Brian Sholis

- “Art exposes us to the universal experience of being a meaning-making animal in a universe where meanings falter. A good definition of art, it seems to me, might be the science of making meaning-making tools.”

* "Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles."

A profile of David Mills, an engineer who coded the Network Time Protocol that runs much of the internet. His methods, his code, are slowly be replaced by other ways of measuring and coordinating time, and this story does a good job of framing the personalities of those involved, the trade-offs, etc.

- “She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight.”

- “But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window-dressing.”

* “Growth takes twice as long as you think and is twice as hard. The biggest advantage you can give yourself is to devote as much of your energy, resources and focus to the actual content itself rather than the sugar high of piling up big follower and subscriber numbers that are likely more quantity than quality.”

- “the focus of software services has shifted from manipulating data to manipulating workflows.”

- “One major aspect of the mystery of time is the fact that it doesn’t play the same role in quantum mechanics as other quantities, like position or momentum; physicists say there are no “time observables” — no exact, intrinsic time stamps on quantum particles that can be read off by measurements. Instead, time is a smoothly varying parameter in... See more