Updates

The buffet at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is called “The Bacchanal Buffet.”

In Chip War, there’s a discussion of why we needed to move away from the vacuum tube and towards “solid state.”

This was a leap forward in computing or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned out. A state-of-the-art computer called ENIAC, built for the U.S. Army at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 to calculate artillery trajectories, had eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. On average, one tube malfunctioned every two days, bringing the entire machine to a halt and sending technicians scrambling to find and replace the broken part. ENIAC could multiply hundreds of numbers per second, faster than any mathematician. Yet it took up an entire room because each of its eigh-teen thousand tubes was the size of a fist. Clearly, vacuum tube technology was too cumbersome, too slow, and too unreliable. So long as computers were moth-ridden monstrosities, they’d only be useful for niche applications like code breaking, unless scientists could find a smaller, faster, cheaper switch.

That “smaller, faster, cheaper” switch was the semi-conductor or transistor.

There’s an interesting point about 4’33” made in 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Math and the Arts.

Four minutes and 33 seconds is 273 seconds. -273C is temperature of absolute zero. Was Cage proposing that his musical piece represented the “absolute zero” of sound?

Here’s a video of someone making The Met Cloisters out of gingerbread.

The real buildng is a museum in Washington Heights.

There’s a short mention of Kinmen in Chip War:

China’s Fujian Province is right across the straits from Taiwan. In the harbor of Fujian’s historic port city of Xiamen sits the Taiwanese-controlled island of Kinmen, which Mao Zedong’s armies repeatedly shelled during the tensest moments of the Cold War

I watched a video entitled Where Did All The Manic Pixie Dream Girls Go?, about how the trope died out.

In an article about George Santos:

A Republican-led House managed to purge a serial fabulist from its ranks…

In Chip War:

Most of China’s scientists resenting [Mao] for ruining their research – and their lives – by sending them to live on peasant farms to study proletarian politics rather than semiconductor engineering. One leading Chinese expert in optics who was sent to the countryside suvived rural reeducation on a diet of rough gains, boiled cabbage, and an occasional grilled snake, as he waited for Mao’s radicalism to subside. While China’s small cadre of semiconductor engineers were hoeing China’s fields, Maoists exhorted the country’s workers that “all people much make semiconductors,” as if every member of the Chinese proletariat could forge chips at home.

From a very silly Netflix series called Obliterated, one character reports that something is “five-by-five,” which causes another, less experienced character, to hesitate and then say, “…uh, ten-by-ten.”

The one responds:

No, you don’t double it, Lerner, it’s still just five-by-five.

From The Good-Enough Life:

Virtue ethics attempted to solve the neoliberal problem having economic value define everything…

In Hidden Potential, there’s a discussion of the origin of the word:

[…] cursor derives from the Latin currere, “to run,” and sometimes translates to “running messenger”, or “errand boy.” It was originaly the name for a part on the slide rule – the piece that moves back and forth – and some computer pioneers borrowed it.

In Knowledge and Power, I found this:

[these things are] a mouthful of philosophical cogs, pins, widgets and chmiebal elements. In information theory, these factors represent an “ergodic” universe, which assures that the same functions will reliably prodice the same outputs. Ergodicity is crucial to any predictive model.

In Knowledge and Power, the author says:

“Your income is someone else’s spending” is a cardinal truth of Keynesianism. Such eminent figures as Paul Krugman believe it is a fair summation of economic reality. It describes a circular ecnomm in which the outputs of some become inputs for others.

(Note that this book has a decidedly conservative slant, so Keynesianism is presented in a less than ideal light.)

In a Buzzfeed article about famous people’s hobbies, someone noted that Lucy Lui –

is a compelling, awesome, and accomplished sapphic painter under the name Yu Ling!

I looked it up, and, sure enough, she paints lesbian-themed art. (Yu Ling is her traditional Chinese name.)

In Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, the book refers to “Robert Scull, a New York taxi-fleet impresario.”

In this context, it doesn’t refer to a theatrical performance, but the job or title or someone who orchestrates something.

From Everything, All the Time, Everywhere:

[Steve] Job’s genius consisted not just in founding Apple and revolutionizing personal technology, but in creating a liberation theology that, in the next few decades, converted many into believing computers and phones could deliver power to the people.

I think the idea here is that – in a generic sense – a “liberation theology” is a belief that things can be better. Without a faith component, this would probably be a “libersation philosophy,” but the religious term simply has more recognition (and there is a larger point here about Apple being like a religious cult – something the author alluded to in other places in the text).

I’ve found a couple references to a comment that Umberto Eco apparently made about Steve Jobs – that he had a “Jesuitical genius for creating user interfaces.”

I can’t find the actual quote, just references to it. And I don’t know the meaning of it either, to be honest.

I also found a of references to how Eco compared the Apple vs. PC debates to the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.

I flew from Trieste, Italy to Frankfurt, Germany on an small, regional airline called Air Dolomiti. The flight path took me directly over the Dolomites.

I was in the London Underground when I saw a poster advertising a concert at The London Palladium, which is a historic theater. I then remembered that’s there’s a Palladium in Hollywood as well.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any etymological information about either of them. The one in Hollywood opened in 1940, and the one in London opened in 1910.

As of right now, I can’t determine why either of them were named “Palladium.”

From Cybertext:

“Afternoon” has often been labeled postmodernist, and it does contain many literally devices typically associated with postmodernism (the metonymic mixing of fragments, and genres, self-commentary and intrusions by the “author,” typographical variation, metaleptic breaks…)

I was in San Francisco, and I walked past “American Legion, Cathay Post 384.” I looked this up, and it’s a very historic American Legion post, started in the 1930s by Chinese veterans of World War I. Near as I can tell, it’s the only such American Legion post.

The year 1931 also marked a milestone in the history of the American Legion. Sixteen trailblazing World War I Chinese American veterans who called San Francisco’s Chinatown home established the first all Chinese-American American Legion Post.

From Harry Potter and the Art of Spying:

What is sine qua non? A wonderful Latin phrase that means an essential action, condition, or ingredient; as a legal term, it means a condition or preexisting ingredient without which that which follows cannot exist.

I found another reference in Neuromancer:

The girl’s face appeared as abruptly as one of Riveria’s projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the balustrade…

In the daily Connections game from the NY Times, four words were grouped under the category “Piquancy.”

• Bite
• Kick
• Tang
• Zip

In Information Hunters, the book refers to a group of people known as “The Office of Soporific Sinecures,” refering to their tendency to sleepwalk through their cushy jobs.

In Information Hunters, the book refers to a group of people known as “The Office of Soporific Sinecures,” refering to their tendency to sleepwalk through their cushy jobs.

Paul Krugman wrote a column for the NY Times entititled The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana

…we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest.

From The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu:

So carefully had my friend Nayland Smith excluded the matter from the press that, whilst public interest was much engaged with some of the events in the skein of mystery which he had come from Burma to unravel…

In Knowing What We Know, the author attributes it to Stalin:

Amnesty International was somehow duped into supporting the [fake] story – Stalin’s phrase “useful idiots” comes to mind…

In Knowing What We Know, about a disinformation campaign during World War I to make Britons hate the Germans:

Though he faded promptly into respectable obscurity, the sustained enmity between Briton and Hun, which was the intended consequence of the transmission of this particular morsel of propaganda, did indeed last until the Armistice.

In September 2023, I read The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, which is the first appearance of the character.

Interestingly, above I note that the character is “generally depicted as Asian.” I understated this – the character is explicitly Asian in the novel, specifically Chinese. At this point, I’m not sure of a depiction that exists which is not Asian.

This TikTok video reinforces the idea that it’s just a coincidence. It says that Georgia the State was clearly named after King George. There are multiple theories of where Georgia the Country got its name, and the most likely ones don’t involve the name “George” at all.

This article on the expansion of heat pump usage includes an explainer:

The idea relies on the very principle by which heat pumps operate: If you can seize heat, you can use it. What makes heat pumps special is the fact that instead of just generating heat, they also capture heat from the environment and move it into your house – eventually transferring that heat to radiators or forced-air heating systems, for instance. This is possible thanks to the refrigerant that flows around inside a heat pump. When the refrigerant encounters heat – even a tiny amount in the air on a cold day – it absorbs that modicum of warmth.

A compressor then forces the refrigerant to a higher pressure, which raises its temperature to the point where it can heat your house. It works because an increase of pressure pushes the refrigerant molecules closer together, increasing their motion. The refrigerant later expands again, cooling as it does so, and the cycle repeats. The entire cycle can run in reverse, too, allowing heat pumps to provide cooling when it’s hot in summer.

So it’s not just moving air around. It performs some physical process on the air to heat it. (There’s a helpful graphic on the page as well.)

In 100 Things You Will Never Find:

In 1649, [Cromwell] because one the regicides – signatories to the order that saw King Charles I beheaded.

From Slow Horses:

The houses opposite seemed to tilt towards his gaze; the effect of their height, and the overhead clouds scudding against a velvet backdrop.

In August 2023, a song called “Kill the Boer” was chanted at a political rally in South Africa. The chant was led by Julius Malema, a Black political leader with strong Left-wing views.

This prompted some controversy, most publicly with Elon Musk – himself a White South African – who tweeted the song was…

openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa

In this usage, “Boer” can be interpreted to mean White people in general, however many have argued it is simply a rallying cry of the disenchanted. The song originated in the 1990s, under apartheid. The ANC distanced themselves from the song due to the implicit call to racial violence.

How Spies Think discusses the problems with “Curveball,” the single source the CIA relied on for information about the WMDs.

Curveball seemed the answer to the [Biological Warfare; BW] experts’ prayers. He was an Iraqi chemical engineer who had turned up in a German refugee camp claiming to have worked on Saddam’s BW programmes and ready to spill the beans. To the old operational hands in the CIA and Britain’s MI6 he seemed to good to be true. […]

The problem was, those mobile BW units did not exist. Curveball had invented them. The experts fell for his story.

After the war, Curveball was tracked down by journalists. He admitted that he had lied in his reporting, and said that he had watched in shock when it was used to justify the war.

He told them that he fabricated tales of mobile BW trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled. He added: “Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right…they gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that…”

I found a cartoon with dead crow in the background and a racoon in the foreground telling a group of crows:

As your lawyer, I’d advise you immediately find a new collective term.

The joke is that the collective noun for a group of crows is a “murder of crows.”

(Honestly, I have no idea why the lawyer was a raccoon.)

I found this quote in a conference presentation about mapping.

Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false.

I asked on the English Stack Exchange what this meant. Mostly, people said it was a literal reference to the simple map itself, which is necessarily a flat surface. Many argued that this was a one-off usage that didn’t really indicate the existence of a generally-accepted idiom (someone called the usage “pretentious”).

The next day, I found this quote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could be “curved” … were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor with the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to developed a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogeneous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter.

Again, lots of references to curves and flatness.

I was confused by this statement in a news article.

Tropical Storm Calvin strengthened Tuesday as it continued to approach Hawaii’s Big Island, where more than a million people are under a state of emergency and a tropical storm warning is in effect.

It seemed to imply that a million people on the Big Island were under threat. However, Oahu is the only island with a population that big.

Later in the article:

Between 4 and 8 inches of rain are expected, with some areas seeing up to 10 inches, mainly along the windward and southeast flank of the island of Hawaii, colloquially known as the Big Island.

I just think it was worded poorly. The first quote would necessarily have to be talking about the population of the state as a whole.

From a profile of Yo Yo Ma in Spark: How Genius Ignites, From Child Prodigies to Late Bloomers:

…beginning with a reference from Isaac Stern, who had heard Ma play in Paris at the advice of a famed luthier named Étienne Vatelot.

I had a conversation with an industry colleague from the Czech Republic. I asked him if Bohemia was a specific area of just a region.

Hi Deane, the Czech Republic consists of western half (Bohemia) and eastern half (Moravia). So yes, Bohemia is a region. But people may sometime use it to refer to the whole country…

Does Silesia still exist?

Yes, it’s kinda third region north to Moravia. But it’s minor, so I didn’t bother to mention it :)

Do the regions have their own elected leaders and governments, or are they just named areas?

Not at this level. Politically, the country has some ten regions that are subsets of these three. Each region has its leader and administration.

The takeaway I got is that Bohemia is a region, like “the Midwest.” And just like the Midwest, it has no formal leaders, but its subdivisions (the states that make up the Midwest), each have leaders. So Bohemia is a group of states, essentially.

From a discussion of Shirley Temple in Spark: How Genius Ignites, From Child Prodigies to Late Bloomers:

Her 1988 autobiography was a paean to her mother.

T.S. Eliot wrote this in 1927.

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

His point seemed to be that a “lost cause” is worth fighting for because (1) it might lead to a victory later, and (2) it proves a point, even in the loss.

From The Tyranny of Clichés:

…sift through the farrago of lies and corruption that led to Kennedy’s legal absolution for Mary Jo Kopechne’s death.

I added the definition above, after finding this in The Tyranny of Clichés:

Refuse to obey even the most picayune law and eventually a man in uniform with a gun on his hip is going to come talk to you.

In The Tyranny of Clichés:

Burke saw the French revolutionaries as overcome with a Rousseauian madness that says we were all born noble, pure, and free, and it is only through the corruptness of society that we become enslaved.

From The Tyranny of Clichés:

It was this kind of Utopian madness that Edmund Burke and his heirs stood athwart, yelling “Stop!”

Clearly, this is a callback to Buckley’s statement from above.

I noticed a book in Barnes and Noble called Houses: Atelier AM. Turns out “Atelier AM” is an interior design firm, and “AM” is the just initials of the two founders.

I was driving through Mankato, Minnesota on Highway 169 when I passed the “Kiwanis Recreation Area.” I looked it up – it’s listed under the Mankato Kiwanis page as a “Signature Project.” I assume they did the fundraising for it, and that’s why it’s named as such.