"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation," Alasdair Gray. (Gray himself attributes the maxim, inscribed on the wall of the Scottish Parliament, to the Canadian poet Dennis Lee.)

“It is not a trivial question,” Socrates said. “After all, what we are talking about is how we should live.” (Or, so Plato has Socrates say.).

Americans who have not actually studied the classics, but have manosphere-mediated or evangelical ideas of the Ancient World’s literature, philosophy, politics, and history, have some very erroneous ideas about the past. The classical world persisted for a very long time,.

The only really good academic satirical novels are Pnin and Pictures from an Institution, and I guess, Changing Places. No, not Stoner. No more novels where the aging male protagonist achieves a brief, illusory renaissance by sleeping with his naive, pulchritudinous student, only.

DCVC is #8 in the top 10 (of the top 50) unicorn investors for DCVC… Not easy given that we only do the hard, Deep Tech stuff, abjuring easy but maybe chimerical wins. Proud to be listed with so many great institutional investors.

Except for David Foster Wallace. DFW really did watch 12 - 14 hours of TV a day, by his account—before turning to Derrida, Saussure, and Barthes.

I have never, at any time, gotten a single Sports question right on the @nytimes weekly News Quiz.

The answer, per Damasio, is (1) Not conscious; (2) Minimally conscious: possessed of fly-sized feelings, homeostatically regulating its fly body, from which emerge fly-sized emotions, from which emerge fly-sized consciousness. But not self-conscious at all.

I did that interview with the late Gene Wolfe.

I cannot prove you are conscious. Nonetheless, I’ve good reason to believe you are. I cannot prove LLMs are not conscious. And yet I’ve every reason to believe they are not.

Milton Glaser, who designed the genuinely iconic "I ❤️ New York" poster, on how to explode an idea and make it new. TED, Monterey, 1998: .

One could write a mildly interesting article about how @TEDTalks lost its natural audience—people like me—long before Chris Anderson threw in the rag and began to look for a new patron. And, no, the decline was not just because TED became woke, surrendering the curation and.

Killer quote from my 2007 Oppenheimer essay: .

If we're going to debate the meaning of Robert Oppenheimer's legendary quotation, he is not comparing himself to Vishnu, or claiming that he was the sole author of the bomb. Here's the full quote, available on . “We knew the world would not be the same.

This is, in fact, true. We’ve even made a new vaccine without the offending particle. Not yet approved.

RT @mattocko: Very happy to work with Dr. Prineha Narang, a brilliant quantum systems expert helping @DCVC double down on our historic quan….

Welcome Professor Prineha ("Pri") Narang, who will be helping @dcvc execute our quantum computing strategy. More detail about that strategy at the link.

I don’t speak for aerospace engineering and rocket science, but there’s a real difference in the life and material sciences between research and engineering. What’s less well understood is that it’s breakthroughs in *tools*—new microscopes or imaging, new methods in data science.

DCVC portfolio company @kanvasbio (where I’m chair) is leader in this field. It has pioneered a spatial biology platform that can describe host-microbiome interactions at the level of the transcriptome. Next, breakthrough Tx that can drug the microbiome like any other organ.