richard feynman’s blackboard when he died: “what i cannot create, i do not understand” “know how to solve every problem that has been solved”

It’s the 40th anniversary of Back to School, which features one of the best meta jokes ever. Rodney Dangerfield hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper about Kurt Vonnegut… and Sally Kellerman gives it an F, saying the writer “doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.”

i hope elon doesn't let the money change him

Absolute banger

Academics write for each other, not for people. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort." "There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times? It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."

when i accidentally close my 45 tabs it's like the burning of the library of alexandria, but worse and much more dire

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy. One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what?? The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you. Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

“You say yes, and you never do it.” Mel Brooks on dealing with studio executives.

Some one smarter than me could probably explain what it means that the infinite subspace beneath reality has transitioned over the last century from a library to an empty, decrepit, office

In "The Odyssey" (2026), Odysseus speaks with a Boston accent, despite being from Ithaca, which is in New York.

Honestly beautiful explosion x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2…

Time to fire the HR team and hire a fire team.

Holy Father the post will perform better if you append the url in a threaded reply as opposed to linking it in the tweet

At the front of the Bible they should have a full spread map with the various places god shows up. LOTR style.

A man who reads old books cannot be fully captured by modern stupidity. He has dead kings, prophets, poets, killers, saints, drunks, generals, and madmen whispering in his bloodstream. The feed has no chance against this.

A rare instance of confusing the territory for the map.

JUST IN: Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow fired the company’s entire HR team because they were “creating problems that didn’t exist.”

microaggresing my buddhist coworker by sending him emails with too many attachments

most inspirational thing i’ve ever read

This supposedly "classic" book has an incredible number of hallucinated references. It's as if he's summarizing books that never existed in the first place.