Substrate

January was the month with a thousand days that would not die, but now it’s February and these tweets by my friend Mark Larson popped up in my head: What good is February? I used to think. February is a good month to die. February is a month for florists, with its Valentine’s Day bouquets and

We expect too much from January and not enough from February.— Mark Larson (@mlarson) February 3, 2012

We stop in front of a vacant store front for a long kiss and so I can wish a positive happy week since we have separate evenings planned.

excited to say i wrote a book about photography and social media! it's out with @VersoBooks in April and you can pre-order it now if you'd like: https://t.co/lD43PwRjJa pic.twitter.com/bmOt0U7R5W— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) February 4, 2019

The fact that I have allowed the illusion of the internet’s regard for me to seep so deeply into my unconscious mind makes me nervous. Like any belief system, it only becomes visible when it breaks down.

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Before Linkedin, contact books, address books, or the personal CRM, David Rockefeller had 200,000 index cards.

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by Taeyoon Choi

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”: “Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have

“the function of memory is not to document the past (as always the same, always available for rote recall) but to produce the past in the present moment”

From Matt Baker of UsefulCharts, this chart traces the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its Proto-Sinaitic roots circa 1850-1550 BC. It's tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved in

I believe that moods (or less colloquially, states of mind) can be used not just defensively, making the best of whatever mood you’re in (as I described

the shadow version of you that Facebook creates is its property; it's what's targeted etc.; meanwhile that entity is used against you (it's used to determine what you're qualified to see), which intensifies pressure on us to adopt that as our "real self— Rob Horning (@robhorning) January 25, 2019

the days are getting longer every day pic.twitter.com/KrmsaOvIM4— daiyi! ✨ (chris) (@daiyitastic) January 29, 2019

Say, for whatever reason, you were in desperate need of Bill the Cat ASCII art in your app. Maybe you were very drunk and had a bet. Maybe you were working with some kind of Unix awk client. I dunn…

I think one reason I’m drawn to writing and art is that I don’t have to be competitive — if I’m competing with anyone, it’s against myself, or a bunch of my favorite (most of them dead) artists, or it’s a kind of friendly competition spurred on by seeing other folks’ work in the world. And even then, I’m not competing to be the best at what I do, I’m trying to be the only one who does what I do.

I first read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” on Twitter, which explains something of why her work is both beloved and dismissed. It’s a boring discussion: I enjoyed this, but is it art? I won’t stoop to take the bait of it here. “Wild Geese” is one of those telegraphic poems that announces its meaning without flourish from the very outset: You do not have to be good. I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me. It’s a poem of arresting lucidity and wisdom. It would be stupid to call it simple in that way that suggests that simplicity is a moral good or an aesthetically preferable state. But I also won’t say that it is complex, as though one needs to apologize for the spare nonpyrotechnics of the piece. Instead, I’ll say simply that “Wild Geese” is a poem that made me want to breathe again. The speaker, in an act of breathtaking generosity, offers the reader, no matter how lowly or afield they have found themselves, an opportunity to reenter the world. There is an entreaty to follow the natural grain of one’s character, to heed one’s desire.

You see, it's very different than other branches of math. Rather than being another sibling lined up in the family photograph, it's more like a common gene that unites them in the first place. With this vantage point, it becomes evident that different areas of math share common patterns/trends/structures. This becomes extraordinarily useful when you want to solve a problem in one realm (say, topology) but don't have the right tools at your disposal. By transporting the problem to a different realm (say, algebra), you can see the problem in a different light and perhaps discover new tools, and the solution may become much easier. a "template" for all of mathematics: depending on what you feed into the template, you'll recover one of the mathematical realms. Naturally, then, you're prompted to also ask about relationships between categories. These are called functors. But why stop there? What about the relationships between those relationships? These are called natural transformations. (And yes, you can ask a hierarchy of questions: "What about the relationships between the relationships between the relationships between the...?" This leads to infinity categories. [And a possible brain freeze.]

Mercedes is a graphic designer and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in Dublin, Ireland. At the moment she is working as a brand …

“@jckarter @Javi @mdiep The space of things that are typey enough to need labels but not typey enough to get a name and call a struct is pretty small.”

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back): Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people