Well - I guess so. I remember a similar thing happening to my buddy Mark Minter.
And that...
Oh never mind.
And that...
Oh never mind.
Quote: (04-15-2014 01:55 PM)cardguy Wrote:
I'm 32 and have never had a girlfriend.
Is that weird?
Quote:Quote:
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS
October 14, 1985
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540
Dear Wolfram:
1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is necessary.
2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.
You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.
Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.
Sincerely,
(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')
Richard P. Feynman
Quote: (04-17-2014 04:27 PM)Icarus Wrote:
A passage from Ernst Jünger's Eumeswil:
Quote:Quote:
At times I see them as if I were walking through the streets of Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. This is one of the historian’s delights and, even more, his sorrow. If we see someone doing something for the last time, even just eating a piece of bread, this activity becomes wondrously profound. We participate in the transmutation of the ephemeral into the sacramental. We have inklings of eras during which such a sight was an everyday occurrence.
Quote: (04-17-2014 04:13 PM)Wutang Wrote:
I remember you previously mentioning that the laments of someone who is in their last days or otherwise weakened mentally or spirtually is something not worth looking at simply because it's from someone who is weak. Conversely, you could say that the words of someone who is currently at the pinncale of success is not worth listening to since it's bred out of someone going through fair weather conditions that will pass inevitiably - kind of like listening to a hot chick in her early 20s at the height of her feminine powers reasoning about life - a view that most people here would say is completely out of touch of what actually goes on in life. Now, I actually don't think that but I do think it's good to listen to people on both sides of the fence (a better mental imagery might be that of someone on top of the hill and someone at the bottom) in order to understand the full range of human experience - that's all I'm really saying is that all parts of life are worth studying, not just the moments of triumph.
Quote: (04-17-2014 06:40 PM)Icarus Wrote:
Here's a letter from Richard Feynman, who epitomizes the "rational" scientist, to young Stephen Wolfram:
Quote: (04-16-2014 04:21 PM)bonkers Wrote:
Cardguy, you said in another thread ("Anyone got a belly that won't go away?" thread) that you were in the "hookers, titty bars and porn stage of my life now."
Yet you are only 32? Surely that's too young to give up and just go for P4P isn't it? Heck, I think most on here would agree that 32 would be heading towards your peak years.
What gives?
Quote: (04-17-2014 08:24 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:
This Jünger passage is a good illustration of precisely the kind of vacuous literary sentimentality I was talking about. There is absolutely no reason to think of any of these experiences as "wondrously profound" merely because they are the last of a certain kind. (...) But it is actually worse than that. The reason Jünger so desperately rhetoricizes these "last experiences" and attempts to convince himself and others that they carry some special weight, is because he believes all experience to be equally empty and futile. And it is this deeply felt totalized emptiness of all experience that leads him to attempt to "sacralize" such terminal experiences -- since, because he "knows" that no experience is of any actual or intrinsic value, but all are equally "meaningless", it is only by such purely formal and arbitrary manipulations that the longed-for but impossible sacralization can be achieved.
Quote: (04-18-2014 09:30 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:
The utterly felt conviction of "meaninglessness" as metaphysical truth drove the most brilliant and sensitive men of the past 100+ years -- of whom Jünger was certainly one -- into a frenzy of more or less intensely expressed literary gestures. But these gestures, however they may impress us with their pathos or nobility, are not the same as a thoughtful understanding of objective reality. They are indeed, strictly speaking, vacuous
Quote: (04-18-2014 11:13 AM)cardguy Wrote:
@TLOZ - I have picked up some books on Wittgenstein and am going to be investigating his work again. The older I get the more I find myself thinking about the sorts of things that he was writing about.