Simon Sarris

@simonsarris

🕯 In labouring to be concise, I become obscure. 🕯 Alchemist. Sacred things, making things, 📸 , kalopsía. 🕯 The map is mostly water. 🌟 I make:

Joined August 2009

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    Jan 16

    I just published the first part of Designing a New Old Home.

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  2. 10 hours ago

    Right now, we can only support the world we inherited with technology. At current tech levels, there is no tech-stagnant utopia. Oil has its price. It is a moral imperative and good to create new technologies. Belief in technology is a belief that the distant future matters.

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  3. 10 hours ago

    Ammonia/Nitrogen: Half the food on the planet grown with fertilizer synthesized by Haber process Oil: If born in a hospital, hands lined with petroleum byproducts were the first thing to touch your skin. Oil held you before your mother did. Result: population 1.7b -> 7.7b [1/2]

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  4. 14 hours ago

    Sources History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by Stover, p 59-60 Worldwide History of Telecommunications by Huurdeman p 61 Also this may have been the first time the US Congress paid out to support private research, unless you count Lewis and Clark:

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  5. 14 hours ago

    He tries again: string the cable on poles. Much faster! April 1st, 1844: Work begins laying poles and wire May 1st, 1844: Over half done. May 24, 1844: Incoming message from Baltimore to the Supreme Court chamber: "What Hath God Wrought"

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  6. 14 hours ago

    (that's $900K today's dollars) Fall of 1843 Morse contracts someone to make custom plow to dig a trench besides train tracks to lay cable. Poor insulation, it fails by the time it reaches Relay (which was named after horse relays not wire ones!). He spent half the money.

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  7. 14 hours ago

    For 's Fast, the telegram. IMO the striking part isn't construction time, but the speed that congress approved money. 1838 Morse sought sponsorship, but denied. Dec 1842 he wires 2 rooms in the capital to demo. Mar 1843 Congress approves $30K to build a 38-mile demo 🧵

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  8. 17 hours ago

    February in New Hampshire

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  9. 20 hours ago

    Every thing has a countable age and an uncountable age.

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  10. Feb 1

    For fiction, almost all of it changes my view of the world, in some way. I think fiction is much more interesting and more powerful than non-fiction. We are storytelling animals and we forget that at our own peril. (And, I think, we often forget it).

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  11. Feb 1

    The most clear example of a single book is probably Tamar Adler's book An Everlasting Meal (which I recommended to a few people in the other thread). It fundamentally changed how I think about food day to day. I think this is my recommendation for you.

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  12. Feb 1

    In general, if you want to learn about the past, biographies and books of letters are often more insightful than 99% of history books. The more you read older correspondence, the more you realize something today is missing, or absent, though it is not easy to articulate what.

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  13. Feb 1

    to actually answer Jessy's question as best I can, There are lots of books changed how I think about the past. Some: The World of Yesterday The Origins of Political Order Seeing Like a State (James Scott) Against the Grain (Scott) Reflections on the Revolution in France

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  14. Feb 1

    I acknowledge that finding a partner is HARD and terribly fraught, but that means that most people, in their 20's, should be trying a lot harder to find the right person, instead of aimlessly coasting from okayish person to okayish person.

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  15. Feb 1

    Most people do incl me. It's considered the norm that you have years and years of dating and a trail of breakups, exes, apartments, moves, upsets. And people call those things "growth", when in another light, they're the opposite, they're a decade of things that stunted growth.

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  16. Feb 1

    And I want to find them and ask them, but they're almost always long dead. So instead you have to find people who read the same books, then maybe you don't have the same experience. The best you get is this kind of eye contact, a reassurance, from the people who read what you did

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  17. Feb 1

    So it's not a book per se but the author that influences, and following them book to book, trying to catch the thread, which I almost never catch, I think maybe they almost never catch, the best I can do is stand there and look in the direction with them.

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  18. Feb 1

    The more you read one author, the more you realize they are turning around these ideas in their mind, in their works, trying to study them, or just look at them. Most of them, I think, never quite get to the point where they can clearly say the thing it is they want to say.

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  19. Feb 1

    Anna Karenina had bigger influences on me for other reasons (Levin's conflict of alienation), but its things like this anecdote, usually, that stay with me from books. The author makes to me in some passing comment some remark that remains.

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  20. Feb 1

    This is a VERY small scene in the book, and its not a complicated sentiment to convey. But it had a big effect on me and shaped my views on marriage (and therefore the trajectory of my life) 1000% more than parents or peers.

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  21. Feb 1

    And if you weren't you could focus on things that are important beyond tonight's entertainment. (and focusing on where the party will be tonight, every night, ultimately gets you nowhere). So if you want to build things with your life, then take it seriously (and get married).

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