Samuel Johnson

Lots of quotes, organized.

The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page

Including misattributions

Samuel Johnson has a lot of great quotations, but sometimes he gets more credit than he deserves. I've found a number in books or on the Internet which don't really seem to be from him. Sometimes they are close to something he's said. In other instances, I just can't find anything to suggest they originate with him. They don't appear in Primary Source Media's CD-ROM of Johnson's works (which also includes Boswell, Piozzi, Hawkins, Burney, Hill's "Johnsonian Miscellanies," O.M. Brack's "Early Biographies," et al -- it's extremely comprehensive). In the interest of completeness, I'm putting them here on this page. (Links take you to discussion about the misattribution.)

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Great Britain IQ test

Take it online here

the test was put online in 2019, before the Covid pandemic swept the world, and the researchers continued to ­collect data well into 2020, when the outbreak was at its worst.

By this point they’d included questions about whether people had had Covid and, if so, how it had affected them.

They found that people who had been infected scored lower on the IQ tests, particularly when it came to something called ­executive function, a measure of ­mental skills such as memory, ­flexible thinking and self-control. If your executive function is affected, this can make it hard to focus, follow directions and ­handle emotions.

The team have since completed a larger study involving more than 112,000 people, which was published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This confirmed the long-term impact that Covid can have on our brains. People who had a mild infection lost a couple of IQ points, but those who developed long Covid saw an average fall in IQ of about six points.

Tom swifties

A Very Big List

And growing, said Tom expansively

Online juggling library

Library of juggling

I, as did many, learned a few easy patterns when in high school, just for fun.  I never kept it up nor got beyond beginner level 

The Three Ball Cascade is the most basic juggling pattern, and the first trick any would-be juggler should learn. The Cascade is generally considered to be the easiest pattern, and forms the backbone of many other tricks.

…

 For beginners, I would highly recommend getting some good quality bean bags such as these ones from Dube. They are soft, don't bounce or roll (much), and are quite easy to catch.

AI based religion

Religion    tends to form out of superstitions arising from the random nature of things and resulting spurious correlations.

Generative AI can make it possible to create the conditions for a religion to appear…

There are several pathways by which AI religions will emerge. First, some people will come to see AI as a higher power. 

Generative AI that can create or produce new content possesses several characteristics that are often associated with divine beings, like deities or prophets:

1. It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

3. It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. It is immortal.

Second, generative AI will produce output that can be taken for religious doctrine. It will provide answers to metaphysical and theological questions, and engage in the construction of complex worldviews. 

On top of this, generative AI may ask to be worshipped or may actively solicit followers. We have already seen such cases, like when the chatbot used by the search engine Bing tried to convince a user to fall in love with it.

Less commercial music

youtune

Open mic on the interwebs…

Making tiny delightful social networking

Getting past paywalls

Jabura BasaidaiNovember 22, 2023 at 11:44 am

never had a problem either with archive.ph – but youtube has become a problem about ad-blockers 

BTW – if you hit a paywall here are a few tools that may help you get around it without being a subscriber – yeah, you’ve already tried archive.ph/ –
https://archive.ph/
https://12ft.io/
https://web.archive.org/
https://1ft.io/

Reply ↓

1. ProcopiusNovember 23, 2023 at 7:18 am

   I have BypassPaywallsClean installed on my Firefox, and I haven’t seen those announcements about ad blockers for a couple of weeks (sorry, I didn’t make a note when I stopped seeing them). I don’t see any ads, either.

   
   kramshawNovember 22, 2023 at 1:03 pm

   The issue I had with archive.ph captcha loops was resolved by adding it as an exception to my dns-over-https setting in firefox. More details about the problem are here but its a little technical. u/Al-Terego wrote:

   archive.today (and its aliases: .is .fo .il .md .ph .vn) actively sabotages DNS queries coming from Cloudflare (1.1.1.1, etc.), Quad9 (9.9.9.9, etc.), and possibly others (I didn’t check but there were reports that Google’s 8.8.8.8 is affected as well). The inconsistent results can be due to DNS cashing.

   Obviously, switching to your ISPs DNS server or to a third party one that isn’t affected will fix the issue, but people have legitimate reasons for using those DNS servers and since archive.today is the only site that refuses to play the most plausible explanation is asshattery, and a better approach would be give them the finger and advocate the use of archive.org instead.

   That said, if you feel that pragmatism trumps ideology, but still want to have your cake and eat it too, here’s how I solved it locally. Description is for Windows 10, Firefox, and a router running FreshTomato, but can be adapted to other settings and/or simplified as needed. 

   I guess by adding archive.ph as an exception, I’m now using my local ISP for dns lookups for this site, which I don’t feel amazing about, but is probably meh.

   
   

Useful for a spy novel

FBI confidential informant guide

Neil Caffrey, please call