ArloArlo Guthrie has a song about a man who would rather ride than have anything else you could offer him. His ride has an engine. Mine is a bicycle.
End of EternityEternity sits outside time. Its people ride kettles up and down the centuries, from the 27th to the 70,000th, and make small corrections to Reality so that humanity never suffers too much.Protect something long enough and the protection turns to be the cage.It is my favourite book.
The Soul of AmericaJon Meacham's book walk us through the worst years of American history: The Civil War, the Klan, McCarthy, and the fight over civil rights. The country came close to the edge many times, yet it always kept coming back a little better.I loved how hopeful Jon was.In 2026 he was asked how Trump's second term compared with what he expected. A little worse, he said. I am less sure of the climb these days, than I was when I read the book.
DylanIn January 1961 a nineteen-year-old from Minnesota came to New York to meet Woody Guthrie. Woody was in hospital by then and could barely play.Bob Dylan visited him, sang him his own songs, and wrote him one. Song to Woody is on his first record.Arlo, Woody's son, has his own star on this page.
Quantum EraserSend light through two slits one photon at a time and the hits slowly build stripes on the screen, as if each photon went through both slits. Mark which slit each one took and the stripes disappear.In the eraser version every photon has a twin, measured a little later. If the twin keeps the path information, there are no stripes. If its measurement erases that information, the stripes come back. The twin is measured after the first photon has already hit the screen.It is tempting to say the future rewrites the past. What happens is stranger and smaller. The screen always shows the same blur. The stripes only appear when you sort the hits by what happened to the twins, and that sorting can only be done afterwards.I still haven't found an explanation that makes it feel normal.