Archives for May 2026

"...the only decisive proof of the fertility of ideas or of a new vision is that of time. Fertility is recognizable by offspring, not by honors. A calamity will befall the world that despises dream. Dream is deeper than all the other roots of ourselves... the best of that I had managed to make in mathematics, everything that I worked upon with genuine zeal, had come to me by itself." Alexander Grothendiek (Crops and Seeds) "Again, to extend Russell’s analogy further, we know that the eye of a fly is so constituted that the single images we see appear to the fly as multiple images. We think that the fly’s vision of the world is inaccurate because it doesn’t correspond to our vision; but … [Read more...]

"Well, the news of the saucer been a-flyin' around I'm the only one that seen it on the ground First thing I seen when I saw it land Cats jumped out and they formed a band [Chorus] Flyin' saucer rock and roll, flyin' saucer rock and roll I couldn't understand the things they said But that crazy beat just a stopped me dead." Billy Lee Riley (Flying Saucer Rock n Roll, 1957 SUN records) "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Peter Thiel (Cato Unbound) “Dollars and cents? I don’t know. I want to do this job because I don’t know. It’s research. It’s pioneering. What’s the moon? Another North Pole, another South Pole. Why go there? We’ll let you know when … [Read more...]

"At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around." Nilay Patel (The People Do Not Yearn for Automation, 2026) “The first cycle of myth is the creation myth. Here the mythological projection of psychic material appears in cosmogonic form, as the mythology of creation. The world and the unconscious predominate and form the object of myth. Ego and man are only nascent as yet, and their birth, suffering, and … [Read more...]