Garrett Dash Nelson

Text from Hobbes's Leviathan: "Another infirmity of a commonwealth is the immoderate. greatness of a town, when it is able to furnish out of its own circuit the number and expense of a great army: as also the great number of corporations ; which are as it were many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of anatural man. To which may be added the liberty of disputing against absolute power, by pretenders to political prudence ; which though bred for the most part in the lees of the people, yet-animated by false doctrines. are perpetually meddling with the fundamental laws, to the molestation of the commonwealth; like the little worms, which phy- sicians call ascarides."

Most of us are familiar with the visual metaphor from "Leviathan" of a giant body politic made up of a mass of people. But Hobbes also offers another vivid organic reference: political sub-units like towns and corporations are akin to roundworms in poop.

A map of the world on an equidistant azimuthal projection centered on Boston, with cities labeled at 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 miles distances.

The world as seen from The Hub: equidistant radii around Boston.

Thunder Bay, St. John's, and Jacksonville are all about 1,000 miles away.

Accra, Ankara, Magadan, and Florianópolis are 5,000 miles away.

Newcastle and Surabaya are 10,000 miles away.

A web search modal with "Date of publication" followed by a seemingly random list of dates and date ranges

On my niche nemesis list: the person who decided this was a useful way to filter a historical collections search by date of publication

The goo-goos were right all along…

"Therefore"

Amazingly useful. Do you have a single geometry file for all cities available somewhere, or are these only available city-by-city from the Dataverse repository?

Somebody should tell Trump that it would absolutely own Musk if all of the federal grants that DOGE cut were not only reinstated, but actually had their grant awards doubled.

Ben Cosgrove’s hand holding a market basket Chelmsford golden ginger ale can

@bencosgrove.bsky.social knows the secret passphrase that gets you access to the cans

Wait till you find out what interstate agency is named after T.H. Portauthority Ofnewyorkandnew-Jersey

Nonzero chance we get AI-designed, 3D-printed statues.

“Modernity—An Incomplete Project” (following Habermas) has long been one of my slogans for exactly this reason

MAUP the floor with this doofus

... millennia upon millennia of accumulated cultural and technical knowledge that belongs to us all. Every human born deserves to live like a trust fund baby of the collective human endowment.

Also, I would argue that even beyond land itself and the fruits of nature, there are so many things that count in the "Given Not Made" category, and these make up the vast majority of inputs to human prosperity ...

Love this! Probably no coincidence that a free public park, where anyone regardless of their economic or social condition can enter and spend time however they like, is the closest thing I think we have to Actually Existing Utopia

These two principles alone make up a major part of my ideological position on democracy

[spartacus voice] "I am Washington Township. No I am Washington Township!"

sadly I think it's unique values so we (and my doctor's office) will never know just which Middlesex County I belong to exactly

union("UNION")

screenshot of a dropdown menu with hundreds of counties listed in alphabetical order

Epic Systems, which took in $4.6bn of revenue in 2022, has software that lists every single county in the US in a single dropdown menu.

Image 1 of "The Obligation of Libraries in a Democracy," by Archibald MacLeish, January 1940

This by MacLeish in 1940 is worth your time: www.loc.gov/resource/mff...

Whoops on accidentally Venmoing 80% of global annual GDP

The only legitimate royal authority in the US

A tweet from me on Sept 15, 2020 reading "A hallmark quality of centrism is the inability to distinguish between things that are annoying and things that are bad"

I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.

both general *and* particular?? In this economy??

Screenshot of the Geographic Names Information System database entry for "Gulf of America"

GNIS has fallen edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-dom...

all dashes are good

We’ve got ourselves a pilot…

Writing a “Man in the High Tower” style alternate reality fiction but the only difference from our own timeline is an enormously powerful MacLeish in a 30 year reign as Librarian of Congress