Chip

Composer, Artist, Husband

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Murray: Is it true that people making under $184k pay a 12.4% Social Security tax rate?

Dahl: Yes

Murray: And the rate for someone making $1 million?
Dahl: 2.2%

Murray: So, a 12.4% tax for people making less than $184k, but 2.2% for a millionaire or .0002% for billionaires.

[Chip @chipmichael]

I just LOVE that our government is more concerned about finding a way to kill people than it is to keep its own people health.

https://t.co/0TblqJJVzz

[Caitlin Kalinowski @kalinowski007]

I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.

[Chip @chipmichael]

Boebert made it clear to reporters that she did not regret break protocol. When asked why she had shared the photo, she responded, “Why not?”
- She should be Censored by the House and pulled from the committee.

[Chip @chipmichael]

https://t.co/0VdmLSCv9y

[USA Hockey @usahockey]

Can we get the shot speed on Keller's goal?! #WinterOlympics

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.

The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.

Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.

This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.

They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.

[ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉᶰᵗᵃʳʸ Q(MEGA TRUMP) @QMegaTrump]

🚨BREAKING: In a bombshell revelation, Rep. Tim Burchett drops a nuke on insider trading by stating, "Washington isn't just a 'swamp' — it's a 'sewer' of corruption enriching from taxpayers' money and it needs to STOP.. Everybody wants to knock Pelosi; she's not even in the TOP 10."

What's your response to this...??👀

Do you firmly support Rep. Tim Burchett on this?

A. Huge Yes
B. No

IF Yes, Give me a THUMBS-UP👍!!

MAKE THIS GO VIRAL ON 𝕏. LET’S GO 👏

[Camilo Montoya-Galvez @camiloreports]

CBS News Exclusive: An internal DHS document shows that less than 14% of nearly 400,000 individuals arrested by ICE in President Trump's first year back in power had violent criminal records.

It's the most detailed look yet at who ICE has arrested.
https://t.co/zMt5Y2vfCJ

[celebsnapz @celebsnapzx]

Bad Bunny's Full #SuperBowlLX HalfTime Show

[Chip @chipmichael]

The GOP wants the country to KNOW just how much they OWN us, how they can and will do anything regardless of the law. https://t.co/64qfXUhYza

[Chip @chipmichael]

When Security Becomes a Barrier: An Executive Blind Spot in Digital Strategy https://t.co/kDAfpeR1g3 via @LinkedIn

[Chip @chipmichael]

Reading R.F. Kuang's Babel. So far (pg 36) I have read aloud a dozen bits that are too delightful not to share. She turns to me and suggests she get a highlighter, then I can just highlight the bits I want to share. I replied, "Yellow, mark the whole thing yellow."

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (https://t.co/4exP9zpqbc), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://t.co/yW7aR73MPc).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[Chip @chipmichael]

https://t.co/nekCMjbyqa

[Chip @chipmichael]

I am proud of the work my Senator is doing.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

I got back to my office after the vote tonight and recorded this. There's no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight. And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I'm angry - like you. But I choose to keep fighting.

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Imagine hating poor people so much that not only do you cancel their food assistance, but you also go after the grocery stores that are trying to help them in a time of dire need.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?

TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is

O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him.

TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing about it

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: In an incredible speech, Mallory McMorrow just revealed how Trump is illegally cutting SNAP. Every American needs to see this.

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

Mike Johnson fucked up on CNN just now and admitted they're defunding SNAP as leverage to get Democrats to fold on the shutdown.

Letting 40 million Americans go hungry just to try to win a political fight is disturbing—I can't believe he said it out loud 👇