Nick Goggans

CEO Pumpjack Dataworks, databanking in Sports & Live Entertainment. Investor/Advisor @Musx Previously: Co-Founder @Umbel

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The duel that took out a brilliant 21 year old mathematician.

It was dawn on May 30, 1832, a single shot fired from 25 paces away hit Evariste Galois in the stomach, wounding him.

The brilliant French mathematician (and fiery revolutionary spirit) did not die immediately, but lay helpless on the ground until a good Samaritan found him and took him to the Cochin hospital in Paris (the winner of the duel walked away indifferently, leaving him to die).

The next day Galois died of peritonitis: he had not yet turned 21. The circumstances that led to his death have never been fully clarified: sentimental or political reasons? In any case, foreseeing the imminent end, Galois spent the night before the fateful duel (his last night) feverishly writing down his mathematical ideas and discoveries: in just under a hundred pages, packed with symbols and extraordinary intuitions, the foundations of modern group theory were laid, the mathematical language of symmetry and, therefore, of beauty.

The figure shows one of the sheets of paper that Galois left on his desk before going out for the fateful duel, a sheet in which mathematical scribbles and revolutionary ideas intertwine to form a decidedly fascinating mix.

After four lines of mathematical analysis, the word "indivisible" appears, which seems to refer to mathematics. Immediately after, however, the revolutionary mottos "unité; indivisibilité de la république" (unity; indivisibility of the republic) and "Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort" (Liberty, equality, fraternity or death) appear.

At this point, almost in a single uninterrupted thought, republican declarations give way again to mathematics. It seems that, in Galois's mind, the concepts of unity and indivisibility were applicable to both mathematics and the revolutionary spirit. And indeed, his group theory led to exactly this, to the unity and indivisibility of the systems underlying various apparently unrelated disciplines. Below, two more sentences stand out among the mathematical "hieroglyphics".

One, "Pas l'ombre", most likely refers to the expression "Pas l'ombre d'un doute" (without a shadow of a doubt): Galois was firmly convinced of both the correctness of his mathematical demonstrations (and his theories) and his republican ideals. The second sentence, "une femme" (a woman), with the second word "femme" crossed out, is, perhaps, a sad reference to the woman at the center of the duel, the woman Galois most likely did not even love.

Today with AI we are reexamining this work for new insights. It will be a great testimony for a great mind lost too soon.

[Dirk Nowitzki @swish41]

I will always be a Mav for life, but had to come support my guy 77 @luka7doncic in the first game of his new chapter!

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

The idea that history magically stopped being about empires in 1945 is one of the central conceits of the "liberal international order." This @gideonrachman column suggests that the empire is back. But did it ever go away?

[Adam Robinson @IAmAdamRobinson]

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. —John Stuart Mill

[Matthew McConaughey @McConaughey]

Texas stories deserve a Texas backdrop. That’s why I teamed up with Dennis Quaid, Woody Harrelson, Billy Bob Thornton, and Renée Zellweger for True to Texas. It’s time to bring film and TV productions home!

[ELON CLIPS @ElonClipsX]

Walter Isaacson: Those who don't want Elon Musk to control so many industries should learn to get stuff done too.

“Why is Elon successful at some of these things, like getting 5,000 satellites up? He said we used to be a nation of really great risk-takers.  Even the people who ran Boeing probably were risk-takers at one point. Not safety risks, but they were going to try rockets. 

He said everybody who came here, whether it was on the Mayflower or across the Rio Grande, they were adventurous, they took risks. 

He says nowadays we have more referees than we have risk-takers. We have more regulators than we have innovators. We have more people saying you can't do it, the lawyers, the whatever. 

He said it's made it so that our big military contractors can't get anything done. We can't get high-speed rail. 

I would think that the best way to make sure he doesn't have so much clout on things is for somebody to be able to build more electric vehicles. 

He built a charging network and then the US Government, Ford, GM, decided to build their own, and they've surrendered because the Tesla charging network works. 

I'm not trying to just sing his praises, but it would be useful if you don't want him to control the charging network in America, if you don't want him to control the Internet in outer space, if you don't want him to control rocket launches, to have Boeing and Northrop Grumman and others be able to get stuff done.”

The 92nd Street Y, October 13, 2023

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Ford CEO Jim Farley on why it's so difficult for legacy car companies to get software right & why @Tesla’s vertically integrated approach is the right one:

“We farmed out all the modules that control the vehicles to our suppliers because we could bid them against each other, so Bosch would do the body control module, someone else would do the seat control module, someone else would do the engine control module. We have about 150 of these modules with semiconductors all through the car. The problem is the software are all written by you know 150 different companies and they don't talk to each other. So even though it says Ford on the front, I actually have to go to Bosch to get permission to change their seat Control software.

So even if I had a high-speed modem in the vehicle and and I had the ability to write their software, it's actually their IP and I have 150, we call it the loose Confederation of software providers, 150 completely different software programming languages, you know all the structure of the software is different. It’s millions of code and we can't even understand it all. That's why at Ford we've decided in the second generation product to completely insource electric architecture. To do that you need to write all the software yourself, but just remember car companies have never written software like this, ever, so we're literally writing how the vehicle operates the software to operate the vehicle for the first time ever.”

via Everything Electric Show: https://t.co/VUqbUCUF53

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

There are some who call me…Tim

Ha! Thank you @marlowinc

[Jillian Braverman @jillybpb]

Ten months after the blockbuster “$75 Million” merger between Major League Pickleball (Lebron James, Tom Brady, Anheuser-Busch) and Tom Dundon’s (Carvana, Top Golf) backed PPA Tour, the new entity (the UPA) needs an emergency bridge loan of $10mm by January 15 to meet its.....

[Kevin Dahlstrom @Camp4]

As the only CMO to rebrand 3 public companies, I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the subject.

This is the Zoolander of rebrands—it reads like a parody. That it's not makes it beyond cringeworthy.

The tagline is "copy nothing" but somehow it already feels tired and outdated... based on a cultural point-in-time that has passed.

You want to be avant-garde? I’m here for it!

Try this:

Create the modern version of this car. Make it over-the-top retro-futuristic. Take a picture of it. There’s your ad.

P.S. @jaguar, HMU.

[Nick Goggans @ngoggans]

@RPMComo

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

Stevie Ray Vaughan playing a rare Gibson L1 acoustic guitar (1983)

[Jamie Kennedy @jamierkennedy]

Interviewer: "Why do people play golf?"

Sean Connery' sums up golf in one perfect, 90-second answer.

[Infinite Books @infinitebooks]

David Foster Wallace on the importance of quiet (and reading)

[Roger McNamee @Moonalice]

🧵
Today I was on @SquawkStreet on @CNBC to talk about the bubble in AI stocks. @GoldmanSachs put out a report warning capex for AI was way too high, given lack of high value use cases. Goldman is right on, but does not address other crippling issues facing AI. Thread.
1/15

[Dallas Trinity FC @dallastrinityfc]

LET'S GO.
#DallasTrinityFC #DTFC #USLSuperLeague

[Mark Blyth @MkBlyth]

Brilliant piece. Encapsulates so much of what has gone wrong and it just at Boeing. Well worth a read. Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing - The Atlantic https://t.co/3oOIs9w7Xs

[𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @CharlesCMann]

Amazing that a chip bricked in 46-yr-old Voyager I, preventing it from sending data, and NASA figured out how to split up and reallocate its functions to other hardware, sending code 15 billion miles away (45 hours round trip!)--and Voyager's back online. https://t.co/OOi1LPZGbT

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

In eight years since I started tracking this share of growth story, the US digital ad market has grown $152.5B (according their own trade body) of which Google and Meta captured an astouding $121.6B of it (estimated from Google/Meta public earnings). That's crazy - your data. 2/2

[Tom Morgan @tomowenmorgan]

It took me 3 months to put 10 years of research on curiosity into a 20min presentation...

...So when @GrahamDuncanNYC challenged me to compress it down to 5min for the @SohnConf yesterday, I obviously went insane.

Here it is.