I was just trying to tend my garden and not ruin the beautiful view and a lovely metaphor drifted in from the internet:

The secret is not to chase butterflies… it's to tend to your garden, and they will come to you. And even if they don't, you'll still have a beautiful garden.

It's a modern meme, pieced together from a supposedly German proverb (whether that's true or not is unclear): "Das Glück ist ein Schmetterling. Jag ihm nach, und er entwischt dir. Setz dich hin, und er lässt sich auf deiner Schulter nieder." (Happiness is a butterfly. Chase it, and it eludes you. Sit down quietly, and it settles on your shoulder.)

It also seems to be frequently misattributed to the Englishman Nathaniel Hawthorne, likely because it appeared in an 1891 book of quotations where his name was printed right next to the phrase.

But later, it was rephrased more beautifully by the Brazilian poet Mário Quintana (1906–1994):

"O segredo é não correr atrás das borboletas... É cuidar do jardim para que elas venham até você." (The secret is not to chase the butterflies... It's to tend the garden so that they come to you.)

In ancient times, people used the duodecimal system—meaning there were 12 digits instead of our usual 10. Whether it's actually more convenient is up for debate; it has its pros and cons. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. But since we have 10 fingers, the decimal system eventually stuck. That wasn't the case from the very beginning, though.

This is why we still see the duodecimal system hanging on in certain areas. Take clocks, for example. You can also see it in the English language: numbers like 11 and 12 (eleven and twelve) look linguistically different from the rest because they originated from Nordic tribes who were using a base-12 system at the time. Then there's the "dozen," or the fact that there are 12 inches in a foot. Interestingly, the ancients used their fingers to count, too. If you use your thumb to count the phalanges (knuckles) on your other four fingers, you get exactly 12. And, of course, this pops up all the time in science fiction and even fantasy.

Our computers are binary—everything is zeros and ones—while the biological language of nature is quaternary; a DNA molecule consists of "words" made of three letters each, drawn from a four-letter alphabet. Yet, even in computers, not everything is binary. Things are often written in hexadecimal (hex), which uses 16 different digits. Since our alphabets usually only have 10 digits, the missing six are represented by the letters A–F. We see this in things like HTML color codes.

I've always found that a bit annoying: if we're using hex numbers, we should have hex digits. Officially, they don't exist. However, it turns out there are dedicated digits for the duodecimal system. A certain Mr. Pitman was a huge fan of base-12 and wanted unique digits for it; he actually succeeded in getting them added to the official Unicode standard. Ten looks like an upside-down 2, eleven looks like an upside-down 3, and twelve is written as "10."

In principle, since 6 and 9 are flips of each other and 8 and 0 are vertically symmetrical, we could probably just keep flipping the rest to get a full set of digits for the hexadecimal system too. But so far, no one has actually done it.

Sometimes it feels like the world has gotten worse. Like it's gone bad somehow.

But the world is huge and complicated, and we can't really make those judgments objectively. Subjectively it's tricky too, yet within that subjectivity it often seems like things weren't this insane or even mad before.

Whether that's true or not — everyone decides for themselves. My own hypothesis, though, is that at some point the world genuinely started getting better, but that very improvement bred weak generations (I personally blame the boomers) who got too comfortable and complacent, that in turn cause the progress to start sliding backward.

And it's going to keep sliding back for a while. Whether it hits rock bottom, total horror, and catastrophe, or whether we as a civilization snap out of it and manage to turn things around — that's what we're about to find out.

My three rules for keeping my moral compass from drifting under the influence of propaganda, algorithms, and tribalism.

1. Maintain sources from the opposite side of the spectrum, even when I disagree with them. It's best when these sources aren't just "the other side," but are reasonable and well-argued.

2. Minimize algorithmic feeds. What I watch and read must be chosen manually; lists, sources, and feeds should be strictly curated.

3. Keep a journal. This includes recounting events in detail and providing analytical reflections on what is happening.

For many years, I've had this concept, or perhaps a hypothesis, that over the next few decades, the number of countries in the world will grow, while the number of living languages will shrink. This is because, for example, the world is becoming more globalized, and there's little need to speak smaller languages. They don't offer the usual financial or other advantages. World-famous novels aren't written in them, blockbuster movies aren't filmed in them, and groundbreaking scientific papers aren't published in them. And even if something like that happens on rare occasions, it's always translated.

But now, I'm starting to have doubts about this. If advancements in computer translation trigger a linguistic revolution, making all media, literature, and other information, whether spoken or written, accessible in a vast array of languages, and if it gradually becomes fairly easy to add more and more languages, dialects, and even slangs, then switching to some dominant, widely spoken language might actually become less strategically necessary. On the contrary, you could speak your native language, the one you've known since childhood, with the people around you physically, and everything else from the outside world would be available in that same language too.

If things head in this direction, we might see an explosion of new dialects and linguistic offshoots. If, instead of speaking in person, you constantly receive speech tailored specifically to you, translated into your preferred language and even fine-tuned to your personal tastes, then communication at the level of villages or neighborhoods might be more than enough for personal interaction, and beyond that, everyone's on equal footing.

Some social groups might quickly dive deep into their own slang, while others could start inventing new languages,artificial ones with enhanced linguistic possibilities. Radically reforming existing languages or creating entirely new ones from scratch wouldn't just be possible; it could even become accessible to small groups of people.

If this kind of multilingual explosion happens and then the system enabling all these automatic translations crashes—that would be the real fall of the "our" time's Tower of Babel. (In quotes, because it would still take a couple of generations.)

In the end, I believe both trends will coexist. Old languages will continue to vanish rapidly under the pressure of globalization, but translation technology will spark an explosion of new languages, most of which will be short-lived, such as digital slangs or niche dialects. A few, however, could be radically innovative, perhaps blending human and machine syntax or unifying diverse cultures in a hyper-connected world, offering greater precision and vibrancy while being simpler to learn and better structured for rapid processing. These languages, unimaginable today, would be tailored to future needs, such as AI collaboration or global governance, though their emergence may be limited by unequal access to technology. Still, I believe fewer languages would be beneficial. Fewer does not mean just one, but having hundreds or thousands of languages does not necessarily help humanity grow. Instead, fewer languages would create larger pools of speakers, fostering richer creative and educational material, better cross-country communication, and a larger body of easily accessible knowledge. Yet, no single language is perfect, so maintaining a small number of diverse languages would allow us to leverage the unique linguistic benefits and perspectives each brings.

There have been many attempts to create new languages, even long ago—think Esperanto, designed for global unity, Interslavic (Mežeslavjanskij), or Slovio and even Slovanština, all aiming to bridge Slavic tongues, or the inventive the Shavian alphabet, crafted for phonetic English. With technology lowering barriers, I believe we’ll soon see a surge of such experiments, and some might just take off.

Watched Felidae, a 1994 German animated feature film, a detective story about cats investigating murders.

It's well-made, interesting, and unusual. Generally, all the well-known, high-quality stuff has already been watched to death, and the less-watched stuff is usually of a lower tier. So, if you love Miyazaki, Tekkonkinkreet, Fantastic Planet, Watership Down or Paprika, this one's worth checking out too.

The premise is simple: a cat named Francis moves to a new place because his owner, who writes pulp novels, frequently relocates for inspiration. In this new place, Francis finds himself surrounded by strange cat murders. He meets the locals and starts investigating.

We watched it with kids, eventhough I'd say it's borderline mature content. Yet we all enjoyed it.

Hypothetically, AI suppose be a huge help to creators. Movies, music, animations, books, journalistic reports, software, architectural projects, and the like—all of this could easily be sped up, made cheaper, and, most importantly, improved in quality with the help of AI, even at its current level.

It seems like a whole bunch of people are engulfed in that, but you hardly see any of it on a large scale. In other words, maybe something has gotten a tiny bit cheaper somewhere, but it hasn't affected movie ticket prices or book costs. There aren't any widespread improvements in quality, faster release cycles, or, least of all, price drops for anything in the realm of creativity and art.

It feels like all these improvements are stuck at a grassroots level, while the big players are massively resisting it and all they do is complain, get outraged, demand something or other, and whip up panic.