Quotations
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What is missing
Socrates said “Virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money, and all other things good to man.” John Siracusa opens his latest essay with that quotation. It was featured, he points out, on the website of Ambrosia Software, which released really good games for the Mac back in the days when… 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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Spring Rain by Robert Hass
Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east as the drifts of warm air make a channel;it moves its own way, like water or the mind,and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch it as the last snow flurries before summer,… Continue reading
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Usualing
“Usualing” is a new coinage by Seth Godin, and IMHO deserves to be…um…commonized? Continue reading
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What Nietzsche Knew
Friedrich Nietzsche lived from 1844 to 1900, so he never heard of the orange baby, but he clearly knew of people like it. In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, he wrote: “You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive… Continue reading
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Quotes of the day
“…no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. […] Storytelling is a real art, and that’s something that we’re always going to be working on very, very hard. I don’t think it’s changed in a long time, and I’m not sure it will. And I don’t think it’s something that the technology… Continue reading
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A River Runs Through It
This is the ending of A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. “Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually… Continue reading
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This adds up
“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” —Eugene Wigner 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!