by jodrellblank | 2025-05-22 00:07:43+00:00
> "I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me down speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.”

Hi HN waves; Reddit, news aggregators, the 24 hour news cycle. One quote I went looking for, which sticks in my mind, was about novel ideas:

> "Had she had any ideas lately? ... That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one —that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it."

She's talking of the Orion's Belt constellation[1], which she has never seen because she lives underground in The Machine (city). It stuck with me how quickly she dismisses the idea because it isn't immediately useful. Jony Ive said that once in an interview decades ago, why he had to move to America, because new ideas are weak and need nurturing and the UK culture dismisses them too easily but America supports them. I saw that basic concept just now on HN comment about EU startups, that EU people see startups as too risky and Americans are enthusiastic about them[2]. Orion's Belt ties to so many ideas, the stars as a shared canvas, projection of our own view up onto them, culture-specific constellaitons, the signs of the Zodiac mark the path the Sun takes overhead, different constellations visible in different hemispheres, imagery as dots, imagination filling in missing details, an ancient time when skies were clear and everyone could see them. I see Orion's Belt through Winter here in the UK but maybe there are people in the Southern Hemisphere who don't see it, so I linked to DuckDuckGo below; worse, maybe there are people in cities with light pollution who never see stars or constellations at all?

Social Media notifications:

> "Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? —say this day month."

The rise of interest in Urban planning and human scale cities:

> “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong."

LLM Stories:

> So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors [access to the surface / outside], and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject.

Was it prescient or was it just observing things already happening 100 years ago?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellatio...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050394