Idea for a short story: linguists have been puzzled by a mysterious ancient manuscript written in a unknown language. It was deciphered after a computer scientist realized that the manuscript is a definition of the language that it’s written in.
An Infinite Universe of Number Systems - The p-adics seem to be a fanciful formalism of numbers. What’s interesting about it is that it provides a way to study an entire university of number systems.
Anticipating the next release of macOS (10.16; Big Sur), I started to read the novel Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. It’s very interesting to me that in Chapter 12, Kerouac went to visit Neal Cassady, who was living in the Santa Clara Valley (more precisely, 1047 E. Santa Clara Street). So, in the late 50’s, Neal Cassady was practically living in today’s Silicon Valley. I had never associated with Silicon Valley with the counterculture movement. I found a couple of articles about Beat figures in the Silicon Valley. Al Hinkle, for example, lived in San Jose. Jack Kerouac’s early introduction to Buddhism was apparently from a book that he stoled from San Jose’s public library.
The loom for making stockings is one of the most complicated and rigorously logical machines that we have… one could consider it as just one single piece of reasoning whose conclusion is the making of the stockings - Denis Diderot, quoted in Italo Calvino’s Collection of Sand.
One of the productivity tips that I have found useful is oddly from Ernest Hemingway (hardly a man of high productivity). He said that he always worked to a point where he knew how to continue, and then stopped working for the day. This way, he always had a good start the next day. I read about it in an article on creativity but didn’t know where it was from. I just discovered it’s from Hemingway’s memoir A Movable Feast, in a chapter about his interactions with Gertrude Stein (“Miss Stein Instructs).
A parody of Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “A New Refutation of Time”: “The Third Refutation of Ordinality”. Or maybe “10 Arguments Against Cardinality”.
A mini-review of the recently released “Miles Davis John Coltrane The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6” album. The first track of the album, recorded in 1960 in a live show in Paris, documents a dramatic moment in the history of modern music. The European concert goers were expecting the dreamy world of Kind of Blue and some pleasant show tunes. They didn’t know that John Coltrane was going to unleash the furious sounds of the future to them. And Miles just let him do what he had to do. It was like the Enchantment Under the Sea scene in Back to the Future, where Marty McFly channeled Eddie van Halen in his cover of Johnny B. Goode.
I don’t believe you are leaving cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream - Tori Amos, Tears in Your Hands
Anthropologists discovered that islanders in South Pacific have been using blockchains for thousands of years. All transactions are recorded by carving patterns on tree trunks, whose integrity is enforced by solving hard problems such as 12/5.
Just discovered that python’s numerical package has a function for Einstein summation for tensors. In the past, you need that for cosmology. These days you use them for neural networks.