The Chosen Vehicle

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

-- Herman Melville (1819 - 1891), American novelist, short story writer, and poet, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) Bk. IV, ch. 5

Sleek, Simple, Utopian

One persistent strand in utopian thinking, as we have often mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise.  Since I do not assume that there are such principles, I do not presume that the political realm will whither away.  The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian scheme.

-- Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002), American libertarian philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopian Means and Ends, p. 330

All Others

"In God we trust.  All others must use data."

-- Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method (1986) Chapter 20 "Doing It with Data" p. 96

Somebody Gets Paid

Defects are not free.  Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.

-- William Edwards Deming (1900 - 1993), American statistician, college professor, author, lecturer, and consultant, Out Of The Crisis (1982) p. 11

They Know We Know

They lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

-- Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova (2010), Chapter 13: A Tour of Leningrad, pp 172 and 173

Jargon That Gatekeeps

Being able to effectively curate information to captivate the audience while maintaining maximum value in the distributed information's fidelity is the most important part of dimensionality reduction for effective communication.  This will be the most important way humans will use AI in order to solve real world problems.

I might add that the ability to simplify information for any audience in order to democratize knowledge without depending on jargon that gatekeeps it is an obvious sign of great intelligence in an individual.

-- Jonathan Murphy, who bills himself as a "Solution Maker", in a jargon- & buzzword-filled response to someone stating on LinkedIn that they plan to train an AI to answer the question, "Am I explaining things at the right level" in this deliverable; this post seems to violate everything he claims to favor

The Height Of A Mountain

Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top.  Then you will see how low it was.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961), Swedish diplomat, second United Nations Secretary-General, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Markings (1964)

In Related News

Trump just took his attack on reality to a different level, by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Why?  Because he did not like the job numbers her agency produced.

In related news, we just saw the last credible BLS data for the rest of the Trump administration.

-- Don Moynihan, Professor of Public Policy at University of Michigan, "Trump Shoots the Messenger", at Moynihan's Can We Still Govern? Substack (1 August 2025)

Few Doubts

Lion had few doubts about his actions.  As he had said on more than one occasion, "I may be wrong, but I am never in doubt."

-- Sheri Stewart Tepper (1929 - 2016), author of science fiction, horror, and mystery novels, Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore (1985) Chapter 10 (p. 162)

RIP Tom Lehrer

Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media.  What we have now -- to quote myself at my most pretentious -- is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.  For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language.  Irreverence is easy -- what's hard is wit.

-- Thomas Andrew Lehrer (9 April 1928 - 26 July 2025), American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician, On the current state of satire, in Rhino Records online chat (17 June 1997)

The Things To Do

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.  Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it.  This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), American philosopher, systems theorist, architect, and inventor, Letter to "Micheal" (16 February 1970), Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker"

Impossible To Please

It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.

-- Jean de La Fontaine (1621 - 1695), French fabulist and the most widely read French poet of the 17th century, Fables (1668–1679) Book III (1668), Fable 1

Reasons

The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know.  We feel it in a thousand things.

-- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), French mathematician, logician, physicist, and theologian, The Pensées (1669) (literally "thoughts") Section IV: On the Means of the Belief (242-290) 277

What Everything Else Isn't

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.  It's what everything else isn't.

-- Theodore Huebner Roethke (1908 - 1963), American poet, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954, Poetry and Craft (1965)

Air Quotes

We used to be called the world's greatest deliberative body.  I think we're still called it, but now I wonder if it's in air quotes.  We will survive as a democracy if we continue to respect the integrity of our institutions, and so that means respecting our own rules and how they operate.

-- Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in an interview with the Washington Post (24 June 2025)

Now More Than Ever

Who will stand up for our democracy?  This question, fraught in even the most peaceful times, has only grown more pressing as our country approaches its 250th anniversary.  Each passing day brings growing assaults on essential liberties like freedom of speech and due process.  Meanwhile, our delicately assembled legal system faces a constant barrage of threats.  Even as this issue reaches publication, the U.S. military has been deployed against peaceful protestors.  We teeter on the brink of collapse into an authoritarian state.  That is why, today, The Onion calls upon our lawmakers to sit back and do absolutely nothing.

Members of Congress -- now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice.

Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans.  It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost.  Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away -- and that is where we have finally arrived. ...

But we have not descended entirely from a nation of fearful men, have we?  Let this be the moment to make amends for any missteps of American bravery and valor.  Congress, we are asking, nay, demanding: This coming Independence Day, don't wave the Stars and Stripes, that enduring symbol of liberty and rebellion.

Instead, wave the white flag of surrender.

Tu Stultus Es,
The Onion Editorial Board

-- Editorial from a hard copy edition of The Onion newspaper that was delivered to all members of Congress, along with a letter "Why I'm Sending Issues of 'The Onion' To Every Member Of Congress" (20 June 2025)

Be Ashamed

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

-- Horace Mann (1796 - 1859), American education reformer and abolitionist, Address at Antioch College (1859)

Inconvenience

So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527), Italian political philosopher, historian, musician, poet, and playwright, Discourses on Livy (1517) Book 1, Ch. 6 

Foolish People

Foolish people -- when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way I mean people who entertain different opinions to mine.  If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859 - 1927), English author, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Getting There

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.  When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.  The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another.  I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.

-- Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855), German mathematician, astronomer and physicist, Letter to Farkas Bolyai (2 September 1808)