When the armada gets lost in the fog, some of the fog gets enlightened by the armada

Every time I reset my password at a financial institution and then like a week later I get a physical paper in the mail confirming that I did this, it’s utterly satisfying. I do this so few times a year that I always forget they are going to do it, so it’s always a surprise when it happens. The envelope shows up and I see the sender and I think “oh geez, ah yes, I do have an account there, maybe this is important!” and then I open it up and it turns out to be a one paragraph letter confirming that I changed my password. Delightful.

Separately, I was thinking about Plato’s “platonic ideals” — ie, things where you have like this perfect idea of a tree which is never realized in actuality, but then some actual trees which are realized in the world but fall short of the perfect tree-ness of the platonic ideal of the tree. One shortfall here is that you could never have a platonic ideal (in the literalist sense of a thing where Plato personally contemplated the ideal of the thing) for anything invented after Plato was dead, which is a while ago now. Like, for example — the Watt steam engine — there’s not a platonic ideal of that bad boy because it wasn’t invented in time for Plato to think about. Huh.

Thirdly, people often ask me about Jeff Bezos and his rockets, and my whole thing is — I remember when Bill Gates was the world’s primary software billionaire and everyone was going around saying things like “Gill Bates” as a fake name for him. I feel like you don’t see nearly the amount of “Beff Jezos” or “Zark Muckerberg” (for example) as you did with “Gill Bates”. I’m not even sure how you could research this. Maybe I’m just not in the circles w here these things are being said. Maybe the 90s was a time where we did more name flipping? I’m not sure.

Finally, I watched the Olympics opening ceremonies Friday night with a bunch of children and at one point they were like “Wait this makes no sense” and I thought yes that’s exactly correct, you now understand the opening ceremonies. We tried to promise them that later on in the next few weeks there’d be actual sports but I think they are probably convinced that it’s all just conceptual art and they’re not sure whether there will actually be track and field and swimming and so on.

And of course I’m really digging how someone on the Japan Olympic organization was like “yeah, you know how we had all those ‘Tokyo 2020’ signs printed?….let’s just keep those” and there were like 18 other people in that meeting just biting their tongues sort of wanting to convey that it was technically 2021 now but also not wanting to make the sign guy mad and have to totally redo his job.