One of the high points of my acting career (such as it was, second only to doing a scene with Russell Crowe as math consultant to A Beautiful Mind) was MacBeth.
While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brought him news that Birnam Wood had moved, and he drew inspiration from every fiber of my being to deliver his "tale told by an idiot" spiel.
I had the opportunity to play Macbeth in my last year of undergrad, and would confidently speculate that Lang probably remembers that moment with the same fondness you do.
It’s a role that, under a conscientious actor, demands attention and introspection years (decades) after the curtain drops.
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
I’m curious about Steve’s banjo. He usually ( but not always ) plays in Scruggs style, which should result in wear on the head down by where the pinky is anchored. But this banjo shows wear up above the strings, where a clawhammer player usually shows wear.
Either this is one of Steve’s clawhammer practice banjos or the wear is from a previous owner, I’d guess.
My favorite nonfiction book in years is "Storia della pasta in dieci piatti" by Luca Cesari. The signature chapter explores the day in 2015 when celebrity chef Carlo Cracco stated on television that a clove of garlic is an ingredient that can go into amatriciana. Cesari explores the absurdity of the resulting uproar, given the actual history of the dish.
People like to make rules. Leave them be in their tree houses, unless you really like to play too. I thought it was a right of passage in high school to laugh at the French forming committees to tell peasants how to speak their native language. We haven't generalized from this example?
Who gives a rat's ass whether this governing body thinks Pluto is a planet or not?
This is hardly on par in terms of stupidity, but one thing you learn from flat-earthers is that humans love disagreeing with a consensus. Nothing make a certain type of person feel smarter than disagreeing with everyone. If you say the sky is blue I'm going to say it's green because I'm so smart.
>If you say the sky is blue I'm going to say it's green because I'm so smart.
Flat-earthers are definitely wrong about the shape of the earth, but even they admit the sky is blue, assuming they aren't afflicted with some unfortunate variety of colorblindness.
In my observations of flat-earthers, they're people who reject the consensus surrounding a particular fact because they haven't observed that fact for themselves, which doesn't make them bad people or even crazy. I do rather enjoy their attempts to measure basic scientific facts about the earth, such as when a group of flat-earthers used lasers and the ocean to measure if the earth indeed has curvature. When the evidence incontrovertibly showed the earth indeed has sufficient curvature to match the scientific consensus, many participants were quite shocked. As long as they adjusted to the consensus, or even hypothesized another theory they felt worth testing, they're not crazy, just skeptical of authority.
But how could you be alive and not have observed that the earth is curved? Why does a mountain, building or ship disappear over the horizon if the earth is not curved? That alone should be sufficient evidence to believe that the scientific consensus on this is likely to be true.
I have not observed directly that a human will die after 3 days without water but having experienced thirst & dehydration in limited amounts, I have no reason to doubt that is likely the case.
That's what I don't understand supposed "rational" flat earthers. It's fine and somewhat rational to be skeptical of authority but when the contrary idea takes enormous leaps of faith to consider, it seems weird to me to believe something for the sake of it.
>But how could you be alive and not have observed that the earth is curved?
I know someone who is almost 40 years old that has never left his hometown. He's a reasonable person who holds gainful employment, but from our conversations, he's never been in a skyscraper, flown on an airplane, taken a road trip into the mountains, or even hiked up a large hill, for that matter. He also lives in a land-locked city, so he's never seen the ocean. As such, he has never directly observed the earth to be curved. With all due respect, many people like him do exist in the world, and perhaps you're not acquainted with people like him.
However, he is not a flat-earther because he spends much time on the Internet reading about the way the world works outside his hometown. Basically, he believes in the truthfulness of large institutions, which really is why you and I believe the earth is round; that is, we haven't actually performed a bona fide experiment (not just going in an airplane or up a mountain) to measure the curvature of the earth for ourselves, but we trust the results of those who have, and we also accept that certain technologies like GPS as it is currently implemented can only work if the earth is round (not just in satellite orbits but also the slight-but-critical relativistic shift from a geosynchronous satellite).
>when the contrary idea takes enormous leaps of faith to consider, it seems weird to me to believe something for the sake of it.
That's cool, but many people are capable of believing in something for the sake of it. One fact that stands out to me is that we all use some amount of faith to accept that the earth is round, though perhaps not quite a leap's worth.
> With all due respect, many people like him do exist in the world, and perhaps you're not acquainted with people like him.
Fair enough.
> Basically, he believes in the truthfulness of large institutions, which really is why you and I believe the earth is round; that is, we haven't actually performed a bona fide experiment
I guess to a certain extent, but also knowing that I could perform such an experiment and come up with reproducible results. As well as the lack of any credible alternative theory that holds up to any sort of scientific rigor.
> One fact that stands out to me is that we all use some amount of faith to accept that the earth is round, though perhaps not quite a leap's worth.
I would say that it's not really faith when its reproducible. For example, there is a small amount of faith that my brakes will slow down my car when approaching a corner, but I can test the brakes to know they should work, I can perform experiments with similar mechanisms to prove the basic physics, that all would have reproducible outcomes. So while there is a small amount of faith that some catastrophic failure won't happen, I would say its categorically different to believing things with almost no evidence. There is no reproducible experiment (at least that I know of) that you can even read about that proves the earth is flat.
>So while there is a small amount of faith that some catastrophic failure won't happen, I would say its categorically different to believing things with almost no evidence.
Evidence is the key. I don't know where you stand on the Gettier problem debate (is all knowledge just JTBs?), but the Gettier problem and black swan events show that all the evidence can point to one thing, yet something else might actually happen. So, did you really know, or did you just believe? I guess flat-earthers just reject what 99.9% of people accept as knowledge and hold it instead as competing belief with whatever alternative system quacks well enough to pass as a duck in their squinting eyes.
They are absolutely crazy. There is no defending it. It is something that makes stupid people feel smart. There are easy, verifiable experiments that can be done and they refuse to accept the outcome.
Have you ever called someone crazy, only for them to stop dead in their tracks and say, "wow, you're completely right, how could I have been so blind?"
I haven't, and you probably haven't, though if you have, I'd love to hear that story. As I said, they're skeptical of authority and need to run the experiment themselves; some will even flip on flat-earthers who run the experiment and change their minds. Only those who perform the experiment and still refuse to accept the outcome are deserving of being left to their own crazed devices. Until then, they're just ignorant and/or weird.
My goal is not to get them to see the light. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. These are profoundly stupid people who are confident they are right and everybody else is wrong.
There are many, many, many examples of exactly that happening: they run experiments, the experiments prove them wrong, and they instantly declare the experiment to be wrong. You can easily find them on YouTube, IIRC a flat earth documentary on Netflix also features exactly this at the very end.
There are of course people like grifters in the community who don't believe their own words, but the believers won't reason themselves out of this position they didn't reason themselves into.
I grew up in Greece, a suburb of Rochester, New York where Kodak Park and its research labs were located. Aliens would have spotted the labs in 1965 as the one place in the northeast still lit up during the great blackout.
Researchers bought nearby for great housing values and short commutes. My high school was typical working class weak except for an exceptional science program, to support the many "faculty brats" like myself. Half my friends had parents working in the research labs. One day in the 1960's I saw my first computer, sized like a ship's bridge where I played a primitive computer game, two dots orbiting a sun.
My Dad devised the "Bayer filter" for recording color in digital cameras. His best friend played a similar role in video. Long before the internet, the deepest facts about the world came home to me as tales told to my Dad by colleagues in the labs.
My Dad's first experience with a loop was punched cards of a different color, put them back in the hopper and make a mark on a blackboard. These stories prepared me for the inevitability of computerizing my branch of mathematics.
Still, reading this account, I'm surprised so much so soon.
This is helpful, proving this entire discussion is subjective.
I'm a retired mathematician with a primary research project, and too many tangential projects I fear revisiting; tokens be damned, will they burn all my time? Translate the K&R C computer algebra system that got me tenure to 64-bit modern C. Implement a no syntax macro language to support my Go60 ZMK keyboard. Realize my vision of how interlinear translations should work so I can read Flaubert in the original for an online course this fall. Rejigger my decades-overgrown .bashrc setup and my status, install scripts to manage Bash, Ruby, Lean, Tailscale and my Homebrew setup across four machines. And a waiting queue as these tasks clear.
Fable 5 (with Opus 5 as backup) on Zed with a $200 Max plan has been a sea change for me. Carefully alternating planning and auto modes, I manage all these projects at once using Zed's Threads Sidebar. I'm a virtual CTO taking intense meetings all day, relieved to go cook or run errands when credits stall. Anything I've procrastinated for months is now making steady progress; the translation project I feared taking a month is nearly done with several hours of my attention. My personal IT support is now more advanced and easy to use than I ever imagined possible.
My project creation has been a series of agentic "parenting" steps, so there are years of evolving cultural DNA. I had so hated agent comments that recent agents simply weren't commenting at all, instead recording all context in support documents. We had a "come to Jesus" meeting to discuss what commenting style would benefit both my failing working memory and future agents' token use.
It has taken me two brutal years so far to learn to use AI. AI is a dangerous and powerful Iron Man suit, an extension of our associative minds that is a different experience for each person.
One doesn't ride a surfboard by telling it which way to go. I would surely die surfing a big wave, but my experience with AI doesn't resemble other accounts.
Pub tourism is one of my favorite ways to spend a day in London. The pub "density" isn't all it's cracked up to be. To be able to make it to the next pub for a bathroom (and to preserve my ability to walk) I've found half pints to be ideal. Ideally, accompanied here and there by pub food.
Bar staff don't universally view half pint orders with respect.
Apparently not all 8 year old daughters view half pint orders with respect either. It didn't help it was served in one of those mini pint glasses but she ripped me for getting a "tiny lager" while my partner enjoyed a pint. I wasn't aware we'd passed on anything about drinking culture to her yet, but it seems to start early!
Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials.
They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUIDs, the sort of thing that never happens to anyone else). This matters even if you never need support: Their software is battle-tested by decades of user experience that they understand.
This leads to software convergence, which this rewrite furthers. At first SuperDuper! appeared to me to be oversimplified to avoid trouble at all costs, while Carbon Copy Cloner appeared to be a collection of enthusiast scripts. One could in fact find the scripts driving either; I expanded SuperDuper!'s scope by directly calling an internal script for years.
Decades ago I used Retrospect. They were arrogant twits but they supported external tape drives and such. My breaking point came when when my life turned bicoastal, and their time zone bug forced full backups after every flight. No MBA stereotype could prepare me for the stupid brushoff I heard at a MacWorld show over this. External drives had become affordable enough to motivate a switch to SuperDuper!
More recently there was a macOS release that put the category into crisis, and Carbon Copy Cloner figured it out first. I switched and I haven't looked back. I loved SuperDuper! and I love Carbon Copy Cloner. How much control surface do you want? You have to see for yourself.
I think it was an ad for Retrospect in an early 90s magazine that said "There are two categories of people: those who have lost files, and those who are going to."
SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner are as close as you can get to a hot spare. For data drives, interchangeable.
Time Machine's virtue is single file recovery.
Arq is off-site storage. Any hybrid backup strategy can fail under scenarios better imagined than experienced. Now that I'm no longer bicoastal, Arq (and a safety deposit box) saves me if my house burns down.
I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields.
Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wife, it is generally felt that mixing ego and the possibility of a Nobel Prize has toxic effects on a field.
We now have both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, but both pass over the midlife period when ego eclipses talent.
It is mathematical folklore that one should attempt to prove a conjecture by day, disprove it by night. Jordan Ellenberg recently popularized this in his 2014 book. He and I both heard this from Barry Mazur, but it dates at least to Bing, if not antiquity.
What is the purpose of mathematics? To be the architect of new conventions by seeing clearly past the old? If so, believing that the entire point is proving statements is a poor start. Bill Thurston was a visionary who happened to prove a great deal of what he saw, but his influence was his vision.
For those of us who like to understand every line of code we generate, and have labored for years to learn how to make best use of AI, a factor of two is a reasonable estimate for our productivity gain.
For those of us who believe mathematics is about achieving human understanding, having machines decide what's true and what isn't makes a night and day difference. Again, about a factor of two.
While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brought him news that Birnam Wood had moved, and he drew inspiration from every fiber of my being to deliver his "tale told by an idiot" spiel.
I can still feel the spit hitting my face!
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