Matt Bogen

There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind...

The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life.

Everything is in the way they sit.

The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything.

His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre.

Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy...

And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did."

It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...

[Robert A. George @RobGeorge]

This was fully known from the very beginning. And yet this administration charged a completely innocent man with literally Trumped-up charges. All in service to a president who — as he does with any difficult story — asserts his own reality, and calls factual reporting “fake news” and declares anyone who speaks the truth of what is going on as being afflicted with TDS.
To call this gaslighting is to seriously minimize what this constant behavior over the last decade has done to our politics and the broader culture.
Side effects of this include the recent post by Nate Silver, who offered up a virtual “who effing cares” shrug of the shoulders and called the reflecting pool story, boring, and dumb and chastised anybody talking about it because it didn’t make the top 100 of Trump corruption stories.
This is where this man (not Nate, the other guy) has led this nation. Pray that the republic survives.

[Geoff Keighley @geoffkeighley]

Hats off to doctoral student and podcaster Zhong Shu in Beijing, China, who did this fascinating and smart interview with Christopher Nolan about THE ODYSSEY yesterday, originally posted to Bilibili.

A great listen/watch.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Having experience, and being able to communicate what it all means to students, are not the same skill set. Being able to integrate knowledge from many sources, and present it to people in a way they can comprehend, is something teachers learn how to do. /3

[Kulture🌟 @fw_kulture]

This might be one of the smartest marketing decisions I've seen for a movie. Using Homer's original poetic rhythm in a modern rap is such an unexpected touch. Did anyone else catch this before today?

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer to ‘6 7’ being a word than to Stegosaurus.

[Andrew Markowitz @amarkowitzWX]

Forecast = VERIFIED ✅

Kinderhook and Schodack, NY have each reported over 11" of rain! And it's still raining

Although NYC came out relatively unscathed, this has gone down as a 1/200+ year rainfall event in the Hudson Valley and Capital Region which has led to major flooding.

[Jon Gabriel @exjon]

While I was waiting outside a venue to see a Glen Hansard concert, an old black man was playing his sax for change. I've seen this guy at several shows before and threw him a few bucks like usual.

Later, we were seated near the front of the theater waiting for the show to start, and there was one empty seat in the center of the third row.

Just before Glen took stage, a member of the road crew escorted the old sax player to that seat. Glen had seen him busking outside and thought he deserved the best seat in the house.

Rest in Peace, Glen. https://t.co/Er5eT9bzaS

[The Irish Times @IrishTimes]

Oscar winner Glen Hansard, who found fame after starring in The Commitments and with his band The Frames, has been killed in a motorcycle crash in Co Dublin.

Hansard (56) died following a single-vehicle crash at the Strawberry Beds, Lucan, just before 4.30am.

Read: https://t.co/KZ7eHsnhJn

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[YoDanno #DragonlanceDragonlance @YoDanno]

Happy Heavenly birthday, Gary.

[Matt Fradd @RealMattFradd]

Tolkien Expert: You don't understand the Lord of the Rings.

[mary beard @wmarybeard]

Here's a pic of the projection:

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

I know nothing about Burnham or his politics. But I see nothing wrong with the former mayor of Manchester wearing clothes from one of the last factories trying to keep a regional manufacturing tradition alive and employing skilled garment workers at fair wages in the process.

[OptaSTATS @OptaSTATS]

There have been over 20,000 days of baseball in MLB's modern era (since 1900).

Saturday was the only one of those where hitters combined for 250+ strikeouts (252) and fewer than 15 home runs (14).

[Baseball Quotes @BaseballQuotes1]

Kerry Wood just threw a behind the back strike for the Savannah Bananas

[Cam Miller 🎥 @cammillerfilms]

Sharing this again...because it's a cool factoid. The distance from home plate at GABP to Kentucky is approx. 919 feet, the closest a home plate is to another state in MLB.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

WOW! I caught Starship’s separation from the booster as it flew over the gulf, right at the edge of space.

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

In any other administration admitting in court 100s of grants were canceled solely based on politics would be a "-gate" level scandal w/senior officials hauled b4 Congress, but since Trump is held to a different standard (i.e. NO standard) this won't even be a story by tomorrow🙃

[John Ringo SF Author @Jringo1508]

This is a (true) story that goes around alot in the circles.

You really have to imagine it. The entire mission control is stunned as Apollo 12 is about to come crashing down with all the astronauts aboard. (Think Challenger explosion but worse.)

A junior engineer says 'Try flipping auxiliary' without any permission from that section. (Huge violation of protocol.)

And it works.

He's the only guy in the history of NASA to get the handle Rocket Man.