Kate Ross

Founder and MD of the eight&four Group.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

I just went down a rabbit hole of a concept I literally can't stop thinking about...

Parkinson's Law:

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

Jensen Huang built Nvidia to $2.2 trillion.

I watched his interviews and here's what stands out:

Pure Asian dad energy.

"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."

Going to give this pep talk to my 5-year-old this weekend.

Will let you all know how it goes.

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses @jk_rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions.

He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically.

Watch until the end.
You see the epiphany in real-time.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Lucille Ball dances "The Charleston" with her daughter Lucie Arnaz and close friend Ginger Rogers in 1971.

[Maria Made in Cosmos ✨ @made_in_cosmos]

Sometimes I wonder if people are reluctant to have kids because life has become incredibly comfortable, a hundred years ago raising a kid wasn't any more laborious than growing food or running a house, now it's probably the most demanding thing you'll ever do

[Boyan Slat @BoyanSlat]

Recently, I decided I wanted to read every page of one of my favorite websites, @OurWorldInData.

I’m about halfway now.

Here are the 30 most surprising things I’ve learned about the world so far! 🧵

[Shrug Life @shekfu]

Trying to keep track of this amazing back and forth Twitter thread between a novelist and the guy who was temporary CEO at Open AI for a hot second.

It all started when CEO dude starts pontificating about redistribution of wealth...

[Kate Ross @_eightandfour]

@lucysymonsjones great to meet at Grupo this week! Drop me a DM if you ever fancy a coffee/glass of wine 🍷 x

[Sam Altman @sama]

we are so back

[Benjamin Carlson @bfcarlson]

Ruining 1 person who threatens the regime sends a message that will be heard by 10,000.

"Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys" is the old Chinese expression.

Bring down a powerful person, intimidate society.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

One reason for low research productivity is that we have no good way of shrinking a field when it becomes clear there's not much interesting left to find there.

[Today Years Old @todayyearsold]

My whole life has been a lie

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and is expected to be swallowed by the sun in about 5 billion years, when Earth is 9.5 billion years old. If we make 100 million years one "Earth year," then the planet is currently 45 (out of a 95-year life). Humans are Earth's mid-life crisis.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?!

The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet...

But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &.

The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever.

The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter.

On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera.

The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud.

As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin.

Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own.

Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &."

When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand.

A Dic­tion­ary of Slang and Col­lo­quial Eng­lish from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with:

"Am­persand. The sign &; am­persand. Vari­ants: Ann Passy Ann; an­pasty; an­dpassy; an­parse; aper­sie; per-se; am­passy; am-passy-ana; am­pene-and; am­pus-and; ampsyand; am­pazad; am­siam; am­pus-end; ap­perse-and; em­per­siand; am­perzed; and zumzy-zan."

Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.

[Matthew Scott @Barristerblog]

Appeal is a tiny charity achieving remarkable results. But it is forced to turn away many deserving cases simply because it doesn't have the resources to give them the attention they deserve.

[Hadley Freeman @HadleyFreeman]

But sure, both sides / be kind / right side of history etc etc

[Hadley Freeman @HadleyFreeman]

Women who defend their sex-based rights lose their jobs, get taken to court and are publicly denounced as fascists. But someone who spent 30yrs in prison for violent crimes can tell people to punch women in the face and they get cheered, while the Met looks on doing nothing

[Jon Yates @jonpayates]

🧵 A remarkable story from Glasgow: How the 'murder capital of Europe' cut crime by getting mothers talking to gang members and what we can learn. (1/15)

[Sara Wahedi @SaraWahedi]

Professor Ismail Mashal, who ripped up his diplomas on live TV in Afghanistan and went viral across the world, was arrested by the Taliban yesterday.

His defiantly stood against the Taliban’s ban on women’s education. Now, he’s been silenced. Demand his release.

#FreeMashal