Quoting Simon Willison
Work to avoid being somebody who discourages others from sharing their thoughts. – Simon Willison
Archive of posts filed under the mind category.
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque. It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood. Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. …
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Space Ghost
It is an accident that my new bicycle is named after a 1960s cartoon superhero who fought supervillains in outer space with a sidekick named Blip. Blip was a monkey. I was on my own Saturday, no help from Blip, when my Space Ghost led me up a “trail” on the west side of the …
Richard Parker
There was a playful glee, like he knew he was getting away with something, something frowned upon yet worth doing, with Richard Parker’s “development days.” Richard and I were youngsters, 30-something kids who had been handed the keys to a metaphorical roadster, and we wanted to see how fast it would go. I looked up …
“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”
“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.” – Hanif Abdurraqib I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words. Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, …
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Space graffiti
And out of the ground the lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. – Genesis 2-19 (King James) When I was a youngster …
Ruscha and Wittgenstein
We had a round of holiday Scrabble this afternoon after first feast. I got “emu,” which is a fine word. I never really got Ludwig Wittgenstein when I was studying philosophy in college. A lost opportunity. I’ve always been interested in words as objects, since I was a kid scribbling in notebooks, before my …
Peter Kropotkin and the alley behind my neighborhood gas station
There’s a pedestrian alley in my neighborhood that provides an important link for the low-stress version of my bike commute. The neighborhood, built in the 1950s, has a few of them, but they don’t get much use. People don’t walk much any more. Which I guess is why someone thought it would be OK to …
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North 54 Salvage
The guy seemed puzzled by my presence. I guess I looked lost – why else would an old guy on a bike be riding down a road that dead ends in a junk yard? He wasn’t fazed by my explanation: “I’m trying to ride on every road in Albuquerque, and I haven’t ridden on this …
Do we linger less?
Research comparing pedestrian behavior in Bryant Park and outside the Met, 1979-1980 versus 2008-2010: The biggest change in behavior was that lingering fell dramatically. The amount of time spent just hanging out dropped by about half across the measured locations. I personally am a fan of “lingering” and “just hanging out.” Via Tyler Cowen