Tag: dna

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo.  To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting.  Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.  I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) –once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016.  In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions.  I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

James Comey, in an excerpt from his opening statement for tomorrow’s Senate hearing. He spoke in private with Obama twice in nearly five years and one of those was a “thanks for all the fish” valedictory. Compared against NINE in four months. And Comey felt compelled to document all interactions with Trump immeidately after their first meeting. Nothing wrong here. This is fine.

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.
I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say.

Douglas Adams, who would be 61 today, speaking at Digital Biota 2 in 1998.
Source: douglasadams.se

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.

Douglas Noel Adams
Happy 60th birthday; wish you were here for it.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.

Francis Crick, Nobel laureate, and pretty clearly a high percentage of the brains in the team that first described the structure of DNA.
Source: newyorker.com

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
Most importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a non-hitchhiker discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, flask, gnat spray, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the non-hitchhiker will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that he may have “lost.” After all, any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Douglas Noel Adams
Happy towel day.

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an
ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations,
base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk,
stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’ I typed it out. End of story.

Douglas Adams on 42

We were doing it before we had a name for it

One Kimber VanRy was ticketed to the tune of $25 for sipping a beer on his stoop (not a party, not a nuisance, just sitting out there quietly enjoying a beer in the great urban out-of-doors).

Clyde Haberman reports on the long-term outcome of that event while simultaneously showing us how serious journalism is done:

[VanRy was sitting on] the short stoop of the four-story co-op building on Sterling Place in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in which he owns an apartment. The stoop is set well back from the curb, but does not lie behind a gate, as some other stoops on that block do.

There Mr. VanRy sat, on what was private property — minding his own business, working his BlackBerry and nursing a beer. For the curious, it was a 12-ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada.

Twist top or crown cap?

Anywho:

Last week, a judge tossed out the case on a technicality. The matter had dragged on too long, he said.

For Mr. VanRy, the victory was less than satisfying. Larger questions about stoop sitting and sipping were not addressed.

Agreed.

I can only assume editors cut out the explanation of Mr. VanRy’s fucked up last name capitalization schema. Perhaps he’s big into R (or perl, perhaps) and wanted his name to reflect a delightful air of utterly random and insanity-making camel-casing conventions. Haberman does mention:

Neighbors drinking beer on their front steps get these “quality of life” summonses, but not people sipping wine at New York Philharmonic concerts in Central Park or knocking back frozen daiquiris at summer movie screenings in Bryant Park.

Rest assured, these people will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.