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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3288 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.­ — Epicurus.

There was some discussion about this quote a few days ago on ACX. It's plastered all over the Internet, attributed to either Epicurus or Epictetus, but no one there could determine which work it came from. I did some searching around and found that it actually came from an essay by the 17th-century Frenchman Jean-François Sarasin, falsely attributed to Charles de Saint-Évremond by its publisher, made English as an appendix of a translation of Epicurus, then abridged into its current form in the popular book of quotations The Rule of Life. I briefly wrote up the results of my investigation process there, which some may find interesting. That is the short version, though: it really took me a couple days to trawl through all the variations on Google Books. Apparently, back in the day, random aphorisms were very frequently used to fill up empty space in the corners of magazines.

Apparently, back in the day, random aphorisms were very frequently used to fill up empty space in the corners of magazines.

And in general, so were random factoids. Here's an example from James Lileks's blog:

[Below a newspaper comic] Queen Elizabeth was the first English sovereign to use a fork

Note the little fact: one of those things newspapers used to fill up white space. I will always remember one in the Fargo Forum: “Ants will go to any lengths to get water.” Seemed rather ominous.

That line was cut short, it's supposed to read “Ants will go to any lengths to get water on Mars."

That's right, did you think it was just human curiosity that pushed us to the stars? You thought humans were clamouring to travel millions of miles through an environment that kills us almost on contact, just to play at subsistence farming on a dead ball of dirt? Or was it The National Aeronautics and Space Ants?!

Did you really think Elon Musk made Space X because he's a billionaire man child raised by tv? His parents just coincidentally gave him a nonsense name which is an obvious and lazy anagram of 'melon us, k'*? Of course not! He is actually four ants puppeting an extraordinarily elaborate balloon 'animal'. The real reason he bought Twitter was to return it to the 140 character limit to push humans like you and me (I'm human) to use texting language.

*Ants, it might surprise some to learn, having invented texting during the signing of the treaty of Westphalia after realising worker humans like you and me (not an ant) only have one antennae and a strict social taboo against communicating with it. it didn't catch on however, until we invented mobile phones - which gave us antennae we could communicate with.

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