book, but a big reason everybody started using the term was Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was a very popular book about both the present and the future, and included a glossary of all… Continue reading
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Archiloquy
Here’s a sentence you’d be unlikely to encounter nowadays. “It was noscible in the village that the oporopolist’s stall was often closed because of his fondness for riviation.” You’d be unlikely to encounter it because “noscible,” “oporopolist,” and “riviation” are all words that were once in general use in English, but haven’t been heard from… Continue reading
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Not just the Principia Mathematica
From Bertrand Russel in 1940: “The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and… Continue reading
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Never before…
As everybody knows, just in the past few years the proliferation of new media means that more and more people are doomed to be “unable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon anything.” It’s brain rot, that’s what it is, and it’s something that has never happened before. No,… Continue reading
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Walk like an Egyptian
Although the ancient Egyptians were as far in the past for the ancient Greeks as those Greeks are to us, some of the ideas of their astrologers have stuck around as solidly as the Pyramids. Those astrologers calculated that there were two days every month when you definitely shouldn’t start anything important. Don’t begin a… Continue reading
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Point of view, time of life
It all depends on how you perceive time. If humans lived just a couple of months, we would think about the world entirely differently. Same goes if we lived centuries. Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!