We went on for some days. To anyone but myself, who had a great love for the sea, the hours would have seemed long and monotonous; but the daily walks on the platform, when I steeped myself in the reviving air of the ocean, the sight of the rich waters through the windows of the saloon, the books in the library, the compiling of my memoirs, took up all my time, and left me not a moment of ennui or weariness.
– Professor Pier Aronnax
Some would feel trapped. Bored. An irrepressible urge to escape. But for Professor Pier Aronnax, being held captive aboard the Nautilus were ideal conditions for him to live.
Jules Verne should be canon.
Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2012
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren’t you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind–to use its construction, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.
– Albert Einstein
As read from Mastery, by Robert Greene.
So much fun is found in doing the thing, reading the thing, sketching the thing, for it’s own sake. We can want the output so bad that the joy of the input can be overlooked. Reminds me of Seth’s blog post: Hobby mindset.
Greene, Robert. Mastery. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2012. pg205
Babbage saw digital computers as instruments by which to catalog otherwise inaccessible details of natural religion — the mind of God as revealed by computing the results of his work. He believed that faster, more powerful computers would banish doubt, restore faith, and allow human beings to calculate fragments of incalculable truth.
“A time may arrive when, by the progress of knowledge, internal evidence of the truth of revelation may start into existence with all the force that can be derived from the testimony of the senses,”
Of course George Dyson gives Charles Babbage his flowers.
With us entering the AI age, it’s fascinating how faster, more powerful computers don’t banish doubt or restore faith. They instead create more questions. Even with U.S.S. Enterprise levels of compute, some truth will remain incalculable.
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg42
Watts advocated not just listening to lectures but taking detailed notes, then reworking the notes themselves-all of this imprinting the knowledge deeper in the brain. Faraday would take this even further.
Attending the lectures of the popular scientist John Tatum, each week on a different subject, he would note down the most important words and concepts, quickly sketch out the various instruments Tatum used, and diagram the experiments. Over the next few days he would expand the notes into sentences, and then into an entire chapter on the subject, elaborately sketched and narrated.
Excellent example of “active” learning. Taking notes is the first step. Reviewing and reorganizing the notes is the alpha.
As read from Mastery, by Robert Greene
Greene, Robert. Mastery. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2012. pg97
I have attempted, in my own life and in this book, to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines. In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.
He meticulously cultivated new ideas and distilled them into words. “He walked much and contemplated,” wrote his contemporary John Aubrey. “and he had in the head of his Staffe a pen and inke-horn, carried always a Note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted, he presently entered it into his Booke, or else he should perhaps have lost it.
As read from George Dyson’s all-to-relevant book on modern times, but was published in 1997 – Darwin among the Machines.
Love a good notebook story. Don’t you?
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg5
Underlying his meticulous craftsmanship and insatiable curiosity was a complete lack of patience for sloppy work, easy solutions, or glib answers. He refused to be satisfied with the ordinary. The young man who would later talk of the “Intergalactic Computer Network” and publish professional papers with titles like “The System System” and “The Gridless, Wireless Rat-Shocker” possessed a mind that was constantly probing, and constantly at play.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider named it right the first time. We need to get back to calling the internet the Intergalactic Computer Network immediately.
Sometimes he set out for the dining hall and turned around, forgetting to eat. He scratched things in the dirt of the pathways, and the scholars just stepped over them. No one seemed to pay much attention to the eccentric, solitary mathematics professor and his strange night fires, his endless scribbling.
And that’s how the rest of Isaac’s life might have gone — if not for one person.
As read from Isaac The Alchemist, chapter 17.
We often believe these behemoths of discovery and progress had it all figured out.
No.
Issac Newton was a professor scratching the dirt. Until Edmond Halley came along.
Losure, Mary. Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d. United States: Candlewick Press, 2017. pg 115
Maria was precocious, and published an essay advocating higher education for women when she was nine years old. The essay was actually written by one of her tutors, but she translated it into Latin and delivered it from memory to an academic gathering in the garden of the family home. Her father also arranged for her to debate philosophy in the presence of prominent scholars and public figures. She disliked making a public spectacle of herself and asked her father for permission to become a nun. When he refused, she extracted an agreement that she could attend church whenever she wished, wear simple clothing, and be spared from all public events and entertainments.
Floodlights and Goalposts 