Progress report: Epic or epigrammatic?
I started the Monday-Friday blogging cycle on July 30 and am surprised to find myself still here and churning out posts. My goal was to do 50 posts — 10 weeks of posting — and I passed the 5-week mark on August 31. So — to echo this blog’s subtitle — what have I been learning as I go? The next series of blog posts explores my typically blathering answers. Continue reading “Progress report: Epic or epigrammatic?”
Real creativity is the dull and failure-fraught art of giving people things they never asked for. Out of the blue.
Soft animal
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
~ Mary Oliver
Many people wait, wanting to be certain before they step into the flow, not realizing the flow is the path of certainty. Surrender, Dear Ones, surrender and know that through the flow you are accepting that magical invitation to be a glowing, joyous, empowered, treasured dance partner with the universe. ~Archangel Gabriel
Assorted links
- The History of Outlining
- The “Victorian laptop” (hat tip to Taking Note)
- Straining the soup ever more thinly. Haven’t we said all that there needs to be said about the Pythons? Haven’t they done other work in their long careers? I’d much rather see brand new reissues of the Big Red Book and Brand New Papperbok.
- Solve a problem by looking at it. Very much a Taoist idea, I think — solve by not-solving.
- A new theory that Jack the Ripper was a cart driver who told police he discovered the first victim.
Claude Shannon, father of information theory, separated information from meaning. His central dogma, “meaning is irrelevant” declared that information could be handled as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness…It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
Freeman Dyson, in his review of James Gleick’s book on information, in NYRB
Inspire yourself
In my PhD methods class, our professor asked us to pick something that inspired us — it could be a song, a research article, a movie, a book chapter — make a brief presentation on it and on how it inspired us in our work. Inspiration can come from unexpected sources and feed us in non-obvious ways. This assignment nudged us into coming out about what we found exciting and how we could use it as a touchstone in our research. Great things are always great, and no matter how they may differ in detail, there is something common in their essence. Continue reading “Inspire yourself”
This, then, may be the one great secret that keeps the uninitiated out of the “inner circle”, and those “in the know” secure in their art: the ability to care. –John Carney
My first year in graduate school, I took a course in structural mechanics taught by Bob Eubanks, a remarkable man who combined highly theoretical research with a very down-to-earth personality. He was powerfully built, bald with a little moustache, and had a habit of making noises as he breathed that combined humming, growling, and snorting. The impression he gave was that of a bull.
During the final exam, he sat at a desk at the front of the class, reading the newspaper and occasionally looking out at us. About an hour into the test, he must have seen something in our faces or our frantic scribbling that bothered him, because he got up and walked around the room, stopping behind each of us and giving a little grunt as he looked at our test papers. This was not a confidence-builder.
When his tour was complete, he returned to the front desk. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if I might make a crude suggestion… If sex is a pain in the ass, you’re doing something wrong.”
He went back to his newspaper. We all looked at each other and then at our test papers. Most of us decided to put our pencils down and rethink whatever problem we were doing. Thirty years later, when I find myself struggling with a problem of any sort, I remember Bob Eubanks’ advice, put my metaphorical pencil down, and try to rethink the problem.
Brownstudy's Blog 