My love language is gifts of solar systems and planets with useful, interesting ecologies and technologies.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot is how much of the pre-2010 internet has been totally obliterated during this decade. Photos deleted, social profiles gone forever, old sites and blogs just wiped out. https://t.co/oUTceC05fW

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) December 28, 2019

I think about this a lot, too. There are dozens of sites that I used to visit regularly that almost no trace of can now be found. They are not anywhere. Not in the Internet Archive. Barely mentioned on any other site, and of course Google only cares about what happened in the last five minutes these days.

Of course most of what happened is lost to history. But we could do better and did not.

I’m at urgent care because i may have broken my leg. While I’m in extreme pain, i am forced to fill out 10 pages of forms and discuss in detail my insurance before i can be seen. There is a loop of an ad for a Botox knock off playing on the tv. This is not a normal system.

— lil babushka (@cowgirl_beebop) December 28, 2019

But it’s the best health care in the world!

(Note to the propaganda department: this one needs some more attention.)

I am glad the book Gödel, Escher, Bach exists. It’s an excellent way to identify complete dumbasses quickly and reliably so that I never have to take anything they say seriously. It saves a great deal of time.

I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts.

Exactly. Speed-reading with any degree of comprehension is basically not possible. If I am very alert, am reading something not that complex, and have no distractions, I can read about a thousand words per minute.

This is very fast — in the top 1/10 of one percent or above of readers — but nothing near the speed-reading rate claimed by any of those bogus programs.

Most of the time, though, I read about 500wpm or so. Still fast but nothing that amazing. I guarantee you that no one can read with any comprehension at 5,000wpm, and that very few people even with speed reading training can read that much faster than I can with full comprehension.

It is just not physiologically possible.