Snippets (people): Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 05:46, 2 May 2020

Things to use or delete. See Snippets.

Ricardo Montalban

If one says "vintage brass" in Ricardo Montalban tones, then yes, it is just like Corinthian leather.

There is no need to put quote marks around Corinthian leather.

The power of Ricardo Montalban makes the idea real, then and now, on Earth as it is on Ceti Alpha Five.

Brutus de Villeroi

Brutus de Villeroi (1794–1874) was a French engineer of the 19th century, born Brutus Amédée Villeroi (he added the aristocratic "de" in his later years) in the city of Tours and soon moved to Nantes, who developed some of the first operational submarines, and the first submarine of the United States Navy, the USS Alligator (1862) (nonfiction), in 1862.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_de_Villeroi

Barry Malzberg

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/howto-design-a-cocktail-for-a-lunar-civilization/148044/25

Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern is a poet, painter, sculptor, and media artist. His oral history, From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist: 1948–1978, was published by The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He is a founder of USCO (along with Michael Callahan and Steve Durkee), one of the first arts/technology cooperatives, active since the early 1960s. Based in a church building in Rockland County (NY), their interdisciplinary approach to creating art includes poetry, painting, sculpture, and multimedia projects involving film, light, motion and sound. The group had an important early influence on the culture of light shows and psychedelia, as well as computer programming and software development. Stanford University recently acquired USCO and Gerd Stern's archives for the special collections library. USCO’s work has been shown in New York's Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Liverpool, Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim, and was recently featured in the museum exhibition HIPPIE MODERNISM: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (2015). He is represented by the Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati.

https://brooklynrail.org/2019/07/art/GERD-STERN-with-Raymond-Foye?fbclid=IwAR3h-HTzKi0Ln0vdjZ0ywNZEuDAWLbjt9PHywxvi9811U1hc8ZKwuMKlEXk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCO

https://www.facebook.com/kim.matthews.397/posts/10156747324837087

Siméon Bourgois

Siméon Bourgois was a 19th-century French Navy vice-admiral who was especially involved in the development of early submarines. He was born in Thionville, Lorraine, on March 26, 1815, and died in Paris on December 24, 1887.

He held the rank of captain when he presented together with Charles Brun his project for the submarine Plongeur in 1858, and when he created the plans in 1860, under the code name Q00. Plongeur was the world's first submarine to be propelled by mechanical (by opposition to human) power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%A9on_Bourgois

Pic:

http://ecole.nav.traditions.free.fr/officiers_bourgois_simeon.htm

Charles Joseph Dumas-Vence

Charles Joseph Dumas-Vence, born in Tonnerre on February 16 , 1823and died in Paris on March 2 , 1904, is a French admiral , diplomat and hydrographer . Member of the Geographical Society, a specialist in scientific works, he contributed to the creation of the new French armored navy and in particular to the adoption of torpedoes, about which he directed experiments in the presence of Napoleon III.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Dumas-Vence

Pic.

George William Littler Garrett

George William Littler Garrett (4 July 1852 – 26 February 1902) was a British clergyman and inventor who pioneered submarine design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Garrett_(inventor)

Pic search yes: https://www.google.com/search?q=George+William+Littler+Garrett

Emile Lamm

Emile Lamm (24 November 1834 – 12 July 1873, in New Orleans) was a French-born American inventor and dentist.

Lamm was born in Ay, France, but moved to Louisiana in 1848 at the age of 14. He patented various improvements in techniques of gold dental fillings, and developed a number of innovative designs for street railways. These later were inspired by wishes to improve the Streetcars in New Orleans, as there was a desire for faster and more powerful propulsion than horsecars could provide, while steam locomotives created noise, smoke, and soot that was undesirable in city streets. The most successful of Lamm's designs was "Lamm's Fireless Engine", which ran on the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar line in New Orleans in the 1870s and 1880s, and also saw wide use in the street railways of Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Lamm

No pictures online.

Tom Lehrer

He planned on retiring early, if prematurely, after 109 concerts: “The main reason I played was to put some money aside so I could do what I liked: teach and continue writing and lie down a lot and just enjoy myself.” He much preferred royalty checks to random applause. Lehrer was never tempted to return: “I’d just be doing an impression of myself. I don’t want to become like people who have lost it, like Carol Channing.” He calls the clamor for his return “The Lenin’s Tomb Phenomenon”—the public’s morbid wish to see the remains of a once-celebrated personage.
Lehrer also felt he lost his nasty edge, and began seeing issues in shades of gray. “Today,” he said in 2002, “everything just makes me angry, it’s not funny anymore. Things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.” He adds, “And people don’t know anything now. They’re all kids and they’ve never read a book. Who would get a Schopenhauer reference? What passes for satire is just easy targets. Irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness.” In 1980, he observed, “This is no time for satire,” apparently believing that reality had outdistanced his creative powers to mock it.

https://spectator.org/33723_whatever-happened-tom-lehrer/

La Revanche du berceau

La Revanche du berceau ("the revenge of the cradle") is a term for demographic threat via high birth-rates among a minority, specifically associated with French Canadians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Revanche_des_berceaux

Wendell Phillips

Wendell Phillips (November 29, 1811 – February 2, 1884) was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Phillips

Roy Jenkins

"I have been obsessed with numbers since I was a boy," says Jenkins. "I am not a higher mathematician, I am an arithmetician - a simple numerologist."

Early mornings at East Hendred offer bizarre evidence of this. Although he is surrounded by picturesque countryside, Jenkins chooses to take his pre-breakfast walk on his tennis court. He marches round and across the court in what he calls "an elaborate series of zig-zags". It is surreal to watch, but he explains it logically: "I walk for exactly 45 minutes: shorter would be too short and longer would consume too much time."

He keeps lists of the exact number of words he writes every day, and used to enjoy swapping railway timetables and cricket statistics with Harold Wilson in No 10. One of his former civil servants says that Jenkins was the only minister he had ever worked for who knew exactly how long it took for the main traffic lights to change in every major city in Britain.

You could almost call him an anorak - except that Jenkins would scarcely recognise such a garment, still less be able to pronounce it. Harold Macmillan is once said to have asked about the young Roy Jenkins: "Who is that grand fellow who makes me feel so common?"

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-saturday-profile-lord-jenkins-of-hillhead-om-the-master-code-breaker-1180152.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Jenkins

Hypatia

Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. She is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She is known to have written a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia

Lawrence Lessig on Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell "... has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington ... "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btkVskE1rgc

The Jute Broker

He was born Valmond Maurice Guest to parents John Simon Guest and Julia Ann Gladys Emanuel in Maida Vale, London. His father was a jute broker, and the family spent some of Guest's childhood in India before returning to England. His parents divorced when he was young, but this information was kept from him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Guest

http://www.worldjute.com/directory/directory_brok_list.html

Carl Malamud

Carl Malamud (born 2 July 1959) is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.

Malamud is the author of eight books, including Exploring the Internet and A World's Fair. He was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and is the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium. He also is the co-founder of Invisible Worlds, was a fellow at the Center for American Progress, and was a board member of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Malamud

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/us/politics/georgia-official-code-copyright.html

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/13/1928257/accused-of-terrorism-for-putting-legal-materials-online

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/23/1725231/carl-malamud-answers-goading-the-government-to-make-public-data-public

Adam Worth

Adam Worth (1844 – 8 January 1902) was a German-born American criminal. Scotland Yard Detective Robert Anderson nicknamed him "the Napoleon of the criminal world" (because of his short stature). He is widely considered the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional criminal mastermind James Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series, whom Conan Doyle calls "The Napoleon of Crime".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Worth

Ellen Rometsch

Ellen Rometsch (born September 19, 1936 in Kleinitz, Germany) was rumored to be an East German Communist spy who was assigned on diplomatic cover to the West German embassy in Washington, D.C. during the early 1960s. She had fled East Germany with her parents in 1955. She married German air force sergeant Rolf Rometsch, who was stationed at the West German embassy. Rometsch is also widely thought in some Washington journalism circles to have been one of President John F. Kennedy's girlfriends during the height of the Cold War. However, the FBI never turned up "any solid evidence" that Rometsch was a spy or that she had relations with President Kennedy.

Edward Levinson

Edward Levinson (March 2, 1898 to December 26, 1981) was an American gambling operator.

He was raised in Chicago, Illinois then joined the underworld in Detroit, Michigan in the 1920s and became an associate of Meyer Lansky. Levinson and his brothers moved to Newport, Kentucky, in the 1930s, where they dominated illegal gambling. In the 1940s he moved to Miami, then in 1952 to Las Vegas, where he became a part owner and operator of various legitimate hotels and casinos. For several years he ran the Fremont Hotel and Casino. Illegal FBI tapes seemed to show that Levinson was involved in skimming profits for delivery to hidden underworld partners. In the 1960s he became involved in enterprises in which he was associated with senior politicians of the Democratic Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Levinson

Organized crime in the United States (nonfiction)

Januarius

Januarius (Latin: Ianuarius; Italian: Gennaro), also known as Januarius I of Benevento, was Bishop of Benevento and is a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. While no contemporary sources on his life are preserved, later sources and legends claim that he died during the Great Persecution[2] which ended with Diocletian's retirement in 305.

Januarius is the patron saint of Naples, where the faithful gather three times a year in Naples Cathedral to witness the liquefaction of what is claimed to be a sample of his blood kept in a sealed glass ampoule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Januarius

Christopher Morley

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Morley

John Rodgers

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

– John Rodgers

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Rogers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rogers_(writer)

George Parker

George Parker (1654–1743) was an English astrologer and almanac maker, known as a controversialist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Parker_(astrologer)

Groucho Marx on wealth

"As soon as they get rich they become Republicans."

Groucho Marx - interview with Dick Cavett @ 39:35

Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman

[Mary McCarthy's] feud with fellow writer Lillian Hellman formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. The feud had simmered since the late 1930s over ideological differences, particularly the questions of the Moscow Trials and of Hellman's support for the "Popular Front" with Stalin. McCarthy provoked Hellman in 1979 when she famously said on The Dick Cavett Show: "every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

Hellman responded by filing a $2.5 million libel suit against McCarthy, which ended shortly after Hellman died in 1984. Observers of the trial noted the resulting irony of Hellman's defamation suit is that it brought significant scrutiny, and decline of Hellman's reputation, by forcing McCarthy and her supporters to prove that she had lied.

Father Nathan Monk

"Other struggling people aren't the enemy."

Extreme Moustaches

Vildebon-Winceslas Larue

Carneades of Cyrene

In ethics, the plank of Carneades is a thought experiment first proposed by Carneades of Cyrene; it explores the concept of self-defense in relation to murder.

In the thought experiment, there are two shipwrecked sailors, A and B. They both see a plank that can only support one of them and both of them swim towards it. Sailor A gets to the plank first. Sailor B, who is going to drown, pushes A off and away from the plank and, thus, proximately, causes A to drown. Sailor B gets on the plank and is later saved by a rescue team. The thought experiment poses the question of whether Sailor B can be tried for murder because if B had to kill A in order to live, then it would arguably be in self-defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plank_of_Carneades

Compare -- and mash with -- Ship of Theseus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

James Riley

"I realize this world is flawed by virtue of its children, most of whom are the spiritual children of the devil."

https://www.claremont-courier.com/education/t30360-claremont-rileys-farm

Joachim Johann Nepomuk Anton Spalowsky

Joachim Johann Nepomuk Anton Spalowsky (1752, Reichenberg – 1797) was an Austrian naturalist and polymath.

He was a surgeon attached to the civic regiments of Vienna. (See Asclepius Myrmidon.)

Spalowsky's 1795 treatise on conchology, Prodromus in Systema Historicum Testaceorum, published by the widow of Ignaz Alberti, includes original descriptions of several new species. He also wrote works on birds, plants, and mammals, including Beytrag zur Naturgeschichte der Vögel (1790–95).

He was a Member of the Royal Czech Society of Sciences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Johann_Nepomuk_Spalowsky

Abbot Arnaud Amalric

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. ("Kill them all. For the Lord knows those who are his.").

Supposed statement by Abbot Arnaud Amalric before the massacre of Béziers during the Albigensian Crusade, recorded 30 years later, according to Caesarius of Heisterbach. cf. "Kill them all and let God sort them out."

Links to pursue

Overheard (true quotes)

"I vow to crush all of my children's dreams. That's my main goal in life." (Female co-worker in her mid-thirties.)

By Charlie Stross

Some notes on the worst-case scenario. Excerpt:

Here's the thing: we are looking at an administration that is very clearly being operated on behalf of carbon extraction industries. Trump's cabinet picks are almost all climate change deniers. While there are some questionable exceptions--Tillerson has apparently conceded some human link with climate change--even those who are "soft" on climate change existing at all stand to benefit from interests in the coal and oil industries.
There is a huge asset bubble tied up in uncombustable fossil fuels--the carbon bubble. In addition, there is a base of approximately $70Tn ($70,000 billion--let that sink in for a moment) of installed infrastructure for processing fossil fuels and petrochemicals (with plastic and composite manufacturing being relatively small compared to packaging, shipping, and burning the stuff for energy).
Meanwhile, rival power industries are coming on stream rapidly. Solar power and electric cars could halt growth in fossil fuel demand as soon as 2020. The cost of solar has fallen by 85% in the past 7 years: by 2035 electric vehicles could make up 35% of the road transport fleet, and two-thirds by 2050. These estimates are conservative, based on the assumption that breakthrough technologies will not emerge to permit photovoltaic cells and battery capacities vastly better (or cheaper) than today.
It follows logically that if you have heavily invested in fossil fuels, time is running out to realize a return on your investment. Buying a US administration tailored to maximize ROI while fighting a rear-guard action against action on climate change and roll-out of a new, rival energy infrastructure is therefore rational (in business terms).
Russia and the Putin angle is best understood as part of this; oil and gas exports accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. The possibility that Trump is personally heavily invested in Rosneft via shell proxies while being at loggerheads with Merkel might be an inversion of the normal state of affairs in international relations for the past 70 years but is entirely consistent with the big money picture: Germany is trying to push (heavily) for renewable power (as well as generally being welcoming to refugees--see below).
It isn't possible for a US administration to make a ban on solar power and electric vehicles to stick globally. By its nature, solar will work well in equatorial regions, and these are where economic growth is currently focussed (China, India, and Africa all having huge population bases and demand for rapid roll out of infrastructure). Because PV is local, the need for capital-intensive centralized power stations and distribution grids is avoided: this will make it easier for Africa to catch up, just as the large-scale roll-out of telephony is sub-Saharan Africa has largely leap-frogged fixed wires and gone straight to cellular. Late adopters get better infrastructure.
Looking ahead, the carbon barons have to know that in 10-20 years time the USA will be stuck with obsolescent infrastructure and a loss of relative advantage if they pursue this course (although they, individually, will be a whole lot richer). What is to be done?

Source: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/02/some-notes-on-the-worst-case-s.html

Alexander Dewdney

Alexander Keewatin Dewdney (born August 5, 1941, in London, Ontario) is a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Dewdney is the son of Canadian artist and author Selwyn Dewdney, and brother of poet Christopher Dewdney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dewdney

Vivian Gordon

The Dead Woman Who Brought Down the Mayor: Vivian Gordon was a reputed prostitute and blackmailer—but her murder led to the downfall of New York Mayor Jimmy Walker

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dead-woman-who-brought-down-the-mayor-27003776/#ZWh8xCXRuPVk2Yap.99

Died during sex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Faure

Worms in the Winecup

John Milton Bright (1908-1989) was an American journalist, screenwriter and political activist.

Bright was born in Baltimore and worked with Ben Hecht as a newspaper journalist in Chicago. With fellow journalist Kubec Glasmon, Bright co-wrote a series of stories adopted as screenplays. The most notable of these, Beer and Blood, became the 1931 film The Public Enemy starring James Cagney. The two were nominated for a 1931 Academy Award for Best Story.

In 1933 he became one of the ten founders of the Screen Writers Guild. As with other founders and members of the Screen Writers Guild, Bright was targeted in the early 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and put on the Hollywood blacklist.

Bright's wife Josefina Fierro was a Mexican-American activist in her own right. Bright fled to Mexico and wrote screenplays for at least two Mexican films.[3]

His 2002 memoir was called Worms in the Winecup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bright_(screenwriter)

James Fridman

Photoshop Follies:

https://twitter.com/fjamie013

Mazzarino Friars

The Mazzarino Friars were a group of Capuchin friars that turned to crime. They were active around the town of Mazzarino, Italy, in the 1950s. Their trial was a much-debated issue in the early '60s in Italy, in the context of the historical struggle between clerical and anti-clerical political forces prominent at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazzarino_Friars

Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

"Not all that is thought need be said, not all that is said need be written, not all that is written need be published, and not all that is published need be read."

"Where is God to be found? In the place where He is given entry."

"You don't love fish. If you loved the fish, you would not have killed it and cooked it on a fire."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Mendel_of_Kotzk

Mitch McConnell

“Mitch McConnell and his family have extensive ties to China,” the Blankenship campaign’s news release says. “His father-in-law who founded and owns a large Chinese shipping company has given Mitch and his wife millions of dollars over the years. The company was implicated recently in smuggling cocaine from Colombia to Europe. Hidden aboard a company ship carrying foreign coal was $7 million dollars of cocaine and that is why we’ve deemed him ‘Cocaine Mitch.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/04/the-kooky-tale-of-cocaine-mitch/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a34b85166b71

"Peroxided Mark Twain"

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/listen-to-william-shatner-and-henry-rollinss-duet-of-jingle-bells/129361/4

Henry Rollins called David Lee Roth a "peroxided Mark Twain".

Jan Baptist van Helmont

Jan Baptist van Helmont (/ˈhɛlmɒnt/;[2] Dutch: [ˈɦɛlmɔnt]; 12 January 1580 – 30 December 1644) was a Flemish chemist, physiologist, and physician. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry".[3] Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his ideas on spontaneous generation, his 5-year tree experiment, and his introduction of the word "gas" (from the Greek word chaos) into the vocabulary of science.

Sulaiman al-Tajir

During Sulaiman al-Tajir's stay at the city of Guangzhou he noted that the Chinese used fingerprint records to maintain the identities of newly arrived foreigners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Xuanzong_of_Tang_(9th_century)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulaiman_al-Tajir

Ben Dushnik

https://www.lib.umich.edu/faculty-history/faculty/ben-dushnik

https://www.lib.umich.edu/faculty-history/faculty/ben-dushnik/memoir

https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=5241

His doctoral students include Seymour Ginsburg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Ginsburg

Tycho Brahe: update timeline

Tycho Brahe (nonfiction)

Frank Herbert on governments

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

— Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

William Braikenridge

William Braikenridge (also Brakenridge) (c.1700–1762) was a Scottish mathematician and cleric, a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1752. Pic: book cover.

Michelangelo Ricci

Michelangelo Ricci (1619–1682) was an Italian mathematician and a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

Richard Heck

Richard Frederick Heck (August 15, 1931 – October 10, 2015) was an American chemist noted for the discovery and development of the Heck reaction, which uses palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactions that couple aryl halides with alkenes. The analgesic naproxen is an example of a compound that is prepared industrially using the Heck reaction.

For his work in palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions and organic synthesis, Heck was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with the Japanese chemists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki.

Pic.

Robin Williams

"The first purpose of alcohol is to make English your second goddamned language."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIWB-Neyj-c

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Rules_for_Life

Henry Rollins

[I am a] "Jackass of all tirades." - Henry Rollins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng0F9LQvFcI

Norman Vincent Peale

"Good grief, [Norman Vincent] Peale was hardly Aleister Crowley. He was barely even the Wizard of Oz."

Boundegar @ Boing Boing

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/dark-star-rising-magick-and-power-in-the-age-of-trump/122512/5

Lightstone

Albert Harold Lightstone (1926–1976) was a Canadian mathematician. He was one of the pioneers of non-standard analysis, a doctoral student of Abraham Robinson, and later a co-author with Robinson of the book Nonarchimedean Fields and Asymptotic Expansions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._H._Lightstone

Missing birth/death dates, but interesting pic available.

To look up

Matt Chamberlain

Robin Holliday

Larry Grathwohl

Gerald Heard

The Armageddon Plan - Atlantic Monthly

Brimo

Silvio Micali

Jim Gray (computer scientist)

The Lady Tasting Tea

Debabratu Basu

John Wishart (statistician)

William Sealy Gosset

Charles Jordan (magician)

Sergei Ogoltsov

Lady Caroline Blackwood

Ettore Majorana

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Richard N. Goodwin

Peter Kuper

Giorgio Agamben

Seth Tobocman

Harold Hugh Edgerton

Eduardo Kac

J. Halcombe Laning

Dudley Allen Buck

Louis Ridenour

Arlo Guthrie on Lee Hays

Arlo Guthrie called the late Lee Hays "one of the few men I've known in this world who was not only an inspiration to me, but showed me that it's possible to do for yourself what you intend to do for the rest of the world."

Justinus Kerner

Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner (18 September 1786 – 21 February 1862) was a German poet, practicing physician, and medical write

Kim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC3o2KgQstA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrdYueB9pY4

Sol Yurick

http://www.bldgblog.com/2013/12/conic-sections-an-interview-with-sol-yurick/

http://www.solyurick.com/interviews/

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/19/interview-with-sol-yurick-aut.html

HyperGlu algorithmic generative art

This algorithmic generative art explores the visual beauty of math:

Romanian artist HyperGlu creates programs and algorithms that generate fascinating images and animations with a geometric and mathematical beauty.

https://boingboing.net/2017/07/31/this-algorithmic-generative-ar.html

https://hyperglu.com/

Marx Farctor

Bricktop Smith

Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known as Bricktop, (August 14, 1894 – February 1, 1984) was an American dancer, jazz singer, vaudevillian, and self-described saloon-keeper who owned the nightclub Chez Bricktop in Paris from 1924 to 1961, as well as clubs in Mexico City and Rome. She has been called "...one of the most legendary and enduring figures of twentieth-century American cultural history."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%22Bricktop%22_Smith

Magic

It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, worry, or what not, the fact remains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Maskelyne_(magician)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Poulsen

Hibakusha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, answers questions about the future of humanity:

"Today more people die from eating too much than from human violence, which is an amazing achievement. In the past, the main economic assets were material – wheat fields, gold mines, slaves. War made sense because you could enrich yourself by waging war against your neighbours. Now the main economic asset is knowledge, and it’s very difficult to conquer knowledge through violence."

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/19/yuval-harari-sapiens-readers-questions-lucy-prebble-arianna-huffington-future-of-humanity

http://www.ynharari.com/

Racist history of Portland

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/

Gideon Worthy

Gideon Worthy, Glyph Warden

Joseph Swetname

Joseph Swetnam (died 1621) was an English pamphleteer and fencing master. He is best known for a misogynistic pamphlet and an early English fencing treatise.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swetnam

Rachel Speght

Rachel Speght (1597 – death date unknown) was a poet and polemicist. She was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, by name, as a polemicist and critic of gender ideology. Speght, a feminist and a Calvinist, is perhaps best known for her tract A Mouzell for Melastomus (London, 1617). It is a prose refutation of Joseph Swetnam's misogynistic tract, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, and a significant contribution to the Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis, defending women's nature and the worth of womankind. Speght also published a volume of poetry, Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (London, 1621), a Christian reflection on death and a defence of the education of women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Speght

Francis Galton on Order in Apparent Chaos

"Order in Apparent Chaos: I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error.’ The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.“ -- Sir Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance, 1889

Research Spotlight: Victor Barranca and Applied Mathematics (Part I)

http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2018/05/01/research-spotlight-victor-barranca-and-applied-mathematics/

von Kleist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Kleist

On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking In the first of his larger essays, On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden), Kleist claims that most people are advised to speak only about what they already understand. Instead of talking about what you already know, Kleist admonishes his readers to speak to others with "the sensible intention of instructing yourself." Fostering a dialogue through the art of "skillful questioning" is the key behind achieving a rational or enlightened state of mind. And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact. In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has "its splendid source in the feelings," and thus, man must overcome his "struggle with Fate" with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion.

Stephen Colbert on Trump

"He looks like a microwave circus peanut that somebody rubbed on a golden retriever."

George Washington, miserable prick

"We are sure, we are absolutely positive, that George Washington was a miserable prick. But when he spoke, he spoke for all of us, with a great conscience."

-- Penn Jillette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV7UXp1Yqlw

Nate Bucklin mix

"Billboard Love" by Uncle Bonsai

Nicky Case

http://ncase.me/

Mister Elk and Mister Seal

Cavalcade of Excitement

Lee Hays

Arlo Guthrie called the late Lee Hays "one of the few men I've known in this world who was not only an inspiration to me, but showed me that it's possible to do for yourself what you intend to do for the rest of the world."

Lillian Schwartz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Schwartz - 20th-century American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
- https://hyperallergic.com/329466/paying-tribute-lillian-schwartz-computer-art-pioneer/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Paying+Tribute+to+Lillian+Schwartz+a+Computer+Art+Pioneer&utm_content=Paying+Tribute+to+Lillian+Schwartz+a+Computer+Art+Pioneer+CID_c4565a35cadba61d5957340dd1ab0c5d&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Read+More

Aloysius Lilius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloysius_Lilius

Talent

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."

- Stephen King

The Selfish Living

"The living are so selfish. They can think of nothing but themselves."

- The Tudors: Season 4, Episode 4

People

Odilon Redon

His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible".

A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."

- Redon, Odilon (1988). Odilon Redon: the Woodner Collection. Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection. unpaginated. OCLC 20763694.

Fortune Tellers: Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut & Aldous Huxley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGuk9o8uZBc
"Nothing means anything." - Kurt Vonnegut

Elliott Erwitt

Nikita Krushchev and Richard Nixon, Moscow, 1959.

Glassmakers of Herat

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMYE83DJU4Q

- http://blog.cmog.org/2013/04/17/the-glassmakers-of-herat/

Jimi Hendrix

When Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees

Fay Cluff Brown

Fay Cluff Brown (1881-1968) was a physicist and inventor who created and supervised the development of educational exhibits, most notably in the Museum of Science and Industry at New York City’s Museums of the Peaceful Arts. Much of his scientific research focused on the element selenium. Early in his career, Brown invented a device using selenium, which translated printed text into sound.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_82/May_1913/Scholarship_and_the_State

Peter Struycken

Lichtarcade by Peter Strucyken. Rotterdam, NAI, Rochussenstraat.

Peter Struycken (January 5, 1939) is a Dutch visual artist and color expert.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Struycken

Wooley

"Commodore Woolsey was of middle height, sailor-built, and of a compact, athletic frame. His countenance was prepossessing, and had singularly the look of a gentleman. In his deportment, he was a pleasing mixture of gentleman-like refinement and seaman-like frankness. His long intimacy with frontier habits could not, and did not, destroy his early training, though it possibly impeded some of that advancement in his professional and general knowledge, which he had so successfully commenced in early life. He was an excellent seaman, and few officers had more correct notions of the rules of discipline. His familiar association with all the classes that mingle so freely together in border life, had produced a tendency, on his excellent disposition, to relax to much in his ordinary intercourse, perhaps, but his good sense prevented this weakness from proceeding very far. Woolsey rather wanted the grimace than the substance of authority. A better-hearted man never lived. All who sailed with him loved him, and he had sufficient native mind, and sufficinet acquired instruction, to command the respect of many of the strongest intellects of the service."

— James Fennimore Cooper, Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancthon_Taylor_Woolsey

Cassady on Graham

Neal Cassady summed up Bill Graham on sight: "He was out on the street checking tire treads to see if they’d picked up any nickels."

Blowing Mad: Neal Cassady and Music

Pynchon

Pig Bodine (nonfiction)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Bodine
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon