January 30, 2007 — books, life, hoffer
In the unfolding of the individual’s life, chance is everything. In a vigorous society, chance and example have full play, and in such a society the talented are likely to be lucky. – Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
In the last few weeks, I’ve had the luck of meeting Eric Hoffer.
July 13, 2006 — books
This evening I was a first-time visitor at the Silicon Valley Cocoaheads meeting at Apple’s campus in Cupertino. There we enjoyed a presentation from Amit Singh, author of the newly-released Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach from Addison-Wesley. This evening I saw his book for the first time, and it was a stunning sight.
November 21, 2007 — books, life
I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.
So wrote David Lynch in a brief book titled Catching the Big Fish. Subtitled Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, its purported theme is how Lynch’s twenty years of Transcendental Meditation have helped him think creatively. But it’s both less and more than that. It is less in its lightness on details about meditation and it is more in the insight it gives of Lynch’s creative career.
October 22, 2007 — books, software
Quoting A Conversation with Alan Kay:
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
November 02, 2009 — books, life, poems
Sometimes I miss midwestern autumns and winters. Here's a poem for November by Robert Frost.
September 04, 2009 — books, life, poems
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
—William Stafford
October 17, 2005 — einstein, books, life
These were the words Albert Einstein used to describe the events of 1905, the most productive year of his life. At age 26, he published five papers that had a lasting influence on physics and twentieth century thought.
Last week I read John Rigden’s Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. It’s a history and explanation of Einstein’s 1905 papers. I found Rigden’s descriptions of the five papers to be just detailed enough for me to understand them intuitively as a technically trained non-physicist.
In this short and accessible book, Rigden gives us a great description of Einstein’s work and life. He makes a strong case that Einstein is one of the most brilliant scientists in history. But as a lifelong student and hopeful parent, I find the most interesting parts of the story to be the characteristics of Einstein’s life that enabled him to do so much.
Lately I’ve had a difficult time concentrating, and sometimes when that happens my mind turns back to some of my favorite authors. I’ve found that like meditation, reconsidering their words can be soothing and focusing. This time I’ve been visiting W.H. Auden. That will be no surprise to those who know I’m a big fan of his poem The More Loving One, which I’m often caught quoting on outdoor walks at night.
Openly gay and very religious in his later years, Auden considered himself married to his partner Chester Kallman, and along with other of his works, The More Loving One focused on Auden’s fascination with unrequited love, including what Auden often felt to be his unmatched love for his partner. But it contains a wonderful ambiguity. Reading it, I can’t decide who Auden meant as the object of his love in this poem. I see love for another person but also something else: the resigned view of one who’s decided that the universe and its deities aren’t everything that we’d like them to be. But in both cases, the speaker has decided to carry on loving, because being a loving person is what he prefers himself to be.
So what does this have to do with thinking?
