the ħive—a honeyed mess of scholarship and serendipity

📡 still relevant (dead kennedys)

From the album Frankenchrist, back in 1985

💡 2021 is the lem year

On 13th September 2021 “we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Stanisław Lem - writer, futurologist and philosopher, whose work ignites the imagination of readers all around the world.”

illustration: Daniel Mróz

Check out the awesome celebratory website: https://lem2021.org/

And some quotes:

“There is no such nonsense that people would be incapable of believing it.”
“It’s impossible to talk to people who cannot see the obvious.”
“Stupidity is the driving force of history.”
“The world is actually an hallucination of some Superbrain gone berserk in a manner infinite but bounded.”

💡 robo gecko

via mpg.de

more (including video) at the website of the Locomotion in Biorobotic and Somatic Systems group, MPI-IS, and their Nature Communications Biology article

📎 grumpy website

A collection of bothersome UI/UX decisions, like:

https://grumpy.website/

If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it.

repair is better than recycling
repair saves you money
repair teaches engineering
repair saves the planet

We have the right:

to devices that can be opened
to repair documentation for everything
to non-proprietary fasteners
to replace any and all consumables ourselves
to available, reasonably-priced service parts

…and more. Read in full at https://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto.

💬 hofstadter's wit

via https://wit.substack.com/p/untwist-all-the-tongues

Hofstadter is a theoretical physicist, an AI skeptic, a proud Hoosier, a literary scholar, and a strange loop. He also coined Hofstadter’s Law, which states that things always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

He describes himself as pilingual: he speaks English, French, and Italian, “with several other languages having small to tiny fractional values,” adding up to 3.1415…

Here are some of his potentially untranslatable puns:

“A mistress is halfway between a mister and a mattress.”

“Parking is such street sorrow.”

Boids, “a documentary on artificial robot-birds, whose title draws on ‘android’, ‘humanoid,’ etc, while also doing a stereotyped Brooklyn accent on ‘birds’”