Asae

Decades-old ceremonial passwords, PIN numbers a nation knows by heart, a saint's preserved finger used for biometrics

the most striking version of this i've experienced is ~80 year olds talking about their ~60 year old immature and careless selves

On 9/11 since we didn’t have school the next day and it was my friends birthday I asked if I could go out. Growing up on an island “going out” meant finding a restaurant worker to buy us beer and my dad knew. His response: “You’re going to fucking Iraq in 2 years. Do whatever you want.” This reminded me of that moment

Marathon finishing time distribution proves one of my biggest leadership lessons: Deadlines work! … even if they are somewhat arbitrary

additional fun fact: magnolias are actually older than bees and so evolved to close their flowers at night to trap beetles and cover them in pollen, then to open them again in the morning to let them travel to a different tree

In the United States car seat laws mandating use until age 8 save 57 lives each year at the cost of about 8,000 births.

I overthink, therefore I diazepam.

The best way to flirt is to have God orchestrate synchronicities for you

When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism in 1543, it was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model - a system refined over 1,400 years with epicycles precisely tuned to match observed planetary positions. It took another 70 years before Kepler, working from Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly precise observations, replaced Copernicus’s circles with ellipses - finally making heliocentrism empirically superior. Terence Tao's point is that science needs a high temperature setting. If we only fund and follow what's most state of the art today, we kill the ideas that might need decades of work to surpass some overall plateau.

Becker, Grossman & Murphy tested this in 1994: announce a future cigarette tax, and consumption drops today — before it takes effect. A myopic addict wouldn’t respond. Short-run elasticity is about −0.4, long-run about −0.75. Rational addicts revise their entire plan.

A year ago today, I achieved my goal of being able to recite 1,000 lines of Beowulf from memory: youtube.com/watch?v=ymkK9j… These days, because of my pigritia and signifigantly busier life, I can only get to about line 750 before I have to reference a book, so hopefully I can reconquer some lost territory in that regard in the coming months. Either way, I'm extremely grateful to my past self for brute-forcing through it; the experience permanently transformed my ability to understand Beowulf and the rhythm of Old English verse in a totally unique and irreplicable way. Memorize poetry!!

Joseph Kent, a top counterterrorism official under Trump, just resigned. Kent and I don't agree on much, but he is right: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."

The secret classicist

Wow

The most iconic line from this book is: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

You won’t believe what astronomical event took place on April 3rd, 33AD. Seriously, look it up

Von Neumann's insight in Game Theory was that when the "environment" contains other optimizing agents, the problem becomes irreducibly triadic. You can't just model your action against the world, because the world includes agents who are modeling you modeling them. The interaction requires a mediating structure — the game itself — that isn't reducible to either player's perspective. This is Thirdness in Peirce's precise sense: a relation that cannot be decomposed into dyadic components.

John Gerrard's "Western Flag" is probably the most relevant work of art right now.

Enrol in a humanities or social sciences PhD program; take your time doing it and get paid to read books, travel the world, interview cool people, live the life of an aristocrat. Postpone the ‘real world’ as long as possible.

Noam Chomsky once called English spelling "a near optimal system." You might think he was being ironic. Far from it. The silent 'b' in "bomb" reappears in "bombard." The silent 'n' in "hymn" is pronounced once again in "hymnal." The silent 'g' in "sign" comes back in "signal." English spelling keeps these words looking like the family they are, even when pronunciation pulls them apart. The past tense ending "-ed" is pronounced three different ways (-t in "jumped," -d in "played," and -ed in "painted"), but spelled the same every time. One spelling, one meaning: something happened in the past. English spelling is full of inconsistencies and silent letter because it’s not simply encoding how words sound. If English spelling were aiming to represent sound alone, it would indeed be a total failure. But that's not the kind of system English has. It encodes words' meaning and history as well.