The Nobel-prize-winning physicist, Enrico Fermi, came up with this simple and intuitive way to deduce the circumference of the earth.
1. How many time zones do you pass through when you fly from New York to Los Angeles?
Answer, 3
2. How many miles is it, about, over that same distance?
Answer, about 3000.
3. How many miles per time zone, on average?
Answer, about 1000
4. How many time zones must there be around the world?
Answer, 24 because there are 24 hours in a day
5. How many miles around the world?
Answer, 24 time zones x 1000 miles per time zone = 24000 miles
Yes, it is about 24000 miles around the world.

So how do I get the diameter of the Earth

1. the formula for a circle is 2 pi r, right? where r is the radius and pi is about 3
2. so 24000 mi = 2 x 3 x r = 6 x r

3. therefore 24000 mi / 6 = r = 4000 mi

4. the diameter of the earth is 2 x r = 8000 mi, where the diameter is 2 times the radius

5. 1 mi = 1.6 km so 8000 mi x 1.6 km/mi = 12800 km

(the correct answer is ~12742 km)

So you can always figure out the dimensions from your basic knowledge of traveling!

09/13/18

Among computer scientists, there is this joke: when computer scientists go into a room full of political theorists, philosophers, cultural critics and linguists, they say to each other, “get rid of all of them and replace them with engineers.” Well, perhaps this joke is a bit too much but it has a grain of truth. Neither philosophers nor political theorists are able to design proper methods adequate to actualize possibilities, imagined or not. We need politically and philosophically informed engineers and designers. Engineers are indeed not mindless technicians, they are people who have one foot in the domain of thinking and one in the realm of an external reality or worldly affairs. They do not see action as a form of hubristic mastery to the extent that they know whatever we do at any level of reality—be it natural, social or cultural—will meet the resistance of that reality.

09/12/18

I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame   
How a sound comes into a word, coloured   
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside   
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

09/06/18

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic

08/13/18