Cadillac
Article
Cadillac is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 13, 2022 and June 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac”; “a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac”. It most often appears alongside 1890s, @VividVoid_, Alan Turing.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 13, 2022
- Last seen: June 12, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent
Related Pages
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- 1890s (1 shared issues)
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- @VividVoid_ (1 shared issues)
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- Alan Turing (1 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Ananyo Bhattacharya (1 shared issues)
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- ancient Greek (1 shared issues)
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- Arya (1 shared issues)
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- Ashkenazi Jews (1 shared issues)
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- Austria (1 shared issues)
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- Austro-Hungarian Empire (1 shared issues)
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- Belle Epoque (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Von Neumann loved driving very much but had never passed a test. At [his wife] Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened “Von Neumann Corner” on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the streeting wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. "I was proceeding down the road,” begins one fabulous excuse. “The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!”
(Some people will object that nobody is “genetically inferior”, because “inferior” means “worse in every possible way”, and nobody is worse in all ways - maybe the person with cystic fibrosis has a gene for great memory or something. But first of all, if we come up with a contrived example where this isn’t true - eg identical twins who have exactly the same genes, except one has a somatic mutation causing cystic fibrosis - I’m still reluctant to say the mutated twin is “genetically inferior”. And second of all, this isn’t how we use the word “inferior” anywhere else - we might say that eg a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac, even if the Yugo is better on some trivial dimension like having a slightly longer tire life.)