Sublime
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Eno and I dutifully viewed the famous pennies used to adjust the clock, a stack of which is visible on the boss of the pendulum a few feet below the suspension point. Each one-ounce penny speeds the clock by 0.4-second in 24 hours (by raising the pendulum’s center of gravity a trace and thus shortening its period a microtrace). The pendulum, made o
... See moreStewart Brand • The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Patrick Collison • Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck
The machine, called a punch-card tabulator, had been invented in the early 1880s by an engineer named Herman Hollerith for the purpose of automating the US census. It worked on a simple principle.
Nicholas Carr • The Big Switch
Walker thinks that our understanding of life, as a phenomenon, is right now where we were with gravity before Newton. We can describe what we see, but we have no sense of the underlying principles—we just see an apple falling to the ground. She thinks that without a theory, a deeper understanding of what life is, the search for it beyond Earth is p
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