From Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera: … applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science, playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other. The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the…
Blog Archives
Slabs of time
From Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson: Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long,…
Efficiency could land you in jail
A German postman recently faced criminal charges for coming up with using more efficient routes to deliver the mail. His supervisor had informally tolerated his initiative, but could not officially sanction it since his violated procedure. He got into trouble…
Beethoven, Beatles, and Beyoncé: more on the Lindy effect
This post is a set of footnotes to my previous post on the Lindy effect. This effect says that creative artifacts have lifetimes that follow a power law distribution, and hence the things that have been around the longest have…
Pure possibility
Peter Lawler wrote a blog post yesterday commenting on a quote from Walter Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman: For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of man he was or…
Nobody's going to steal your idea
When I was working on my dissertation, I thought someone might scoop my research and I’d have to start over. Looking back, that was ridiculous. For one thing, my research was too arcane for many others to care about. And…
Maybe you don't need to
One life-lesson from math is that sometimes you can solve a problem without doing what the problem at first seems to require. I’ll give an elementary example and a more advanced example. The first example is finding remainders. What is…
Being useful
Chuck Bearden posted this quote from Steve Holmes on his blog the other day: Usefulness comes not from pursuing it, but from patiently gathering enough of a reservoir of material so that one has the quirky bit of knowledge ……
Avoiding difficult problems
The day after President Kennedy challenged America to land a man on the moon, … the National Space Agency didn’t suit up an astronaut. Instead their first goal was to hit the moon — literally. And just over three years…
How long can you think about a problem?
The main difficulty I’ve seen in tutoring math is that many students panic if they don’t see what to do within five seconds of reading a problem, maybe two seconds for some. A good high school math student may be…
Pushing an idea
From The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking: Calculus may hold a world’s record for how far an idea can be pushed. Leibniz published the first article on calculus in 1684, an essay that was a mere 6 pages long. Newton…
Design for outcomes
Designing a device to save lives is not enough. People may not use it, or may not use it correctly. Or be unable to maintain it. Or … Link to video. (If you know why the embedded video doesn’t appear…
When a good author writes a bad book
The other day I read a terribly bland book by an author I’ve previously enjoyed. (I’d rather not name the book or the author.) The book was remarkably unremarkable. It reminded me that even the best strike out now and…
The cult of average
Shawn Achor comments on “the cult of the average” in science. So one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statistics and business and psychology is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the…
Digital desk, analog desk
Austin Kleon has an interesting idea for setting up a workspace: have a digital desk and an analog desk. I have two desks in my office — one is “analog” and one is “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but…
