The Core

I can never find this quote when I want it (e.g. discussions of what tech is just around the corner)

The field of artificial intelligence was born in a fit of scientific optimism, in 1955, when a small group of researchers—three mathematicians and an I.B.M. programmer—drew up a proposal for a project at Dartmouth. “An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves,” they stated. “We think a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom

"We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world."

  -- Desmond Tutu speaking about Israel and Palestine
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu

It never ended though, it's just changed names!

 “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
    --- Lyndon Johnson

Thinking of this when thinking of what Trump and Biden could have done to better handle Covid. It's one of the great and rare moments of courage in the US presidency. Johnson thought he might lose the election over civil rights and people were telling him to go slow with the '64 election looming.

Caro writes that during a searching late-night conversation that lasted into the morning of November 27, when somebody tried to persuade Johnson not to waste his time or capital on the lost cause of civil rights, the president replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”... He directed one labor leader to “talk to every human you could,” saying, “if we fail on this, then we fail in everything.”

Eventually Johnson corralled enough Republican votes to break the longest filibuster in the history of the House, won the election and moved on to pass the Voting Rights Act and escalate the war in Vietnam. In the end, it was the latter, that caused him to drop out of the 1968 race, but it was the former that helped formulate Nixon's Southern Strategy that gave him the White House.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/what-the-hells-the-presidency-for/358630/

"Remember hobbies?  Hobbies is what we use to do before we had phones."
-a guy on the internet

>>what did we call those things

B.O.O.K. = Body Of Organized Knowledge

>> don't seem to have any charger cords 

You might be able to use them anyhow. The earliest B.O.O.K. models did not need charger cords because they were powered by ambient light.

Spotted on a forum:

"If random people walking through a crowded place can tell you are a prepper you aren’t doing it correctly."

Related:

"If you don't take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"