Skip to content

Sign up for a small monthly payment and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD


3 Quarks Daily

Make a one-time donation and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD


  • Home
  • About Us
  • Monday Magazine
  • Archives
  • Support 3QD
  • Log In

How to avoid getting hit by a train

Posted on Friday, Jun 24, 2011 11:32PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Like what you're reading? Don't keep it to yourself!
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Email this to someone
email

Tagged video, youtube

Post navigation

The Brain on Trial
Does Islam Stand Against Science?

Receive 3QD Posts by Email

All of the day's posts are sent out just after midnight (NYC time) every night. This service is free of charge for everyone. If you are a subscriber to the old 3QD Feedblitz email, you should sign up below NOW to get this new one, which is ads-free, and then cancel the old one by clicking "unsubscribe" at the bottom of any of the old 3QD emails from Feedblitz.

* indicates required

Search 3QD



Follow 3QD on Social Media


What People Say About 3QD




"I'm a big admirer of 3 Quarks Daily!"

—William Dalrymple, award winning historian and travel writer, as well as distinguished broadcaster, critic, art historian, foreign correspondent and founder and co-director of Asia's largest literary festival.




3 Quarks Daily is an essential stop for any serious reader on the Web."

—Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch since 1993.




“From my perspective as an early modernist, what you’re undertaking is akin to the heroic labors of Renaissance compositors, who would (like you) read widely and excerpt and synthesize vast amounts of knowledge for others. A real service to the republic of letters.”

—Scott Newstok, Professor of English, Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment, Rhodes College, and author of How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.




"Thanks for 3 Quarks Daily which has been very high on my reading list for several years now!"

—Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He is also co-founder, with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn, of a project to establish a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.




"3 Quarks Daily is a warm and often amusing home for intellectuals and other wags."

—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer.




"I like to check in from time to time with 3 Quarks Daily."

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. "One of the most celebrated writers of his generation," according to the Virginia Quarterly Review.




"For sheer elegance, wit and worldly wisdom when it comes to reading, editing, presenting the real news of the world... for liveliness, cosmopolitanism, range of scientific, philosophical, and literary curiosity in harvesting big and provocative ideas... for consistency of character and manners, ever above the ordinary... 3 Quarks stands alone. If 3 Quarks Daily were a person, wouldn't it be Proust?"

—Christopher Lydon, host of the excellent show "Open Source" on National Public Radio, author, media personality.




"3 Quarks is a daily must-read for intellectuals of all stripes. It is perhaps even smarter and better and more comprehensive than Arts & Letters Daily, the de facto gold standard of the smart set on the internet."

—Laura Claridge, former Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, and author of Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire, Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence, and Norman Rockwell: A Life.




"Mighty interesting website! I've added it to my favorites."

—Daniel Dennett, University Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University.




"3QD is always interesting--you (and your other contributors) have a fine eye for good writing in both the arts and the sciences, which is a very rare thing indeed."

—Rochelle Gurstein, author of The Repeal of Reticence, and frequent contributor to The New Republic, Salmagundi, and American Scholar.




"3 Quarks Daily is terrific - many congratulations, and many thanks!"

—Alain de Botton, best-selling Swiss-British writer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.




"3 Quarks Daily is first rate."

—Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy and Director of the South Asian Institute at Columbia University.




"The cross-disciplinary curatorial website 3 Quarks Daily represents a pocket of humanity in an increasingly amoral, algorithmic internet."

—Thomas Manuel, playwright, in The Wire.




"3 Quarks Daily is one of the most interesting aggregator blogs out there. It puts together stuff from art, science, philosophy, politics, literature. It’s a completely international, cosmopolitan place to get information. It’s become my entry point to reading on the Web."

—Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, in the New York Times.




"Just wanted you to know I’m one of many who reads and enjoys 3 Quarks....almost daily."

—David Byrne, musician, former lead-singer of the Talking Heads, artist, intellectual.




"I look for relevant research, interesting themes and funny stories on sites like 3 Quarks Daily, Crooked Timber, Boing Boing and Slashdot."

—Clay Shirky, prominent thinker on the Internet and its social and economic consequences, and author of Here Comes Everybody, in The Atlantic.




"3 Quarks Daily is smart and highclass."

—Robert Pinsky, only three-term U.S. Poet Laureate.




"I look at your site every day. It's where the two cultures meet."

—Suketu Mehta, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Maximum City, winner of the O. Henry Prize, and frequent contributor to various newspapers and magazines.




"3 Quarks Daily is one of the most interesting and thoughtful websites out there."

—Sean Carroll, physicist at Caltech, author.




"I've recommended your site to a number of friends and colleagues who've bemoaned the dearth of sites with any literary/scientific muscularity. Keep up the wonderful work."

—John Allen Paulos, Professor of Mathematics at Temple University, and bestselling author of Innumeracy




"I couldn't tear myself away from 3 Quarks Daily, to the point of neglecting my work. Congratulations on this superb site."

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University.




"I have placed 3 Quarks Daily at the head of my list of web bookmarks."

—Richard Dawkins, previously Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.




"You guys rock!"

—Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, author of five books, überblogger.




"3 Quarks Daily is a great website which should be supported!"

—Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at NYU; former chair of the philosophy program at MIT.




"It is a great honor to be mentioned in one of my two ONLY portals to the internet—and the world, since I do not read newspapers. My discipline, to avoid drowning in information, is not to cruise the web outside of these two points. I tried many sites; yours has CHARM."

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. [The other site NNT is referring to is the excellent Arts & Letters Daily.]



Recent Comments on 3QD

  • Ken_Pidcock I read Stoner after reading a previous review of Shields's book. Honestly, I don't know what the perfect novel would be like, but I found that one...

    I just let him have his beer ·  Thursday, December 12, 2019

  • Bill Benzon My grandfather had a Leica, and his own darkroom equipment. They took a Hasselblad to the moon, didn't they?

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • Michael Liss Bill and Abbas, now I'm getting flashbacks.....a couple of photography or audiophiles talking shop. Waiting for the Hasselblad and Leica references...

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • Bill Benzon Photoshop is as insane as MS Word. As you know, the sensor for any modern digital camera captures a wider dynamic range than any printer can print and...

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • jimculleny "Coetzee emphasises the fact that religious thought comes into being when the order of the world is broken." With that in mind religious thought may...

    The Death of Jesus ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza Bill, for a casual photographer to try and know everything that modern cameras can do and all their features would be like a writer thinking they...

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza As I said, too much focus (!) on that stuff actually prevented me from taking better pictures, but to each his/her own! :-)

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • Michael Liss To your and Bill's points, I always thought that one of the things that drew both my father and father-in-law to photography was the ritual of...

    Monday Photo ·  Wednesday, December 11, 2019

  • David Tiffany And don't forget His resurrection. https://downtownministries77.blogspot.com/2019/04/gospel-of-grace.html?m=1

    The Death of Jesus ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • Bill Benzon "...that experience and developing an eye for what might make a nice image was a lot more important than fancy equipment..." Yes, it's photographers...

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza Michael, I have had a strange experience with photography: I had some pretty serious equipment when I was younger and had learned all kinds of very...

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • Michael Liss Sorry, not a photographer. I still have my Dad's two Roliflex and somewhere I'm pretty sure a couple of his light meters. All I know is things "went...

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza It is not clear what "enhanced" means anymore, as almost all cameras now perform all kinds of processing on the image before it is even stored in...

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • Michael Liss Abbas, this is not enhanced? It's really striking.

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza Thanks, Ruchira! :-)

    Monday Photo ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • Eric Weiner There is some disagreement as I'm sure you're aware as to the role the sophists played as paid educators, or experts/advisors to a growing...

    The Responsibility Of Intellectuals Who Teach ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • Rick Passov Thank you for this...

    Taking Philosophy into the Field ·  Tuesday, December 10, 2019

  • SloMo2020 I wonder where you would place Plato's "sophists", today referred to as "consultants"?

    The Responsibility Of Intellectuals Who Teach ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Ruchira Stunning!

    Monday Photo ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • S. Abbas Raza Thanks, Dave! :-)

    Monday Photo ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Michael Liss I don't know, but it's easy to be a complete pessimist. If history teaches us anything, it's that sticking it to the other guy invariably has...

    The General and the Attorney General ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Bill Benzon Those people with no regrets about the unraveling of the OD, what do they think will happen if they get their way? Do they think the country will...

    The General and the Attorney General ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • maelo622 this reminds me that one of the local (Seattle-area) PBS stations recently ran a doc,

    Stuck, Ch. 5. Your America: Redbone, “Come and Get Your Love” ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Michael Liss Thanks for reading, Bill. I think your point about the "OD" unravelling is unfortunately true. What's also true is there are plenty of people who...

    The General and the Attorney General ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Dave Maier Very nice!

    Monday Photo ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • Bill Benzon I went through it quickly, Micheal, reading some paragraphs word for word, while whizzing through others just to get, shall we say, a flavor. But of...

    The General and the Attorney General ·  Monday, December 9, 2019

  • brianwhit I read the article, which was adapted from a discussion, and found its more convoluted analysis beyond the swift brief logic chains of the internet. I...

    Is There a Crisis of Truth? ·  Sunday, December 8, 2019

  • Bill Benzon An excellent review and article.

    Without women the novel would die ·  Sunday, December 8, 2019

  • bobg There is a crisis of truth, that began with personal conversations and has snowballed into things heard and read on mass media. To combat this crisis,...

    Is There a Crisis of Truth? ·  Sunday, December 8, 2019

  • Ken_Pidcock Once again reason to be grateful that, in the lottery of life, I wasn't assigned to graduate study in the humanities.

    I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix ·  Saturday, December 7, 2019

3QD Design History and Credits

The original site was designed by S. Abbas Raza in 2004 but soon completely redesigned by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis in 2006. The next major revision was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde in 2013. And this current version 5.0 has been designed and deployed by Dumky de Wilde in collaboration with S. Abbas Raza.

3 Quarks Daily

3 Quarks Daily started in 2004 with the idea of creating a curated retreat for everything intellectual on the web. No clickbait, no fake news, not just entertainment, but depth and breadth —something increasingly hard to find on the internet today. If you like what we do, please consider making a donation.