"Dawn H Foster tweeted this weekend asking whether she was alone in feeling less intelligent now than she did when she was younger. I know exactly what she means. Those earlier versions of me were more certain in their ability because life hadn’t chipped the armour plating of arrogance off them. I’m at a point where I have let that go too far though and wear away at the confidence beneath it. Whether the next incarnation of myself turns out to be paranoid and shaky like the Thin White Duke at his darkest or on the cusp of a new prospects like McCartney circa 1961 is up to me." This is very familiar.

Passed without comment, but something to come back to when I'm beating myself up.

"Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.

"Dolores Labs paid MechaTurks to apply labels to 10,000 color swatches." Then they built network graphs out of them. Very nice.

"When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.'" ... We are programmed for scarcity and can't dial back when something is abundant." So that explains it.

Very elegant