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boarders.bsky.social
@boarders.bsky.social
680 followers 1.8K following 1.9K posts
Thanks to impermanence all things are possible

Working on a book on topos theory
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boarders.bsky.social
Mr. Carl Sagan apology form
Quote from Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World: “I have a foreboding of America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
August 26, 2025 at 1:37 AM
boarders.bsky.social
Reminded that Rorty thought 2014-2044 would be the dark years:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”
July 23, 2025 at 2:46 PM
boarders.bsky.social
Ethan Hawke portraying a Reverend in the film First Reformed
July 16, 2025 at 4:12 AM
boarders.bsky.social
I am reading Calculus Made Easy, a popular introductory text from 1910, to prepare for a class I’m teaching and it has this immortal prologue
“Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks. Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics - and they are mostly clever fools - seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way. Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.”
June 28, 2025 at 3:20 AM
boarders.bsky.social
This is, I think, one of the main theses of Adam Curtis (especially his work since hypernormalization).

For instance, here is the synopsis of his new series on Britain at the end of the 20th century from Wikipedia:
“Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved - and with it any hope of a functioning democracy."!?! The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.”
June 23, 2025 at 3:15 PM
boarders.bsky.social
Text from the beginning of the declaration of Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of the Independence of Vietnam which reads: ““All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless for more than 80 years the French imperialists, abusing the standard of liberty, equality, and fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.”
June 12, 2025 at 1:32 AM
boarders.bsky.social
“COWEN: Could it just be easier to stay at home, and more fun? I find I'm an outlier, but my use of Al - I either want to go somewhere very distant and use the Al there to learn about, say, the birds of a region, or I want to stay at home. It's a barbell effect. The idea of driving 35 minutes to Washington, DC - that seems less appealing than it used to be.” source: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jack-clark/
May 29, 2025 at 8:32 PM
boarders.bsky.social
Was quite taken by this and wondered if there were other instances of the trick. Wouldn't describe it as working well...
main :: IO () main = do print ((1 :: Int) ⊆ ([1, 2, 3] :: (Set Int)) ⊆ ([1, 2, 3] :: (Set Int))) class In member container res | member container -> res where infixr 4 ⊆ (⊆) :: member -> container -> res instance (Ord a) => In a (Set a) Bool where a ⊆ s = a `member` s instance (Ord a) => In (Set a) (Set a) (Set a) where s1 ⊆ s2 | s1 `isSubsetOf` s2 = s1 | otherwise = mempty
May 24, 2025 at 2:24 AM
boarders.bsky.social
There is definitely a sort of ‘idealism of the ruling class’ that their “fans” also pine for (some of the libidinal appeal of AI art hits on it). There is a good reason Karl Rove supposedly said:
Image containing text of the following quote: “People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
December 10, 2024 at 5:25 AM
boarders.bsky.social
what Gauss wrote to Bolyai’s father 6 months after being told about his son’s work. Bolyai quit mathematics as a result.
image of text with the quote: “Now something about the work of your son. You will probably be shocked for a moment when I begin by saying that I cannot praise it, but I cannot do anything else, since to praise it would be to praise myself. The whole content of the paper, the path that your son has taken, and the results to which he has been led, agree almost everywhere with my own meditations, which have occupied me in part for 30-35 years.”
November 29, 2024 at 1:16 AM
boarders.bsky.social
Sidney Morgenbesser also seems like he’d be good at it:
October 22, 2024 at 2:44 AM
boarders.bsky.social
AJ Ayer:
October 22, 2024 at 2:37 AM
boarders.bsky.social
The opening paragraph from Russell’s essay “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”: “Man is a rational animal-so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is
September 22, 2024 at 4:44 PM