""I found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends," he wrote. "I told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock." Greek would have to go "because it is so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelled," and research in math "was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions.""
"William Shakespeare's only son, who died at age 11, had what name-just a letter off from one of the bard's most famous tragic heroes? - From James Shapiro's "The Long History of the [REDACTED] Myth" In AI-safety discussions, the likelihood that artificial intelligence causes global cataclysm is popularly expressed as what statistical term? - From Charlie Warzel's "The World Still Hasn't Made Sense of ChatGPT" Germans sometimes call their country "Das Land der Dichter und Denker," or the land of what two vocations-the former of which would apply to, say, Rilke, Schiller, and Goethe, and the latter to Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt (or you right now)? - From Isaac Stanley-Becker's "The New German War Machine""
Mark Twain, after receiving an honorary degree from Yale, advised that colleges should learn less and curb the endless accumulation of new knowledge. He criticized an astronomer for collecting more comets and asteroids before older findings were applied. He recommended dropping Greek because it is hard to spell and nearly impossible to read once spelled, and he dismissed certain mathematical research as unfit for a college that should deal in facts rather than guesses and suppositions. Yale did not follow the recommendation. The excerpt also includes Atlantic Trivia questions and mentions that Shakespeare's grave does not bear his name.
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