Quote of the day

"That young Elon Musk read Hitchhiker's Guide [to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams] in South Africa and, failing to perceive its indictment of apartheid, took it as a lesson in the importance of asking the right question is hardly surprising. He was a kid. It's that he stuck to that interpretation into his late middle age that's odd, especially because much of the book today reads like a spoof of Musk himself." - Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Musk, who said that empathy is a threat to civilization, also apparently absorbed absolutely zero percent of the book's humanism; that was absolutely not the point Adams was making about the question of the meaning of life. Adams was saying (at least as how I read it) that the question itself is meaningless because the universe is capricious and life has no meaning other than what we give to it. This is, of course, a humanist point to make.