Jim Feltis

Jackson #Pollock's "Lavander Mist" & my friend Joseph's "Bean Dip Pollock".

@planetJoseph When we lived in Tucson, people would always say, “Yeah, it’s hot outside today. But it’s 5 degrees hotter in Phoenix.” ☀️

It’s gonna hit 108 degrees in Phoenix this week. Having grown up there, that kind of heat this early in the year is insane.

🚨In 1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc took a needle, a wooden floor, and a question that sounds almost childishly simple. If you drop a needle randomly onto a surface ruled with parallel lines, and the needle's length equals the distance between those lines, what are the odds it crosses one of them? The answer is 2 divided by pi. No circles anywhere in that experiment. No curves, no arcs, no radii. Just a straight needle falling onto straight lines through pure chance. And pi crawls out of the probability like it was hiding there the entire time, waiting for someone to ask the right question. Mathematicians call this Buffon's Needle, and it remains one of the most conceptually violent results in the history of probability. You can physically recreate it on your kitchen floor. Drop a needle 500 times, count the crossings, divide, and you will approximate pi to several decimal places through nothing but randomness and straight lines. The circle was never in the room. Pi showed up anyway. This is what separates pi from every other mathematical constant. It doesn't stay inside its original context. It migrates. Euler discovered it hiding inside the sum of the reciprocals of all squared integers, a problem involving no geometry whatsoever. The Gaussian bell curve that governs how errors distribute in measurements, how heights vary in a population, how quantum particles spread across space, carries pi in its foundation even though the curve itself was never constructed from a circle. Physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper in 1960 that never got the mainstream attention it deserved. He called it "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." His central bewilderment was precisely this pattern: mathematical structures developed in complete abstraction, with zero intention of describing physical reality, keep turning out to be the exact language the universe was already using before anyone looked. Pi is his strongest case. It wasn't engineered to fit physics. It was found already fitted, in places nobody thought to look for it, in systems that share nothing geometrically with a circle. The needle doesn't know about circles. The universe apparently does.

If you want to have a better day, watch this 30 second video of Zelensky meeting a bunch of school kids last week.

@planetJoseph On my “list” for September

A good burger in a hidden and far-flung corner of the DC area that’s genuinely worth the drive, as is everything on the menu. Bring your bike, too because it’s right on the C&O canal. frederickmagazine.com/articles/outly…

I was in the room for the presser, and one thing that always stands out about Trump is his ability to present two versions of the same event in a single breath. Vance was “maybe less enthusiastic… but quite enthusiastic” about going to war. The war is “very complete”… and “just the beginning.”

So, some kid called me a boomer today for using ChatGPT and not Claude.

@mikewhitmore I saw them in 1978 in my hometown of Billings, MT. Neil’s drum set was incredible - it had every piece of percussion known to man!

Me too! More than once. 🫶🏼

Nothing is quite as European as demanding that your emergency WW3 meeting must only occur during normal office hours.

It’s not good that the United States Government is more hostile to Anthropic, an American company opposed to spying on Americans, than it has been to TikTok, an arm of the Chinese surveillance state.

@windley @thesidetrack @GovCox Back in the day, one would see bumper stickers that read; “Northern Idaho - 51st State”. Idaho is the West Virginia of The West.

@thesidetrack @GovCox Idaho has the capitals (economically). Northern Idaho: Spokane, SW Idaho: Boise, SE Idaho: Salt Lake. I grew up in SE Idaho and lived for many years in a Northern Idaho. They don’t look to Boise for anything.

Hey @govcox I stumbled on some leverage you can use in those gas tax talks

That was a close one

Our refrigerator just died... again. This is our second refrigerator in ten years. It was a Whirlpool, a "plain Jane" model with no bells, no whistles, and no fancy screens. We bought it for its simplicity, thinking it would be the one thing in our house that just worked. It lasted five years and one month, exactly thirty days past the warranty. The repairman’s verdict? A dead compressor. But the real diagnosis... it was Built to Break. Under the guise of "green" regulations and "energy efficiency," we’ve traded tanks that lasted thirty years for plastic-heavy shells that barely last five. We are forced to pay a premium for "high-efficiency" tech that saves ten cents a month on electricity, only to be told to throw the whole $1,500 + unit into a landfill when a single internal component fails. It’s a racket. The government mandates the specs, the manufacturers cut the quality, and the consumer is left holding a bag of spoiled milk. We don’t own appliances anymore; we just lease them from the scrap yard.

BBC Radio 4 just mentioned that 12% of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

"Dude there's no way you could ever win unless every single person in front of you crashed"

@planetJoseph You make tiramisu?! You’ll have to make it when I’m there in September. 🇮🇹

Damn I can’t get this line in the Tiramisu straight with the curved soup spoon I keep using. But I’m determined to keep trying.

Against the power of AI there can be no victory. We must join with it, Gandalf. We must join with AI. It would be wise, my friend, to subscribe for a small monthly fee to the premium versions and also subscribe to my palantír updates

@mark_holle There was a kid who used to throw STP stickers on the Meadowlark playground in the early 70s after Mario Andretti won Indy in ‘69 in the STP car. Every time he would do it, a riot would occur. :)

@markmartin Firestone and STP stickers were on a bunch of my stuff in the early 70’s.

If you want to part with them I would be your guy.

Scenes from today’s #Seahawks Super Bowl victory parade - especially for Dallas Cowboys fans who don’t remember what this looks like. ;) 🏈

President Trump (recounting a tariff negotiation call w/ Swiss ‘prime minister’): “I didn’t really like the way she talked to us… So, instead of giving her a reduction, I raised her to 39%.” Textbook national emergency.