The World is Too Much With Us

Iambic pentameter courtesy of Petrarch still rings true…

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

In Honor of Beloved Netbooks

I absolutely adored my eee PC 701 and used it all the time. I’ll add a gallery here later.

There were two products that arrived in 2007 that fundamentally changed computing: one, of course, was the iPhone. The second, obviously more important product was the $399 Eee PC 701. It originally ran a custom Linux operating system that reviewers loved (Laptop Mag’s Mark Spoonauer said it was “ten times simpler to use than any Windows notebook”) and was generally heralded as a new kind of computer with tremendous mass appeal. Spoonauer: “Pound for pound, the best value-priced notebook on the planet.”

Source: Let’s remember netbooks – The Verge

Too Much Choice and Not Enough Solutions

Whether you’re telling the world about your church, selling products or sharing experiences, your website is probably not doing the job you think you hired it to do.

I’m a big fan of the “jobs to be done” philosophy of “customer experience” marketing (again, doesn’t matter if you think you have “customers” or not… you do… time is the biggest asset we all have).

Your church / business / group’s website, social media, and all of its messaging should be focused on helping your “customers” identified problems instead of just giving headshots of your directors.

Good post here laying out the issues of too many choices and not any real solutions:

People respond best to a small handful of tailored choices presented to them on a silver platter.That’s why each page should have one Call to Action, and it should be tailored to the content the user chose to read/watch/listen to.That’s why you should intentionally design content marketing funnels.That’s why you should have landing pages for specific products and specific audiences.

Source: Why Don’t People Buy: Too Much Choice – Stacking the Bricks

Don’t mess with The Art Squad…

Two members of the art squad’s archaeological unit were on assignment in Brussels when they took a walk after work in the Sablon neighborhood that is known for its antiques shops. They spotted a marble statue in a shop that they suspected was from Italy, and confirmed their suspicions when they cross-referenced the work with a database of known stolen antiquities, the statement said.

Source: Off-duty Italy art cops find looted statue in Belgian shop – The Washington Post

Do fish feel pain?

Puts a different spin on that fishing trip after I’ve always told myself “it’s ok, fish don’t feel pain” (to paraphrase Kurt Cobain)…

I was the first to identify the existence of nociceptors in a fish, the rainbow trout, in 2002. These are specialised receptors for detecting injury-causing stimuli, and their physiology is strikingly similar to those found in mammals, including humans. Since then, my laboratory and others across the world have shown that the physiology, neurobiology, molecular biology and brain activity that many fish species show in response to painful stimuli is comparable to mammals.

Source: There is ample evidence that fish feel pain | Fish | The Guardian

Maya Angelou’s Partnership with Hallmark

I’d forgotten about this completely… fascinating read:

Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate and a fellow Random House writer, questioned Angelou’s partnership with Hallmark, the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States and, among the literati, commonly associated with trite expressions.

“It lowers the understanding of what poetry actually can do,” Collins said to the Associated Press. “Hallmark cards has always been a common phrase to describe verse that is really less than poetry because it is sentimental and unoriginal.”

Source: Why Maya Angelou Partnered with Hallmark | The National Endowment for the Humanities

One of my fav hippos from the Middle Kingdom

Poor little fella’s legs, though…

Each of the sculpted hippo’s legs was ritually broken in order to render it harmless in the afterlife. In ancient Egypt herds of hippos were a constant threat to farmers’ fields. The first pharaohs hunted hippos in the marshes and eventually drove them far south into Upper Egypt. Hippos became associated with chaos, and the hunt for hippos became a metaphor for how the pharaohs of ancient Egypt could conquer evil.

Source: Hippopotamus | Saint Louis Art Museum

Why not just write on your own blog and monetize there?

I get the allure of Substack and applaud the move to decentralized platforms, but why not write on your own blog if your goal is independence and direct interaction with your own audience?

It’s not that difficult.

So many more benefits to creating in your own space, on your own domain, with your own platform…

And despite a handful of departures over politics, that wave is growing for Substack. The writers moving there full time in recent days include not just Mr. Lavery, but also the former Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker, the legal writer David Lat and the columnist Heather Havrilesky, who told me she will be taking Ask Polly from New York Magazine to “regain some of the indie spirit and sense of freedom that drew me to want to write online in the first place.”

Source: Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack – The New York Times

Universe as a self-learning computer

The researchers explain the universe as a learning system by invoking machine learning systems. Just like we can teach machines to perform unfolding functions over time, that is, to learn, the laws of the universe are essentially algorithms that do work in the form of learning operations.

Source: Physicists working with Microsoft think the universe is a self-learning computer