Old Books vs. Modern Books

I’ve been reading many old books lately and would summarize the situation as follows:

Old books - Crappy cover, great content.

Modern books - Great cover, crappy content.

The Government Is Lying to You

From Comedy Central Stand-Up:

Now there are just certain people I have no time for like if you're sexist or homophobic, or if you don't believe in conspiracy theories. How don't you believe in any conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them. Not most of them. But you don't believe in any conspiracy theory? You think the government is just batting 1000 and telling us the whole truth? That's a strong stance to take.

- Ron Funches

Interesting Theory About Charlie Kirk's Assassination

According to Michael on X:

The moment that Charlie Kirk is ‘shot’ you can clearly see the blood pack vest and tube/wire leading to it under his shirt.

Maybe not have the ‘victim’ wear a white T shirt the next time you pull a fake assassination huh?

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A Great Video Arguing Against the Left vs. Right Debates

Chase Hughes argues why the (social) media is tribalizing people and who benefits from it: https://youtu.be/azE7nqqQMmo.

One commenter responded with:

I have found peace and I’m spreading this video every day. I am guilty. I have stopped following people. I will not let myself be coerced any longer. This video has changed my life and I will keep spreading your message Chase. God bless you.

Michael Yon About Getting More Intelligent

Taking long quiet walks - without distractions- will make you more intelligent. We all have so much information in our minds, but the brain needs time to process it.

source

Welsh revival 1904

An interesting event in 1904-1905. From Wikipedia:

The 1904–1905 Welsh revival was the largest Christian revival in Wales during the 20th century. It was one of the most dramatic in terms of its effect on the population, and triggered revivals in several other countries. The movement kept the churches of Wales filled for many years to come, seats being placed in the aisles in Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Swansea for twenty years or so, for example. Meanwhile, the Awakening swept the rest of Britain, Scandinavia, parts of Europe, North America, the mission fields of India and the Orient, Africa and Latin America. The Welsh revival has been traced as the root of the megachurches in the present era.

YouTube comment about the UK

“If the situation was hopeless, their propaganda would be unnecessary.”

A comment below British Ads Are Dystopian Propaganda.

Converting a PDF to text locally with Ollama

The following is an AI-based method of converting a PDF to text. There is OCR software that can more or less detect symbols without AI, but I find that AI is typically more accurate and introduces fewer strange symbols.

To do this, first convert the PDF to images via

pdftoppm source.pdf source -png

This will produce a number of PNG images. In my case, the numbers went from 001 to 304.

Next, I used the following shell script to run AI on each image. Here, I'm using gemma3:4b since it is a model with image input functionality and runs reasonably fast on my system.

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How Dutch is the Dutch King?

A few weeks ago, I was reading about prince Bernhard (1911-2004), who is the grandfather of the current Dutch king: King Willem Alexander (born 1967). Going through Bernhard his history, one can't help but notice that he is very much German. His name is Bernhard von Lippe-Biesterfeld which means that he is from the Lippe-Biesterfeld family. Then I went through some other family of the Dutch royals. King Willem Alexander's father is also German: Claus-Georg Wilhelm Otto Friedrich von Amsberg (1926-2002). And the husband of his great grandmother was too: Duke Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1876-1934). This region Mecklenburg-Schwerin is where the family of prince Claus was allowed to keep the royal predicate "von". So it seems that the royals have some strong ties to the Mecklenburg-Schwering area.

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The Social Media Good, Bad, and Ugly

Recently, I had some realizations about social media that I think go to the core of the issue.

First of all, of course social media is not all bad. It can be really nice for example to find experts who discuss the news such as the blancolirio channel on YouTube, which is a channel by an experienced pilot discussing aviation crashes and accidents and what to learn from the mistakes.

What’s bad about social media is that it’s fake social. You usually don’t make real friends and if you do it could usually be done faster in real-life. For example, if you have spent 100 hours reading and interacting with someone’s social media posts. What is the chance that this person will do anything for you like watering your plans when you go on vacation? What is the chance if you would have spent 100 hours in real-life with a person?

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