Notices by Bruce Sterling @bruces (bruces@mastodon.social)

Richard Feynman on bongos

*Einstein taking a lot of trouble to part his hair in that pic.

*The Nintendo Game Boy that got incinerated in the "Nintendo War" of 1991.

https://www.military.com/off-duty/games/game-boy-survived-iraqi-bombing-during-gulf-war.html

Feynman grooving on the bongos in New Mexico in 1945

*Elbow-deep in building hydrogen bombs and then finally dead of Covid-19, well, there's a Houston-girl saga for you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_W._Rosenbluth

*I wonder what it physically looks like when PEOPLE add numbers from 1 to 99 in their heads

"Mental arithmetic," that must be awful gooey and messy

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00873

*I wonder what it physically looks like when PEOPLE add numbers from 1 to 99 in their heads

"Mental arithmetic," that must be awful gooey and messy

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00873

"Los Alamos Chess." Dumbed-down for really crude computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_chess

*Feynman. What a slob. #atomicbomb #LosAlamos

*I've read this prophecy many times and as I get older I find more consolation in it. I like the parts that have "not-even-wrongness."

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

To paraphrase Konrad Lorenz: The scientist is the guy who knows everything about nothing, while the philosopher is the guy who knows nothing about everything.

*Or maybe it's the opposite

Feynman creates a John Henry contest: it's IBM punchcard computers vs women with mechanical desk calculators. The prize is an Atomic Bomb. The computer wins, and also the bomb works. So all the cool people know that henceforth it will be all about computers

*The MANIAC produced the hydrogen bomb. Those may be the most deadly women in world history

*Really has that open-source Maker thing going on

*The kid couldn't afford a real airplane, so he decided to build a fake one out of leftover pipe-organ parts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer

"Ivory labs." What a good idea. What does an "ivory laboratory" even look like? What do researchers do to pass the time in there

*When the palace-intrigue about the device is more interesting than the device.

https://ericmigi.com/blog/re-introducing-the-pebble-appstore

Call me a fantasist, but I don't see why this view is "pessimistic." Suppose that we woke up tomorrow and "phlogiston" had returned and was experimentally verifiable. People would be selling phlogiston on Ebay in about a week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessimistic_induction

*It was a giant working model of the entire Mississippi River... and it was built by prisoners from Rommel's Afrika Korps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_Basin_Model

"What the hell were we thinking?! We could have fallen and busted our asses down there!"