Carl Linderholm notes in _Mathematics Made Difficult_ that the next number in 1 2 4 8 16 _?_ has to be 31, based on just those differences.

Lautreamont on mathematical objects.

Death spiral comes from airplanes and pilot disorientation leading to corrective action making a descending turn progressively worse. Without the disorientation, it doesn't happen.

Flying blind without instruments leads to disorientation very fast, if you're doing the flying. If you're just a passenger, you reorient from what the pilot does; but it's fatal if the pilot does that, without instruments to reorient himself from.

Disorientation is the key to take away.

Phlogiston was the cause of fire. It's a reification error, is all. Like ``power'' in political discourse, which is supposed to be a thing you can acquire, or lose, or contest. Whole analyses depend on it.

Derrida must have done a thousand essays on how an author trying to be very precise about how language could possibly work, winds up in an infinte loop clarifying a final point that amounts to in effect starting over.

This contributes a lot to an indefinite future, whatever the modulus problem, if you take AI as just such a project.