[HN Gopher] Don't mess with a genius (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
Don't mess with a genius (2010)
Author : wglb
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-09-13 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shreevatsa.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shreevatsa.wordpress.com)
| Izkata wrote:
| Sounds like the persona of Sherlock Holmes from the original
| stories, just with a (slightly) different focus.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| If this was the pitch for a movie, it would be turned down on
| account of being too unbelievable.
| calcsam wrote:
| Paging Christopher Nolan.
| calcsam wrote:
| And John Madden (Shakespeare in Love).
| svachalek wrote:
| I love the last line, "If you doubt that such a man could
| exist, this monument bears witness"
| koryk wrote:
| Neal Stephenson already wrote a few books about it
| hinkley wrote:
| When I first read Quicksilver I assumed that Newton as Warden
| of the Coin was one of the speculative fiction parts of the
| story. Nope, he was indeed involved heavily in improving the
| state of the art in authentic money.
|
| I'm surprised he didn't get more negative attention from
| counterfeiters. But then once you get one hanged, _and_ drawn
| and quartered, maybe they realize this cat has claws and they
| should leave it alone.
| [deleted]
| thisisauserid wrote:
| Newton's obsession with counterfeiters never made sense to me
| until I read Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle. He makes a good case
| for tying it with Newton's prior alemetical pursuits.
| fuzzybear3965 wrote:
| What does "alemetical" mean?
| jszymborski wrote:
| OP possibly meant alchemical? Can't seem to find anything for
| almetical.
| Jun8 wrote:
| So, if someone with Newton's caliber gets suckered into losing a
| lot of money in a market bubble
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company, note that it
| was a slave trading company), what hope is there for the rest of
| us?
| callwhendone wrote:
| Only retards make money in the markets. This is known.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's like those optical illusions that you can't stop seeing
| even through you know your eyes are lying to you. Our brains
| are just wired to leave us vulnerable to certain cognitive
| biases and errors and while we can try to increase our
| awareness of those vulnerabilities we can't get rid of them.
|
| To make it worse, scammers and corporations spend massive
| amounts of time/money researching how to best exploit those
| weaknesses and so the moment our guard is down any one of us
| could fall for one of their traps. We're all basically one bad
| day away from being suckered into losing money on something.
| Nobody can be hypervigilant all the time and a person like
| Newton probably had a lot on his mind.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I've heard it said that Newton was one of very few (maybe the
| only?) Wardens to not pardon a single counterfeiter and stay
| their execution.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness
| of men_
|
| Many will find this relatable.
| abraae wrote:
| I particularly enjoyed his modest self-eulogy:
|
| > I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself,
| I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore,
| and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble
| or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of
| truth lay all undiscovered around me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| (2010) -But a _great_ story.
| gumby wrote:
| I think you mean (1696)...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-13 23:00 UTC)