flâneur

Napoléon Bonaparte

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on the atlas — 19

highlights — 35

  • Les zazous sont un courant de mode de la France des années 1940, également présenté comme une contre-culture. Il s'agissait de jeunes gens reconnaissables à leurs vêtements anglais ou américains et affichant leur amour du jazz.
    Zazou
  • The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noticed a fundamental shift in the state of society. We used to live in a solid structure. You had a hometown, a career track, a marriage, a defined community. Now, we live in a liquid state. Nothing holds its shape long enough to build on. Combine this structural fluidity with the reality of human desire—the fact that we copy our wants from the people around us, whose desires are also shifting daily—and you get the current condition. We are sprinting on a treadmill made of water, exhausted by the effort of keeping every possible future alive.
    The Terror of Keeping Your Options Open - Philosopheasy
  • “What am I willing to commit to, even though I’ll never know for sure it’s right?”
    Kierkegaard Saw Why Your Search for a Definition Is Keeping You Stuck
  • The modern self-help industry—with its strengths, archetypes, attachment styles, and purpose statements—sells you ever more refined definitions. But it’s selling aesthetic relief, not a self.
    Kierkegaard Saw Why Your Search for a Definition Is Keeping You Stuck
  • Kierkegaard made a distinction that lands like a slap in today’s identity-obsessed culture. He spoke of three spheres of existence—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—but the one that quietly owns us now is the aesthetic with its infinite buffet of possibilities. He called its dark twin “the despair of infinitude”: the dizzy paralysis of having so many potential selves that you never become any.
    Kierkegaard Saw Why Your Search for a Definition Is Keeping You Stuck
  • because the greatest violence we commit against one another is believing we have finished understanding each other.
    if there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone
  • it’s how many relationships end i think, not through a lack of affection, but through a lack of wonder — people stop approaching one another with questions, and begin approaching one another with assumptions — they stop discovering, and they begin recalling — they speak to who someone was, instead of listening to who they have become, and there is a particular loneliness in being loved by somebody who no longer feels curious about you — because at the end of it, to be understood is not merely to be explained, it is to be continually rediscovered.
    if there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone
  • curiosity is one of the most overlooked forms of love, not admiration, not sacrifice — curiosity. the quiet refusal to believe that another person can ever be finished. in a sense, certainty is strangely violent, the moment you decide you already know someone completely, you stop looking, you stop asking, you stop allowing them the dignity of changing, the honour, the grace.
    if there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone
  • what you feel cannot be conveyed in its entirety — you feel too immensely, and language is no match for your heart. language is, at best, an approximation. the sentence my father died contains none of the hospital corridors, none of the silence at the dinner table afterwards, none of the birthdays that followed without him. i’m in love cannot communicate the thousand tiny rearrangements another person has made inside you. i’m lonely tells me nothing about the particular shape your loneliness has taken.
    if there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone
  • Titre : Les larmes se ressemblent Poète : Louis Aragon (1897-1982) Recueil : Le Fou d'Elsa (1963). Dans le ciel gris des anges de faïence Dans le ciel gris des sanglots étouffés Il me souvient de ces jours de Mayence Dans le Rhin noir pleuraient des filles-fées On trouvait parfois au fond des ruelles Un soldat tué d'un coup de couteau On trouvait parfois cette paix cruelle Malgré le jeune vin blanc des coteaux J'ai bu l'alcool transparent des cerises J'ai bu les serments échangés tout bas Qu'ils étaient beaux les palais les églises J'avais vingt ans Je ne comprenais pas Qu'est-ce que je savais…
    Poème Les larmes se ressemblent - Louis Aragon
  • Arguably, the most influential is the Nolan Chart, published in 1971 by David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party of the United States. Nolan argued that any ideology should be measured along two distinct dimensions: how much government control it allows over your economic decisions, and how much over your personal life. The traditional left-right spectrum, he complained, collapses those two very different things into one.
    Why do we divide politics into left vs. right? Blame France.
  • You are interested only in proofs which ‘prove’ what they have set out to prove. I am interested in proofs even if they do not accomplish their intended task. Columbus did not reach India but he discovered something interesting. —Lakatos
    How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson
  • By stretching a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to borrow a metaphor from Lakatos), so that the criticism has more targets.
    How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.
    How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson
  • En théorie politique, la théorie du fer à cheval consiste en l'affirmation que l'extrême gauche et l'extrême droite, au lieu d'être en opposition et de constituer les deux extrémités d'un spectre politique linéaire et continu, se ressemblent, en formant les deux extrémités d'un fer à cheval. Cette théorie est attribuée à l'écrivain français Jean-Pierre Faye. Les tenants de cette théorie notent un certain nombre de similarités entre l'extrême gauche et l'extrême droite, notamment leur supposée propension à graviter autour de l'autoritarisme ou du totalitarisme. La théorie du fer à cheval s'oppo…
    Théorie_du_fer_à_cheval
  • Defenders of the monarchy, pro veto, gathered to the chairman’s right. Radicals in favor of clipping the king’s powers drifted to his left. From that fateful seating arrangement — in a meeting now more than two centuries past — comes the most powerful shorthand in democratic politics: left versus right.
    Why do we divide politics into left vs. right? Blame France.
  • they search for the final wave, the final argument, the final mistake — as though the answer lives there, as though the cliff collapsed because of the last wave that touched it — but cliffs, they do not collapse because of one final wave — they do so because there comes a point in which there is less foundation than damage, a point where the years finally outweigh the repair, where every previous wound arrives to meet the newest one.
    people do not break your heart all at once - by 𖦹‎ ‎ ‎
  • i think people underestimate what the soul is willing to endure in the name of love, how many explanations and excuses it can invent, how many times it can convince itself it’s temporary.
    people do not break your heart all at once - by 𖦹‎ ‎ ‎
  • i think this is how the heart hurts too, not through singular acts of devastation, but through repetition, through sheer relentlessness. because the truth is, very few people possess the power, if at all, to break your heart in a single afternoon. the first hurt is rarely catastrophic, sometimes, it barely registers — a thoughtless comment, a throw-away insult, a forgotten promise, a moment where you needed tenderness and were instead met with indifference.
    people do not break your heart all at once - by 𖦹‎ ‎ ‎
  • Psychologists call this the spotlight effect: our tendency to dramatically overestimate how much other people notice us, think about us, and remember what we do.
    Why Are You Performing for an Audience That Isn’t Watching?
  • Psychologists call this the spotlight effect: our tendency to dramatically overestimate how much other people notice us, think about us, and remember what we do.
    Why Are You Performing for an Audience That Isn’t Watching?
  • Psychologists call this the spotlight effect: our tendency to dramatically overestimate how much other people notice us, think about us, and remember what we do.
    Why Are You Performing for an Audience That Isn’t Watching?
  • "Consider, then, Socrates" the laws might say, "whether we speak the truth about the following: that it is not just for you to try to do to us what you're now attempting. For we gave birth to you, brought you up, educated you, and gave you and all the other citizens everything we could that's good, and yet even so we pronounce that we have given the power to any Athenian who wishes, when he has been admitted as an adult and sees the affairs of the city and us the laws and is not pleased with us, to take his possessions and leave for wherever he wants. And if any among you wants to live in a co…
    5crit
  • More generally, precision makes it possible to produce real-world objects that conform to mathematical idealizations. Engineers can then move beyond envisioning machines in the abstract and start producing reliable prototypes. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution valorized precision, and as the revolution gathered speed, requirements for precision grew ever more stringent. In the 1770s, James Watt proudly declared that the cylinders of his steam engine were bored to the precision of 1/20 of an inch. By the 1850s, the self-acting machines of Joseph Whitworth aimed for a precision of 1/10,0…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Jesuit schools still produced elite mathematicians like René Descartes, but by placing mathematics at the end of a long classical curriculum, they discouraged the widespread dissemination of the practical arithmetic skills favored by the earlier Abacus schools and by the Ramist program found in Protestant countries.
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Using this strategy, the origin of the calculating paradigm in Europe can be traced to the introduction of Arab mathematics during the late Middle Ages. The epicenter was northern Italy. This was where Leonardo of Pisa’s Liber Abaci was published in 1202, and from the thirteenth century onward the region saw widespread adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals and attendant methods for calculation and problem solving. The diffusion of the calculating paradigm was supported by a new form of educational institution: the Abacus schools. These schools catered to the merchant class and differed from tradit…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • The innovations in our narrative encompass a broad range of domains, but they have one unifying characteristic: the use of measurement and mathematical calculations to tackle real-world problems. We call this ‘the calculating paradigm’. The diagram below illustrates the core of the paradigm. To solve a problem, one must first translate it into a numeric representation using quantitative measurement. The representation is then subjected to modeling and calculation to arrive at a solution that is applied to the real world.
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Double-entry bookkeeping spread among private merchants in Italy and, together with improvements in interest rate mathematics, supported the rise of private financial institutions. Banking empires like the Fuggers and Medicis relied on it to manage their sprawling activities and capital structures, and good accounting supported lending institutions by making it easier to supervise borrowers. The era also saw improvements in the financial practices of states. The overarching motivation was the evolving needs of warfare. During the early modern era, the fealty-bound vassals of the Middle Ages we…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Fibonacci was not the first to use Arabic numerals in Europe, but he was influential. He also introduced net present values, which turn flows of payments over time into a single value by discounting future incomes based on the interest rate.
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Astronomical models contributed to navigation by supporting the creation of almanacs that predicted the positions of celestial objects at specific future dates and times. If sailors knew how high different celestial objects were above the horizon at different latitudes and different dates of the year, they could find the latitude by measuring their angles and consulting the relevant date in the almanac. This facilitated open sea navigation, as sailors with knowledge of the latitude of their destination could sail north or south until the position in the sky of the Sun or some other celestial o…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Later, the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the heavens was dealt a final blow by Galileo Galilei. Drawing on his mathematical knowledge and engineering experience, Galileo improved the magnification of the recently invented telescope and used it to discover that Venus had phases just like the moon. According to the Ptolemaic model, Venus is always located between the Earth and the Sun, and there could never be a ‘full Venus’, since this could only occur if Venus was located beyond the Sun from the perspective of the Earth. Galileo was able to demonstrate that the shadows of Venus were consistent…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • Mathematics also shaped Renaissance warfare. To counter the power of new artillery, the geometry of fortification grew more complex through the introduction of the star fort, the so-called trace italienne. Star forts were intricately shaped low-lying fortresses surrounded by a protective belt of glacis (sloping banks) and ravelins (outward-poking triangles of wall) that prevented direct cannon fire onto the walls. Their triangular bastions deflected cannon shots while allowing defenders to enfilade (fire along a line end to end) attackers seeking to scale the walls. To construct them, fortress…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • The ensuing centuries saw further improvements. A key advance was the growth of triangulation. The diagram below illustrates the basic idea: if you have the points A and B and measure the angles ɑ and β to C, this uniquely pins down the position of C. Further, if the length between A and B is known, the method also delivers the distances from A and B to C. Triangulation was attractive because it replaced expensive measurement of distances with cheap measurement of angles. After the mathematician Gemma Frisius explained how triangulation could be used for mapmaking in 1533, the method spread ra…
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • In the fifteenth century, linear perspective revolutionized painting by making it possible to represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress
  • In the sixteenth century, François Viète helped replace the verbal method of doing algebra with the modern symbolism in which unknown variables are denoted by symbols like x, y, and z.
    How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress