We're almost as far from the original Star Wars as it was from... the Great Depression(!)
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Jonathan_Blow
It's interesting getting old: more and more of the people you meet have lived their entire life in what seems like a thin layer of the now. It gets a bit hard to take them seriously.
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I recommend spending time in my social circle: extraordinarily brilliant kids with a strong mathematical bent. The better you know them, the more seriously you take them. They're not erudite, but they're dazzlingly penetrating and original. Really inspiring.
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I'm increasingly regretting what I said, because "taking seriously" has many dimensions and I meant just one, which turns out to be quite hard to make precise. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure.
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I find that I am mostly inoculated against tweeting in haste, since tweets are by their nature aphoristic, and aphoristic writing is so hard for me that I must struggle to do it at all well. I think I know what you mean, though. And I have certainly repented at leisure, too.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez and
In many ways this is a singularly treacherous channel of communication, in which small errors made in good faith are often irremediable and sometimes catastrophic. I doubt whether anyone at all thoughtful who has ever tweeted has wholly escaped serious pangs of regret.
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I really enjoy snappy, aphoristic writing. But we often need to read such writing with a big grain of salt. For example, if we took Oscar Wilde completely seriously, we'd probably think he was insane.
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My favorite aphorist, I think, is François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac. He's a bit too dark, but otherwise sound. Although I'd also like to call attention to the work of our own American contemporary master, Ashleigh Brilliant. He, too, is a great virtuoso.
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