It should, therefore, be the goal of formal educational programs to train the programmer to the point where he can use his tools as tools to further his learning.
The Psychology of Computer Programming
I am engaged in teaching, at graduate level, in producing one variety of "mathematical engineer." The most powerful test I know of for an applicant to be one of my students is that he have an absolute mastery of his native tongue: you just need to listen to him.
And I have no desire to get ugly. / But I cannot help mentioning that the door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
"Seeing Eye to Eye Is Believing"
There is a pleasure sure / In being mad, which none but madmen know.
The Spanish Friar, II, i
It was Larry, of course, who started it. The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.
My Family and Other Animals
Law I: The difficulty of using a program is proportional to its usefulness, inversely proportional to its speed, size, and ease of learning, and is a constant.
Law II: When multitasking applications on a personal computer, difficulty is conserved and is a constant.
Law III: Creativity is inversely proportional to the memory size of a computer.
In practically any comedy or tragedy of Shakespeare one cannot read twenty lines without being made aware that, behind the clowns, the criminals, the heroes, behind the flirts and the weeping queens, beyond all that is agonizingly or farcically human, and yet symbiotic with man, immanent in his consciousness and consubstantial with his being, there lie the everlasting data, the given facts of planetary and cosmic existence on every level, animate and inanimate, mindless and purposively conscious.
The Devils of Loudun
In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that men know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is look at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home.
"Heat? No Sweat"
I don't do crack. I don't do heroin. And I don't do desktop publishing.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic becomes laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
Weaveworld
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted; / One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.
"Time and Eternity"
Mathematics has its paradoxes, astronomy its uncertainties (about what is being measured), physics having suffered certain metaphysical relapses can survive only by swallowing entire jugs of wholly contradictory measurements. As for psychology, its most brilliant and its most scandalous success has been in a realm of theory in which measurement is as welcome as Macduff at Dunsinane.
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
The tendency to believe that things never change, the inertia of daily existence, is a staple of living. It has always been a delusion.
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
... I think Bergman would never have been celebrated as much had he made films in English because the language is so cynical. If you say "I'm full of fear," or "I'm full of pain," in an English movie, people fall out of the seats with laughter.
It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.
I'm not religious at all, but I don't believe in death. Death is a very beautiful thing. I believe that. ... I won't ever see you, darling, but it's been very nice talking to you. Life is very beautiful, you know.
The wonderful childlike game of infinite planes and smooth, perfect bodies, reality unwrinkled, cast a web of consoling order, infinite trajectories and infinitesimal instants, harmonic truths. From that cartoon realm it was always necessary to slip back, cloaking exhilarating flights of imagination in a respectable deductive style. But that did not mean, when the papers appeared in the learned journals, disguised by abstracts and references and ornate, distancing Germanic mannerisms -- that did not mean you forgot being in that other place, the beautiful world where Mind met Matter, the paradise you never mentioned.
"Newton Sleep"
Imaginative literature in the service of rebellion, or satanism, quickly sinks into exhibitionism or obscurity. Imaginative literature as the expression of a deeply apprehended truth, poetry which interprets to a man the myth of his own age, can in the hands of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of Camoes and of Goethe, help to raise the level of a whole civilization.
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.
Canadian consumers race across the border to buy the kind of cheap goods that a country with low wages and a third-rate social security system can produce. So empty are their lives, apparently, that a three-hour lineup of cars at the border coming back is viewed as an acceptable trade-off.
There is a tendency among some Pagans to want to be back in, let us say, sixth-century Wales instead of wanting a transformed world. Going back to sixth-century Wales is a fantasy that is dear to me. It's part of the archetypal dream. But that is all it is. Nobody really wants to go back into the past except a bunch of space cookies. It is not modern technology that is desensitizing. It is the misuse of it that is.
To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future.
Structural Fabulation
In the design of fission reactors man was not an innovator but an unwitting imitator of nature.
"A Natural Fission Reactor"
The aim of this article has been to show that our most successful theories in physics are those that explicitly leave room for the unknown, while confining this room sufficiently to make the theory empirically disprovable. It does not matter whether this room is created by allowing for arbitrary forces as Newtonian dynamics does, or by allowing for arbitrary equations of state for matter, as General Relativity does, or for arbitrary motions of charges and dipoles, as Maxwell's electrodynamics does. To exclude the unknown wholly as a "unified field theory" or a "world equation" purports to do is pointless and of no scientific significance.
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
The Media Lab
The road ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The main point is to get those mistakes made and recognized as fast as possible!