Essays in Idleness by Kenko

1283-1350 Japan. Imperial Court. Poet. Buddhist monk in 1324.

He developed the Japanese aesthetic: beauty is indissolubly bound to its perishability. He wrote, "If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in this world …

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Farnam Street Blog Misc.

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Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Melvin Kranzberg

Harris argues that there was a moment weirdly similar to this one: the year 1450. That.s the year when Johannes Gutenberg managed to invent a printing press.

a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to …

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First Law of Geography

Waldo R. Tobler's First law of geography, an informal statement that "All things are related, but near things are more related than far things."

Found this when researching Distance Decay on Wikipedia

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Seneca, brevity of life

Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it …

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Snippets from, 40 maps that explain the roman empire

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"Pyrrhus won two major battles against the Romans in 280 and 279, respectively. But he took such heavy casualties in those battles that he would eventually lose the war — giving rise to the term "Pyrrhic victory."

"The first conflict occurred after Carthage intervened in a dispute on the island …

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Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

From page 149:

Just so those newspaper readers -- whom he despised and scorned -- longed to get back to the ideal time before the war, because it was so much more comfortable than taking a lesson from those who had gone through it.

From page 182:

The modern man calls this …

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The Power of Lonely

This reminds me of Foundation, or espionage. Secretly assign multiple people to a task to reap the benefits. That doesn't mean assigning a group of people to a task would perform worse. There is a difference between multiple people working alone and multiple people working together.

From the article:

"That …

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Machiavelli on Geography (The Prince)

The Prince. Chapter XIV. Paragraph 4.

"...and learns something of the nature of localities, and gets to find out how the mountains rise, how the valleys open out, how the plains lie, and to understand the nature of rivers and marshes, and in all this to take the greatest care …

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