sure have and I will take a maul over an axe. an axe is for felling not splitting. generally prefer a wedge and a sledge for splitting. gotta say some of the little electric splitters look sweet.
ambient information radiator. I like that term and have always been interested in it. for a while we had a system monitoring connected to a speaker that produced fairly consistent tonal patterns. when it started sounding 'weird' it usually meant something was off.
when visiting the jewish temple in rome someone asked if the roman jews were sephardic or ashkenazi. the answer was 'neither' as there have been jews in rome since before rome and they never left and didn't see themselves as part of the diaspora
reminds of a prank we pulled on a coworker back in the xterminal days. every time he hit a certain key it would invoke the 'melt' screensaver briefly. he was fairly unobservant though and we had to escalate to invoking it for 1s every minute before he finally noticed.
the follow on prank was having all the xterminals 'moo' whenever new code was deployed to prod.
example: in 300 years if anyone thinks of "rock and roll" they might remember one band. and that band is just as likely to be Nickelback as is it is the Rolling Stones.
The premise of the book is that most of what we believe is likely to be wrong, but to avoid delusions in our perceptions, Klosterman advises us to "think about the present as if it were the distant past."
Klosterman examines such phenomena as the history of scientific theories, our perception of historical literary geniuses and our interests in entertainment and professional sports, as background examples to challenge the reader's confidence in their contemporary perceptions, and to try to detect how those perceptions might be mistaken. In a series of what have been called thought experiments, various topics (literary greats, multiverses, time, dreams, democracy, television shows, sports) are analyzed under "Klosterman's Razor": the concept that "the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.