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“4:52 to 5:24: brrrrrrringgggggg … brrrrrrrrrringggggggg
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is this John Paul Jones?”
“Yes. Yes it is. Why are you calling me in the middle of this song?”
“I just noticed you had a telephone on your keyboard, so I thought I’d give you a buzz. Why do you need a telephone on stage?”
“No reason. Sometimes I like to phone Peter Grant and inquire about our tax status before playing ‘Trampled Under Foot.’ Who is calling me, incidentally?”
“My name is Gibson. I’m 22 years old, and I live in Texas. Many years from now, you will produce a record by my band. We will get attention in magazines like Spin, although the story will makes a lot of abstract references to Bigfoot.”
“I have no idea what some of those sentences mean. What will your musical group be called?”
“Butthole Surfers.”
“That’s awful.”
“I know!”” -
“For a nerd like me, this quantification of sports has been tremendous fun. Thanks to obsessive websites, even the casual fan now has access to statistical tools that would have boggled the mind of a GM 10 years ago. Sabermetrics has also transformed the act of being a spectator, so that watching a game is no longer just about cheering for our hometown team. The numbers have given us a whole new way to think about sports, elevating the conversation beyond disappointed groans, ecstatic high-fives, and subjective opinions.
But sabermetrics comes with an important drawback. Because it translates sports into a list of statistics, the tool can also lead coaches and executives to neglect those variables that can’t be quantified. They become so obsessed with the power of base runs that they undervalue the importance of not being an asshole, or having playoff experience, or listening to the coach. “
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“Here’s my idea. When a student wants to learn to program in a language, say Python, they would just go to google apps, and open up a code window, just like they might open a spreadsheet today. They can start programming right away, and when they run their code, you’d actually execute it on your servers, and display the output right there for the users to see. This would be incredible for student learning since there would be nothing to install, and students would get the thrill of literally programming applications to run on Google’s servers. “
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“I only made it to the first sentence of the second paragraph of the first chapter, when I encountered this line:
“The number of individuals which has populated the Earth since life began is beyond estimation.”
Horse feathers, I say! Horse Feathers!
The number of things that ever lived may very well be unknowable, but it’s certainly not beyond estimation. So below, Alemi and I each provide an estimate for the total number of creatures that have ever lived on Earth.”