- You are the captain of a starship, about to embark on a long journey to a strange planet. You must hire a crew and buy supplies for the long journey ahead, then deal with all sorts of adventures and problems along the way. Space Awesome is a lovely little retro game similar to Oregon Trail* or Zork*. (You can play a complete game in a few minutes.)
- The Comprehensive Guide to Building a Realistic R2-D2 Replica
- A wall of ice the size of Rhode Island is heading toward a penguin-packed island off Antarctica.
- Once again, fans of the Buffalo Bills are the class of the NFL. They’ve raised over $100,000 with a GoFundMe for a diabetes charity supported by Mark Andrews, the Baltimore Ravens player who lost a fumble and dropped what would have been a game-tying catch in his team’s AFC divisional loss to the Bills.
- JK Brickworks is a site with instructions for lots of fun LEGO MOCs.
- “Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of ‘scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer’.” – via kottke
- Oh, wow. This is awesome. The Public Domain Image Archive is a hand-picked collection of thousands of out-of-copyright works, free to browse, download, and reuse. – via @austinkleon
Posts tagged “knowledge”
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird … So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard P. Feynman
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Michael Crichton
There is pleasure in recognising old things from a new viewpoint.
Richard P. Feynman
One thing is that I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs, in different degrees of certainty, about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything and of many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
Richard P. Feynman
I was born not knowing, and have only had a little time to change that here and there.
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
To expand on this just a bit:
I know a million things. There are many more things that I do not know. One of the things I don’t know is: How many of the things I think I know do I really know? It gets worse. There are things that I do know that I don’t think I know. There are things that I don’t think I know that I do know. Included in the things that I think I know that I really don’t, are a number of things that I don’t even know I don’t know. This, now, is where it gets tricky. What do I not know that I really do know but won’t admit? And of those things that I won’t admit I know, what do I really know? Because there are a lot of things that I think I know that it turns out that not only did I not know them, I didn’t even know that I didn’t know them. I don’t know if I can handle any more of this sort of introspection. Really not much can come of it. All I know is that there is a whole bunch that I don’t know and even more that I don’t know I don’t know. What gets me though, are the things that I know I know that I wish I didn’t know. Those are the worst.
Something Totally Sketchy
And then, something totally sketchy happens and what you thought you didn’t know you think you might have known and some other things you thought you didn’t know you think that you might know for sure but some other things that you don’t know if you know or don’t know you realize you might know.
What Do I Know?
Did you ever think you totally knew something and then – suddenly – felt like possibly you had absolutely no clue about whatever it was that you thought you knew? Yeah. I feel like that sometimes. Like now for instance.