Rob Boone

@seeminglyrob.bsky.social

141 Followers 110 Following

once described as "the weirdest guy i know" by a reliable source. he/him

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation,1 in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
A fascinating experiment occurred in the Canary Islands in 2008. Most people are acquainted with the double-slit experiment, which is over a hundred years old at this point. Scientists pass a photon through two slits to see what pattern it makes on the other side. If no one is watching-that is, measuring-the photon as it passes through the slits, it acts as a wave: it goes through both slits and spreads out on the screen beyond them. If someone is observing the passage, then the photon acts as a particle and passes through one distinct place (leaving one spot on the screen). This is bizarre enough, suggesting that merely the fact of our attention affects physical reality, or that there is some immense reality occurring that our brains are too limited to observe. Or both. In the Canary Islands, researchers used the double-slit experiment to test the theory of quantum erasure. They began with two entangled particles. The first they shot through slits without observing it. It passed through as a wave. Then they moved to another island and shot the entangled twin through slits while observing it. It passed through as a particle. Given the theory of quantum entanglement, this might sound impossible: what happens to one particle must happen to the other. Maybe there was a chink in the theory: time. But when the researchers went back to the first island and checked the screen behind the slits again, the results of the first experiment had altered: the original particle had now passed through only one spot. The past had seemingly altered. Or maybe at some level of reality there's no such thing as the past? In any event, the relation between particles transcends time. And we are these particles. —
Instead of actual fan seats behind home plate, Cleveland has decided to make the ads roughly 8x bigger and remove fans from the scene entirely
from the nyt morning newsletter: “it falls down and blows things up.”
“Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain.”
"This will require genuine, costly reform—and self-criticism—that goes beyond rhetoric: ending deceptive fundraising practices, rejecting corporate PAC money, and championing popular measures like banning congressional stock trading. Recruiting authentic, working-class candidates—nurses, teachers, veterans—is also crucial, not as a matter of ideological positioning, but as a demonstration that the party is not beholden to the same professional class. Let a thousand flowers bloom; these candidates should put forward platforms and campaigns based on what they authentically think would help the country, not what might attract donors, please crypto lobbyists, or satisfy a popularist’s survey samples. Action, not messaging, is the only path to earning the credibility needed to lead this fight."
an illustration, the left half of which is filled with red hands (republicans) arranged in an orderly way and all pointing at the left half, which is filled with blue hands (dems) arranged in a chaotic way and pointing at each other
screenshot of safari on macos, with a heading from the article on the selected page overlaid onto and obscuring the webpage titles in the tab bar
nyt headlines: Trump Says He ‘Won’t Use Force’ but Demands Greenland Greenland Tensions Rattle Global Markets Some Republicans Begin to Echo Trump’s Case to Acquire Greenland Why Was Macron Wearing Sunglasses at Davos?
an alta magazine ad with the text: “$60+30=$50 Lucky for you math isn’t our strong suit”
the iconic new yorker cartoon: an adult sitting around a campfire in a cave, telling the kids next to him: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
snapshot of a page from the 2025 new york review of books
orion on mac with a liquid glass interface, following apple's new design conventions better than safari
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one. That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion. Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
meme: me whistling at anarchism while still technically in a relationship with communism
ad for emily hauser’s new book “penelope’s bones”
fintan o’toole article headline: what is wrong with the democrats?
a five-panel comic: bird 1: i have so many ideas bird 2: let's hear one bird 1: okay let me just... bird 1: ... bird 1: okay i can't do it in front of people
landing page copy for canva's new free product with the headline "zero bucks given"
Percentage of Republicans who said last year that immigration levels should be reduced : 88 Who say so now: 48
apple mail on macos tahoe without liquid glass
that meme where the guy's forehead veins look like they're about to pop out of his face and eat people
a dizzying amount of colorful circles crammed together looking like a fifth grade art project (no disrespect to the original artist; massive disrespect to apple)
jeff goldblum meme: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
“Once the choice has been made to organize economic, commercial, and property relations at the transnational level, it seems obvious that the only way to transcend capitalism and ownership society is to work out some way of transcending the nation-state. But exactly how can this be done?” —THOMAS PIKETTY, Capital and Ideology, 2019
"See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished, and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on, there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, and there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon, nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet."
"We have one life, one shot at all the glorious things of life, and we walk about constricted, apologetic, afraid. We have so little time; we have so little space upon which to spread our love and our talents and our kindness. Run toward life fulsomely and freely." — Tennessee Williams
"Fall in love and stay in love. Explode. Don’t intellectualize. Get passionate about ideas. Cram your head full of images... Stay off the internet and all that crap. Read all the great books. Read all the great poetry. See all the great films. Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode." — Ray Bradbury
release notes for zen browser 1.15b, which includes the ability to create folders in the tab sidebar
a snippet of today's absurd headlines from themorningnews.org, including trump preparing to steal the 2026 midterms, texas democrats imprisoning a legislator because they don't like the way she votes, and a "whites-only" community in arkansas
“When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, 'gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born. But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff." Roya was working herself up. "Nobody thinks of now as the future past." from the novel “Martyr” by Kaveh Akbar
social media update: I've started joining every Google Meet 30 seconds early. When you join early, everyone's virtual note takers join early too. I spend the first few seconds screaming about how I'm on the Titanic, we've just hit an iceberg, the end is near, and I need immediate assistance. I then do the rest of the meeting normally. When the meeting ends, everyone gets an emailed transcript where the Al summary is: "Chris hit an iceberg, is trapped on a sinking ship, and general Q2 pricing updates"
dr. evil with the caption "how about no"
“In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointess and morally bankrupt. In monetary terms, military advantage became a liability to the winning side. As Kroeber put it, 'The vae victis of civilization might well have been replaced among the Yurok, in a monetary sense at least, by the dictum: "Woe to the victors." highlight from “the dawn of everything” book
new yorker review praising lena dunham’s new show
the iliad and the odyssey, both translated by emily wilson
screenshot of kite, a daily news briefing from kagi, found at kite.kagi.com
a screenshot of npr.org's "npr watch" section with video titles like "is banana the new scent of summer?" and "extreme weather affecting the way tea is grown in china"
today’s cleveland guardians starting lineup and their respective stats
"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time."
wapo's masthead and their "democracy dies in darkness" tagline
"People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man...because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark, everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold." — Leo Tolstoy
"This darkness—this total fucking darkness—is scheduled to envelop the Steelers on September 7 of this year and remain in place for 18 weeks thereafter. Earlier this spring, other NFL teams expressed mild interest in having the darkness consume them entirely. But the Steelers, famous for using the color black on their home jerseys, were always a natural match for Rodgers, and for the parasitic void that both parties are now doomed to inhabit."
chatgpt answering a question about the increase in injuries to pitchers in some detail, including some clubs investing in injury prevention labs and predictive modeling
“Explore” section of the Fable homepage. Among the included titles in “books sparking the most discussion” is Voltaire’s “Candide.”
Tasha has the kind of laugh that makes strangers turn around in cafés, craning their necks in the hopes of being let in on the joke. She is warm yet unsentimental. The kind of woman who has lived enough to tell the truth without bundling it in bubble wrap, which, incidentally, is what makes her an excellent divorce lawyer. “I fall in love when I don’t feel like I’m performing competence,” she tells me over coffee, taken black.
'When Los Angeles lifted the parking-minimum requirements in its failing downtown at the turn of the twenty-first century, developers responded. "One vacant building after another was reborn as apartments," Grabar writes. "New residents supported little businesses downstairs, like video stores and restaurants." And these neighborhoods are nicer, "precisely because they offer access to places where car ownership is optional." '