On this day

August 8th

Thucydides

August 8, 2024

If many of these parallels seem self-evident, one recurring point of reference does not: Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general and author of History of the Peloponnesian War. Though hardly a household name, he has been a favorite of those intent on doom-scrolling the historical record for relevant exempla.

~ Mark Fisher, from What Thucydides really thought about historical analogies | Aeon Essays

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Before working on this blog post I couldn’t even type his name (I do have a quote about manliness) let alone pull from memory any of his writing. I’m not sure if that means I’ve escaped the trap described in this article.

It’s often said—including by me—that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But what does study really mean? My first reaction to find out about Thucydides was to consider reading something he wrote. But, now it seems clear that simply going and reading some history isn’t help me not repeat it.

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This I hope for you

August 8, 2022

This simplicity was disorienting in a way. Many times a day I would finish whatever activity I was doing, and realize there was nothing to do but consciously choose another activity and then do that. This is how I made my first bombshell discovery: I take out my phone every time I finish doing basically anything, knowing there will be new emails or mentions or some other dopaminergic prize to collect. I have been inserting an open-ended period of pointless dithering after every intentional task.

~ David Cain from, What I Learned During My Three Days Offline

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It is still uncommon for me to be without my phone. I have to admit that sometimes I carry it simply because I have a flat pince-nez stuck to the back of my phone. Recently it’s dawned on me that I have another, identical pair in a tiny flat case not stuck to my phone and I sometimes just carry those and not my phone. Regardless, you’ll never see me whip out my phone—unless we have a question, what’s the weather, where’s the nearest…, and so on. It’s a tool I sometimes use, like shoes.

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Escalation

August 8, 2021

It’s fine if you didn’t, but last week you may have noticed this weekly missive put on a few extra pounds. (I just love the word, “missive,” don’t you?) This week’s missive is similarly embiggened. And for the foreseeable future, you can expect about 42.9% more puzzlement. What, pray tell, has happened?

Here’s how much care I put into this . . .

I write, and schedule, the it’s-just-a-quote posts as I find new quotes. At this moment, there are a few—202 to be specific—lined up in the wings awaiting their day in the sun. I had been scheduling them every third day. But you nimble-mathing people will realize that means I was scheduling them nearly two years out. (Relax. WordPress makes it easy to do.)

Worse, because I feed the quotes to my Little Box of Quotes podcast-turned-Little_Shop_of_Horrors-monster, I must accumulate at least one new quote every day, (on average.) Not only are the quotes stuck, like an epic fat-berg, in the pipeline of my blog, that ‘berg is quickly growing. What to do?

Well, I really don’t want to turn my blog into a quote-a-day web site. That’s the only real way to fix the pile-up. Instead, I rescheduled them to be every-other-day. (Relax. WordPress doesn’t make it easy, but I’m cuckoo, and fast.) I already felt that I was cheating 33.3% by only writing two blog posts between every-third-day’s quote— But there was no way I could bear to only write a blog post every-other-day. (Don’t misread that as: I couldn’t bear to cheat that much. No, the posts come out of my head faster than that, and I couldn’t bear to ignore them.) Which brings me to…

I’m going back to writing a blog post for every day, and you’re getting 3 or 4 quotes each week. Thus the jump from a regimented 7 items per week to an embiggened 10 or 11 items per week.

So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

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Why why why why

August 8, 2020

And you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions.

~ Richard Feyman from, Richard Feynman on Why Questions

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Asking ‘why’ is a well-known way to dig deeper into things. But being able to answer a ‘why’ question is something I don’t hear discussed. My mind is stuffed with information, ideas, skills, and experiences. (Yours is too.) That’s not particularly interesting, and it’s certainly not useful.

What is useful is being able to dive into all that stored information and experiences to then craft a thread which leads the questioner on a small journey of learning. Sure we can take the highway and zoom past all these details. But something it’s the better choice to drop into the off-ramp, and onto the secondary roads; Probably still don’t want to come to a complete stop—if we can help it—but if we take the scenic route and point out more of the details… well, we’re effectively, (both metaphorically and literally,) compressing our knowledge and passing it along.

To the secondary roads!

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It’s just a ride

August 8, 2013

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly coloured, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question – is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say ‘Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.’ And we… kill those people.

~ Bill Hicks

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What’s with the funny twitter handle?

August 8, 2012

cc1315_twittercc1315 was my InterNIC handle.

What’s an Internic handle?

Back in the mid-90s, there was only one place to register a domain name. (See Network Solutions.) To register a domain, or to make changes, one sent a specially formatted email message to a special email address at Network Solutions. On the receiving side, a program would read the message and follow the instructions. To verify the request was valid, the program checked the message for a valid InterNic handle.

To obtain a handle one would register with the Internic by sending a formatted email message containing your name, address, and other contact information. The InterNic software would then create a globally unique handle in response. Some program back in 1994 saw my initials and added 1315 — cc1315.

I never managed to figure out the source of the 1315. If memory serves, the handles were always two initials and three or four digits. So my best guess has always been that the digits were the local time-of-day when my registration was received.

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