New H.G. Parry book up for pre-sale. I wasted no time ordering my copy. If you haven’t read them, I recommend “A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians” and “A Radical Act of Free Magic.” Two of my favorite reads from this past year.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-scholar-and-the-last-faerie-door-h-g-parry/1144796299?ean=9780316383905

Like I said, this was a very friendly crowd. Pastore threw a softball, but Wilson still knocked it out of the park with his prepared remarks.

You can read the whole testimony here:
https://history.fnal.gov/historical/people/wilson_testimony.html

It should be noted that Wilson was himself an accomplished sculptor whose artistic and architectural vision defined the Fermilab campus!

Images: Fermilab

https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/wilson_sculpture_overview.html

How would basic science contribute to national defense?

"Only from a long-range point of view, of a developing technology. Otherwise, it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about.

In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending."

— Robert Wilson

There are many economic reasons to fund basic science. Nothing else gets a comparable return on investment.

But a perfectly good and sufficient reason to make this a priority is that the pursuit of science — the drive to understand the natural world — is one of the things that make us who we are.

Senator Pastore asked Wilson how he would justify a large-scale pure science project like Fermilab to someone focused on national security.

How would it contribute to the national defense?

Wilson's reply is wonderful.

Excerpts from Wilson’s testimony are often edited to make it sound like he was up against an antagonistic Senator who saw no value in science other than national defense.

But that wasn't the case! It was a friendly crowd. Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island strongly supported the project, and his questions for Wilson were mostly for the purpose of building a case the committee could present to members of Congress who weren't yet on board.

Robert R. Wilson, first director of Fermilab, famously testified in front of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy #OTD in 1969.

In making the case for building Fermilab, Wilson delivered a lovely justification for a national commitment to basic science.

An important argument to revisit, in light of recent bad news about funding for basic science.

Image: Fermilab

@allynkhine Uh, I don't know? Is there a USC connection here?

@arno_app (Thanks for the rec!)

@arno_app Apparently I have! Downloaded it yesterday to take a look. But when I start it, I get a message saying my demo expired back in April 2022. I guess I installed it in a pandemic haze and forgot to ever try it?

@thomasfuchs There's that, and also I think a general resentment of folks who are creative and who have worked to develop skills that complement their creativity.

@cabel From the folks who brought you “Do you want to save your document to the cloud? Are you sure? What if you just saved it to the cloud this one time? I'll keep asking in case you change ur mind. Maybe also you could try some new AI features.”

@cra1g You mean all of them?

What we need is a movie where Keanu, or Jason Statham, or whoever, just John Wicks every person who ever sold your email address to a political campaign so they could send you fundraising emails. Everyone would love it and it would have a 70 billion dollar opening weekend.

@lowrankjack Essentially the setup I am going for, I just don't want to use emacs or vim.

I can cobble together something like it with Nova or BBEdit, but nothing I put together feels as snappy as my textmate setup. Maybe I just have to put in a little more effort.

Biochemist Marie Maynard Daly, who studied correlations between heart attacks and cholesterol, and between smoking and lung disease, was born #OTD in 1921.

She was the first Black woman to receive a chemistry PhD in the US.

Image: National Institutes of Health

@fbobraga Thanks for the rec. It’s fun, I’ve tried it before, but it never fit comfortably into the way I use LaTeX. In any case, I’m really looking for a Mac native text editor.

@marcpalmer Trying it right now (was already using it for web stuff).

@diazona It's a nice suggestion, and I've been meaning to give it a try. I think I'm pretty tied in to packages it doesn't support (extensive use of tikz/pgf, for instance), and of course there's submitting to the arXiv. But maybe somewhere down the road!