7 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. After Theseus, king of Athens and enemy of Minos, escaped from the labyrinth, King Minos suspected that Icarus and Daedalus had revealed the labyrinth's secrets and imprisoned them—either in a large tower overlooking the ocean or the labyrinth itself, depending upon the account.[1][2] Icarus and Daedalus escaped using wings Daedalus constructed from feathers, threads from blankets, clothes, and beeswax.[3] Daedalus warned Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris, instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high, lest the sea's dampness clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them.[3] Icarus ignored Daedalus's instructions not to fly too close to the sun, causing the beeswax in his wings to melt. Icarus fell from the sky, plunged into the sea, and drowned. The myth gave rise to the idiom, "fly too close to the sun." In some versions of the tale, Daedalus and Icarus escape by ship.[1][4]

      Minos suspected Theseus and Daedalus gave the secrets of the labyrinth to Ariadne/Theseus. They were imprisoned. They escaped via wings that Daedalus constructed. Icarus was instructed to not fly too high or too low. Too high, and his wings would be burnt. Too low, and his wings would dampen. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and plunged into the ocean. Hence the idiom "fly too close to the sun".

  2. Feb 2024
    1. As Thoreau said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”;and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed,Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?

      another variation of Thoreau on tools... source?

      It's Walden. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/b10mJsGoEe6rgteMdxbwKQ)

      Joy may have more profitably quoted the earlier Walden piece from p.41: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."

      There also seems to be the idea of our slow evolution into cybernetic or Borg-like beings hiding not only in Joy's argument, but in Thoreau's. If we integrate so closely with our tools, where do they stop and we end and vice versa?

      Compare this with the infamous problem of the ship of Theseus.

  3. Feb 2023
  4. Aug 2022
    1. What I find surprising in the frequent heated debates is that the nature of the type system is rarely even discussed. People talk about static vs. dynamic types as if there were only one static and one dynamic type system.

      Good point.

      We can go further. Suppose I have a project written in TypeScript, and your affinity for TypeScript is well-known. Only—surprise!—I'm actually using TypeScript 1.x from n years ago. Are you still happy?

    1. Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
  5. Dec 2019
    1. Theseus

      Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, and the love of Ariadne for Theseus.

  6. Jan 2019