“For dealing with the blessings which come to us from outside we need a firm foundation based on reason and education; without this foundation, people keep on seeking these blessings and heaping them up but can never satisfy the insatiable appetites of their souls.”
Plutarch
“Human flight will not be achievable for 1 to 10 million years.”
The New York Times, two weeks before the Wright Bros. flew at Kitty Hawk.
Control is just a myth. Flexibility - now, that is something you can learn!
Seen online
Work is a privilege, the more so the older you get. It’s a privilege to be able to do what you love to do and be good at it. My hobby is my work, and my work is my hobby. Thats’s the secret. There’s no distinction.”
Les Paul (h/t Mom)
“Did you ever stop to think that most of the world’s great men have achieved their true life work, not in the course of their needful occupations, but in their spare time?”
I get frustrated when atheists point to the dumbest Christians they could find and as soon as they express a lack of education in an advanced scientific area, claim to have discredited Christianity. But it’s equally frustrating when a Christian thinks that because the idiotic statement “the 2nd law of thermodynamics disproves evolution” stumps the most uneducated atheist he can find, he’s made steps towards anything.
Yes, yes, and yes. This has been a great frustration for me for the last decade and a half, and as usual, Matt sums up in two sentences what I’ve been trying to say for several years. I really wish the scientific establishment would stop treating believers as young-earth rubes. There are many of us who believe the Bible and yet remain comfortable with the idea of aeons, dinosaurs, and australopithecus (if you get my continental drift). “Middle ground” between science and religion doesn’t discredit or weaken either side. The religion camp should not be afraid at all of scientific truth, because truth is truth and future generations may look at us as provincial in light of new knowledge (just ask Urban VIII how he feels about that old earth-centered view).
Dangit, that still took me four sentences.
For a heaping helping of Deep Thoughts, don’t miss Matt’s new blog.
I still find it hard to believe that the invention of the catapult preceded the invention of the computer and all its peripherals; nothing in human history exceeds the ability of the computer to make its user want to construct a device that hurls heavy objects as far away as possible.
Guy Kawasaki posts a transcript of a commencement speech he gives at colleges.
#9 Pursue joy, not happiness.
This is probably the hardest lesson of all to learn. It probably seems to you that the goal in life is to be “happy.” Oh, you maybe have to sacrifice and study and work hard, but, by and large, happiness should be predictable.
Nice house. Nice car. Nice material things.
Take my word for it, happiness is temporary and fleeting. Joy, by contrast, is unpredictable. It comes from pursuing interests and passions that do not obviously result in happiness.
Pursuing joy, not happiness will translate into one thing over the next few years for you: Study what you love.
#6: Continue to learn.
Learning is a process not an event. I thought learning would be over when I got my degree. It’s not true. You should never stop learning. Indeed, it gets easier to learn once you’re out of school because it’s easier to see the relevance of why you need to learn.
You’re learning in a structured, dedicated environment right now. On your parents’ nickel. But don’t confuse school and learning. You can go to school and not learn a thing. You can also learn a tremendous amount without school.
Read the debates of the First Congress of the United States. Compare them to the debates of the 110th Congress memorialized in the Congressional Record. The deterioration in learning is alarming, virtual disproof of Charles Darwin’s theory of progressive evolution.
more here
Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support … With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees–not Bill Gates’ departure.
As a daily user of Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Vista, I’m keenly aware of what works and what doesn’t. Mac and Linux work.
“You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”
Columbia President Lee Bollinger to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Build a man a fire
and you warm him for the night.
Set a man on fire
and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Amateurs in the sciences are probably no less numerous than in the arts. Music may have more devotees than botany, but surely there are more amateur astronomers than Sunday painters. One is impelled to ask: what are these amateurs all seeking? It is this: an expansion of their understandings and of their capacities, and the pleasure that derives from effort. One can appreciate the arts without ever having touched a brush or a musician’s bow; similarly, one may keep abreast of progress in science merely by reading. But the purely receptive role is not the one that yields the richest fruit. If that which we acquire is to penetrate deeply, we must in some degree be participants: we must use our eyes to observe, we must experiment, we must build with our own hands. The extensive knowledge contained in books must sound within us echoes of personal experience. Only in this way can a truly cultivated understanding be developed.
Andre Couder, 1951
“You want magic?” I typed in 22 divided by 7.
Whoa that?��Ǩ�Ѣs a long number.
“And it never ends. It goes on forever. If you laid all the numbers out in a line the numbers would go beyond the end of space. That?��Ǩ�Ѣs why the universe is expanding: to give us more room for the numbers of pi.”
Matt: “I’m just leaving campus from teaching and going home. I hate it!”
Jason: “You hate what, leaving campus? Teaching? Going home? You’re a scientist, be specific!”
Matt: “Well, you’re an artist… be intuitive!”
Just because I told him I’d post it here.
Honor is a concept widely derided and discarded today. But honor is really nothing more than your personal credit rating. It is a statement of your character, and like credit, honor has leverage. It can move large numbers of people: elevate them, raise their spirits and their expectations of themselves. Honor and Courage and Character are beacons in the darkness; they draw all manner of people toward their light. Most people want to be good, to be brave, to be useful. They just need to be shown the way sometimes. And the only way to create such beacons to light our path is to commit to becoming one yourself.
Good words from Bill Whittle.
Cool word of the day (from a comment over at Katherine’s blog):
She cashed in her tickets – we no longer save them, having realized they expire before you have enough points for the big prizes – and skipped off to the prize counter. Literally, skipped. She skips a lot; the other day I went to drop off something at school, and we went to her locker; she skipped down the hall, hair waving from side to side. I’ll skip too, if no one’s watching. Not that I care, but it embarrasses her sometimes. Justifiably so. There’s a regrettably narrow window of opportunity for skipping, and it closes all too soon for too long – you have to be over 70 to get away with skipping again. Then people are impressed. Young at heart! How spry! Eventually skipping is replaced by the cool roll, the slouch-in-place – or maybe not. Some people always seem to be skipping, if only to themselves.
A person who works with his hands is a laborer.
A person who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman.
A person who works with his hands, his brain and his heart is an artist
—Louis Nizer
The Internet Craftsmanship Museum. Amazing.
Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I’m interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don’t worry about it. It’s like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y’all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch’s turned over. Now: what have you said lately?