The blog of John D. Cook
From the category archives:
From The Hobbit:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.
Don’t be satisfied with being merely clever. Make something beautiful.
Related posts:
The beauty of windmills and power lines
Calendar of lost mathematical art
Complexity and unity
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Here are a dozen previous posts on simplicity and complexity.
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Windmills were considered eyesores in 17th century Holland. Now we believe they are beautiful. And so they are. But there is a prejudice to presume that industrial things are not beautiful. We learned to see the beauty in windmills after artists painted them.
Alain de Botton discusses the beauty of windmills and power lines in his interview on EconTalk.
Many of the industrial things in the world are considered ugly, not because they are ugly, but because nobody has come along to point out that they might be beautiful. … A lot of times we call things beautiful or ugly because artists have been there and shaped our sensibilities. … and in a small way, that’s what my book is about: finding beauty where genuinely there is beauty but it gets missed.
Related posts:
Complexity and unity
Calendar of lost mathematical art
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Here’s a 10-minute talk by John Cleese on creativity:
From about 6:20 into the video:
If you’re racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.
Related posts:
Being a dreamer is hard work
Doing good work with bad tools
Creativity and faith
Getting to the bottom of things
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If you’re looking for visual stimulation, check out Colors of the World: A Geography of Color. I found it while browsing a library the other day and have thoroughly enjoyed looking through it.
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In his book Made by Hand, Mark Frauenfelder quotes Peter Gray on what’s wrong with contemporary education. Gray says that school is about
always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something, instead of doing things now. And that’s such a tedious approach for anybody to take to life — always preparing.
Related post:
“Just in case” versus “just in time”
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Peter Bergman wrote an HBR blog post last week How (any Why) to Stop Multitasking. Bergman tried to stop multitasking for a week as an experiment. His post lists six benefits from his experiment including this observation:
I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time.
Multitasking can mask the pain of doing something that doesn’t need to be done.
Thanks to Neal Richter for pointing out this article.
Update: See this post on the study that Bergman quotes on how multitasking lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. The study made a big splash even though it had a ridiculous design.
Related posts:
C-State and F-State
Multitasking makes us shallow
A sort of opposite to Parkinson’s law
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From Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse:
I confess that I am a dreamer. Someone once called me just a dreamer. That offended me, the just part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing your dreams.
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Frederick Brooks is best known as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software project management first written in 1975 and still popular 35 years later. Brooks has a new collection of essays entitled The Design of Design that was just released this month. In his chapter on collaboration in design, Brooks notes
“Many hands make light work” — Often
But many hands make more work — Always
Collaboration may reduce the amount of work per person, but it will certainly increase the total amount of work to be done. In addition, collaboration is likely to reduce the quality of a design. Earlier in the same chapter Brooks says
Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.
He gives a long list of designers to support this claim: Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Michelangelo, Watt, Edison, the Wright Brothers …
The great works Brooks alludes to may have been implemented by teams, but they were not designed by teams.
You can hear Brooks explain why he believes design work doesn’t partition well in his talk “Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design.” There’s a link to the audio in my blog post on Brooks and conceptual integrity.
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“I couldn’t put it down.” “A real page-turner.” That’s how you might describe a good novel to take on vacation. But for more serious reading, a good book is one you have to put down. Thoreau put it this way:
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence to living on its hint.
Some books take a long time to read, not because they are dull, but because they are exciting. You have to put them down frequently to think about what you’ve read before reading more. It may not be the content of the book per se but the thoughts the book sparks that make you have to put it down.
What are some books you had to put down frequently because they stirred your thinking?
Related posts:
C. S. Lewis on reading old books
Why are bad guys so interesting in novels?
Worthless technical books
Tim Bray’s high-tech monastic cell
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Here’s a short video from Tom Peters on starting an exciting business in a dull industry.
Tom Peter’s video reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Richard Feynman:
… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …
Related posts:
Too much time on their hands?
Six quotes on digging deep
God is in the details
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Countless articles tell us that multitasking makes us less efficient — we’re not as good at multitasking as we suppose. But here is a new criticism: multitasking makes us shallow.
If you don’t want to sink, you learn to surf; you have to. You learn how to go fast, but smooth, through a huge amount of stuff — at work, at home, in the store, in the street. Multitasking means learning how to double back and reshuffle at the least hint of resistance, it means missing most of what goes on around you but learning not to regret it because nothing is that much more valuable than anything else, it means learning how to coast through meetings on zero information … You are compensated for the loss of buffers and boundaries built into the old real world of separated times and spaces, by an overall muffling of experience in general …
From Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita.
Related posts:
A sort of opposite to Parkinson’s law
Getting to the bottom of things
Rethinking interruptions
Emily Dickinson versus Paris Hilton
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Charlie Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians. But unlike most artists, he had a cavalier attitude toward his equipment. He would pawn his saxophone for drug money and show up for a concert without an instrument. He assumed that he could always borrow a saxophone at the last minute. He even used a plastic saxophone for one concert. Parker could take a cheap piece of plastic and make it sound good.
Good equipment helps. I’ve played cheap saxophones and professional quality saxophones, and I much prefer the latter. But a good sax didn’t make me sound like Charlie Parker, nor did a cheap sax make Charlie Parker sound like me. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
For centuries people have searched for the secret of Stradivarius violins. What did Antonio Stradivari do to create his legendary instruments? Was there something special about the wood he used? Something special about the varnish? A new theory says that there was nothing unusual about the materials he used and that he simply did excellent work.
It’s hard to think of a worse programming environment than DOS batch files. But I worked with someone who was able to do amazing things with batch files.
Hugh MacLeod calls it “hiding behind pillars” when you think you must have the best tools before you can work. He summarizes hiding behind pillars this way:
The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.
Related posts:
Thomas Edison’s fire
Too much time on their hands?
Redbelt problem solving
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From Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser:
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. … However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
Related posts:
Simple legacy
Simplicity in old age
The simplest thing that might work
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From Eugene Peterson:
Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.
Related posts:
Don’t try to be God, try to be Shakespeare
Subtle variations on familiar themes
Three quotes on originality
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