AdamSmith

As if that jacket weren't cause enough... ...this revolution in taking women seriously is maybe the best thing since the Civil Rights Act of 1965. And many leap-forward progresses since, like the MA state supreme court ruling in 1986 that Marriage Inequality is Injust and Stupid! Goodbye & good riddance, Matt.

He is very cute!

When can you be here?

Collaboration Kills Creativity, According to Science It's impossible to think "out of the box" when you're stuck inside a box with a bunch of other people. By Geoffrey James The notion that collaboration makes people more creative has become conventional wisdom in the business world. Here's a typical example: Collaboration has recently emerged as the defining characteristic of creativity and growth in nearly all sectors and industries. The singular genius who works alone is a myth of yesterday. Despite this kind of corporate-speak truthiness, there is substantial scientific evidence that collaboration, rather than sparking creativity, results in group-think and mediocrity. What does result in creativity? Simple: solitude. According to a study recently published in the Elselvier journal ScienceDirect.com, the character traits of "shyness, avoidance, [and] unsociability," while generally seen as undesirable, are positively associated with creativity. Furthermore, intelligent people are happier when they have less social interaction, even with their friends, according to a national survey of 15,000 respondents aged 18 to 28 and quoted in the Washington Post: The more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness. But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed. More intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently. [Emphasis mine] In other words, far from being a "myth of yesterday," the "singular genius who works alone" is much more likely to be creative than the person who seeks interaction and "collaboration." Forcing creative people to "collaborate" simply blunts their creativity. According to an article in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, there are two ways in which solitude can facilitate creativity--first, by stimulating imaginative involvement in multiple realities and, second, by 'trying on' alternative identities, leading, perhaps, to self-transformation. ... By separating us from our usual social and physical environments, solitude can remove those people and objects that define and confirm our identities. The people we see and the places we frequent reinforce our identities as students, parents, police officers, or whomever. ... By extracting us from our customary social and physical contexts (or at least altering our experience of them), solitude facilitates self-examination, reconceptualization of the self, and coming to terms with change. Put another way, being around other people keeps creative people from thinking new thoughts. Indeed, there are few experiences more mind-numbing for a creative person than being forced to interact with dullards on a daily basis. Even if your office is full of geniuses, they'll be less creative en masse than if they can work and think alone. In short, it's difficult and maybe even impossible to "think out of the box" when you're literally inside a box (i.e., an open-plan office) that's full of other people. https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/collaboration-kills-creativity-according-to-science.html?cid=mustread3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins

Yet another Great Stride Forward in encouraging more participation here. You're right up there with the best motivational coaches.

Sorry, that engraving was actually by Blake. 'Dave, my mind is going.'

'REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES!'

They have been around quite a while now, and they haven't done this yet. Instead they have, time and again, grown by putting their capital into developing new markets. I think your view expressed here is captive to old-think, in a way that Bezos is not. By the considerable evidence available thus far.

Looks to me just like Gustav Dore's engraving of Dante's Gate to Hell that I posted yesterday in the Organ thread here.

You have given here, in terms kindly adopted for lay consumprion. an elegant intro to this highly technical topic of 1-, 2- and 3-point perspective. Thank you! Very clear and well done. I know it from many years behind the journalistic camera. And the vertical stat camera in the darkroom, etc. And then the digital-technology follow-ons. And of course just from being an art history whore. (Did I ever recount my personal story about Jasper Johns? A genius, and a truly dirty old man! Lovely, in every way.) Vasari (was it? God, the mind goes quick ) gave a great Googleable technical treatise on perspective.

Yeah, this. The only way to make life risk-free is to have the undertaker screw down that wooden lid. Risk mitigation is, as @BiBottomBoy notes, the way to go, and still live life.

All I can say is I know him personally and I think his larger ideas are long-term correct.

With respect, your post contains its own refutation. The commercial opportunity here discovered, largely, by Amazon has woken up a few, to date, of its strongest competitors to likewise get on the ball and do something in this arena: Microsoft Azure IBM Cloud Google Cloud Platform https://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/public-cloud-providers.html This seems to me the normal business evolution of new-technology markets. Microsoft, Google, and even IBM although in its lately typical bumbling way (Monty-Python-'Convict Ginny Rommetty as a witch! a witch!' ) are catching up with AWS, and beginning to find ways to compete, very effectively. I am as lefty as they come, but I think regulatory intrusion here now -- no need to add, with the various present people in power -- would be worse than disastrous.

Very Fair & Balanced (so seems to me; but our @RA1 would be the authority here) comparison of Boeing vs Airbus design philosophies. But, on balance, reminds me yet again why (if one had one's druthers, which of course is hard to arrange): If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going. P.S. Being a consultant about engineering software, in such things as the above, I find myself more and more in line with Alfred North Whitehead: 'Seek simplicity, and distrust it.'

The only way to live! Full throttle.

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated A new book challenges how we think about human progress. Updated by Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Nov 22, 2017, 10:40am ET Is civilization good for us? Has it made us any happier? The takeaway from a new book by James Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University, is that the answer to the first question is yes but it’s complicated, while the answer to the second question is, well, even more complicated. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott explores why human beings decided to shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary, agrarian lifestyle roughly 12,000 years ago. The accepted narrative is that humans abandoned hunting and gathering as soon they discovered agricultural technology, because it made life easier and safer. But Scott argues that this is not quite right. Humans, he says, spent thousands of years trying to preserve their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Sure, settling down in agrarian societies provided the basis for the modern state by allowing large numbers of people to live in one place for extended periods of time, but it also led to the spread of diseases and forced people to give up the freedom of an itinerant lifestyle for the affluence of a modern one. The story we tell ourselves about human history is one of linear progress, fueled in large part by moral and technological development. There is some truth to this, and on a long enough timeline it makes sense, but Scott says the sacrifices made along the way are rarely understood. I spoke to him recently about those sacrifices, and what we tend to get wrong about early civilizations. For Scott, the price of civilization — for the individual and the environment — has been higher than we think. Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows. Sean Illing Has civilization been good for humanity? James Scott So much of what I thought I had understood about early civilizations and pre-modern men and women was just wrong. I’ve tried to offer something of a counternarrative that suggests the domestication of grains centuries ago did not lead directly to humans living in large groups in one place for long periods of time, as we now do. It turns out that the kind of agriculture that early humans practiced was onerous and involved a tremendous amount of work. The first civilizations were very hard and unhealthy places that gave us most of our first infectious diseases, many of which are still with us. They also produced the first coercive states that took slaves and oppressed large numbers of people. Now, that doesn't mean that the modern state since the French Revolution is not the ground of both our freedom and our oppression, but it does mean that the early states were by no means a simple advance in leisure, freedom, emancipation, or help. Sean Illing We can circle back to that last point about what we lost in terms of leisure and freedom, but first tell me what you initially got wrong about early civilizations — and presumably what a lot of us get wrong. James Scott A couple of things. One is that I think the standard narrative is that once we had domesticated plants, then we immediately shifted to an agricultural society so that we could stay in the same place. People also assume that before the agricultural revolution, humans had to wander around as foragers and hunter-gatherers. But that’s not quite right. Four thousand years passed between the first firm evidence of domesticated plants, cereals, and the beginning of truly agrarian communities that are living largely by agriculture. The other mistake, which I had never thought about, was this assumption that we couldn’t wait to settle down, that this was part of the inevitable progress of humanity. That’s not true at all, and it certainly could have gone another way. The truth is that staying in one place, which is what civilization more or less forced us to do, wasn’t all that healthy for us, and our human ancestors resisted [it] strongly for a very long time. Sean Illing So the birth of agriculture, which effectively laid the foundation for modern civilization, was not welcomed by most humans at the time. What were they resisting? What did they see? James Scott Well, you have to remember that in places like Mesopotamia, people lived in a kind of wetland paradise, with water levels much higher than they are today and with diverse migrations of mammals and birds and fish that created an extraordinarily rich set of ecosystems. Those early humans had a variety of plant and animal and fish sources of subsistence, and it actually required very little of the year for them to get all of their protein needs. “It’s important to understand that this was not a choice between hunting and gathering and foraging on the one hand and the Danish welfare state on the other” Sean Illing So the hunter-gatherers were healthier than those who switched over to the more sedentary agricultural lifestyle — at least initially. James Scott That’s right. Their diet was extremely varied, which is to say extremely healthy. So that when you find the bones of people who died at the same time and you want to know whether they were a part of an agrarian state or whether they were hunters and gatherers and foragers, you can tell because the hunter-gatherers’ skeletons are much larger because they had fewer interruptions in growth, and their bones show almost no signs of malnutrition, whereas the people in the agricultural civilizations are both shorter and their bones and teeth are less robust. You see evidence of growth interruptions that are mostly due to protein deficiency of one kind or another. It's clear that people outside these grain civilizations were healthier than the people inside. Sean Illing People tend to think of human history as a story of steady progress, which is largely true, but it’s also more complicated than that. James Scott Even today, there is this idea that life with civilization is easier and affords more leisure, but hunters and gatherers spend only about 50 percent of their time producing or searching for what they needed to survive. The idea that hunters and gatherers and foragers were living hand to mouth and one day away from starvation is nonsense, even for those in pretty marginal areas where there is less access to natural migrations of fish and animals and the fruiting seasons of trees and so on... Hunters and gatherers only spent half of their time working, and the rest was spent in play or leisure. By contrast, those early agrarian civilizations involved much more labor and drudgery. [They] also involved a narrower diet that turned out mostly carbohydrates. And that’s why people resisted this transition, and why many had to be forced into this change... Cont.: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/11/22/16649038/civilization-progress-humanity-history-technology

Occurs that the radar operator in this scene was very possibly modeled on one Jacob Beser, the expert 24-year-old radar technician who flew on the Enola Gay mission to bomb Hiroshima, and then also on the Nagasaki run. To help record the effects of the bomb, but more importantly to try to detect, and counter, any possible use by the Japanese of radar that would interfere with, and possibly prematurely set off, the radar-based proximity-fusing mechanism of the atomic bomb. Over Hiroshima, Missing the Target by 500 Feet Was Kind of Academic By Bruce Goldfarb Jacob Beser Crewman at Hiroshima and Nagasaki Jacob Beser was a 24-year-old radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay on Aug. 6, 1945, when it dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Beser was aboard Bock's Car when "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only person who crewed in the attack aircraft of both missions. His responsibility aboard the planes was to monitor the workings of a fuse-device that set off the bomb when radar beams bounced off the ground indicated that the weapon had fallen to a precise altitude for an air burst of maximum destructiveness. In Hiroshima, the altitude was 1,850 feet. His other job on the flight to the targets was to make sure that there were no enemy radars using the same frequency as the fuse -- which could have set off the bomb prematurely. Jacob Beser, November 1945 Little Boy produced an explosion equal to 12,000 tons of TNT and killed 78,150 of Hiroshima's population of 255,000. More than 25,000 people were injured and 13.425 people were never found. In Nagasaki, 35,000 were killed or never found and 40,000 were injured, out of a population of 195,000. Beser is a native of Baltimore. Prior to enlisting in the Air Force, he studied mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the area of firing and fusing. After 27 years of service, Beser recently retired from Westinghouse, where most of his work was classified. This summer Beser plans to return to Japan for the first time since the war, and has been invited to attend memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lives with Sylvia Beser, his wife of 36 years, in Pikesville, Md., where he is active in Jewish organizations. The Besers have four sons and five grandchildren. [Jacob Beser died in 1992 at age 71] Q: Do you often think of August 1945? A: Yeah, I think of it because people like you and others don't let you forget it. It's not that I care to forget it, but there's always constant reminders. Q: Before you were aware of what the mission was, you requested a transfer to a combat unit. Were you pretty anxious to fight? A: I was quite anxious to get into it. I wanted to go to Europe. Classmates were there. I had family in Germany who had been chewed up already. I went up to Washington to see the adjutant general of the army, who theoretically could send you anywhere you wanted to go. He said, "I don't know why, but even I can't touch you. Your file has been flagged for some reason." Eventually I got transferred into the [Army Air Corps] 393rd [Heavy Bombardment Squadron, the one assigned to the Manhattan Project]. A month after that, orders came down from Washington freezing all the personnel in the 393rd. Nobody in, nobody out. And they were alerted for a temporary move to Wendover Air Force Base. They said take everything you own with you, which was quite unusual. All your trucks and your organizational equipment. Crew of Enola Gay before Hiroshima mission. Beser, standing far right We were at Wendover a couple of days and we got called together in the base auditorium to meet Paul Tibbets, our new group commander. He said we were going to form a new group, independent, able to operate anywhere in the world, the purpose of which was not to be told to us for a while. Don't ask questions, just trust me. It was secret. And everybody could go home on two weeks leave except Lt. Jacob Beser, please report to my office immediately. I was ushered into his office with two more army personnel, a naval officer and a civilian, Dr. Al Brode, who had just come off a college campus. A light came on in my head and I said, "Hey, this guy is a big wheel in physics." They wanted to know where I was from, how old I was, where I went to school and what my background and experience had been. Brode looked me straight in the eye and said, "How do you feel about flying combat?" "I have a pair of wings," I said. "That's what I was trained for. What's the problem?" He said, "Well, this job we want you to do, it’s not that we don't have people that can do it in our organization but they're too valuable to risk." I could see my life expectancy going down, my insurance rates going up. I was excused from the room and about 10 minutes later invited back and everybody shook my hand and congratulated me. I'd been hired. What for? Nobody was saying, but I was now part of the crowd. I didn't know what I was part of. Several days later we were told to be on the flight line at 7 the next morning and be packed for three or four days travel. I said, "Where are we going?" "You'll find out when we get there." That's interesting. "And do I take warm clothes or summer clothes or what?" "Take 'em both." They wouldn't give me the slightest clue. I crawled in the airplane. I didn't know the rest of these fellows too well. But I did know the pilot and I said, "Arthur, where are we going?" He said, "I don't know but when we get near we'll find out. All I know is I filed a clearance for a place called Y. The letter Y. I've never been there before." Pilot Col. Paul Tibbets before take-off for Hiroshima mission Q: And that turned out to be Los Alamos? A: Yeah. I was escorted there by Col. Tibbets and Navy Capt. Richard Ashworth. We went right to the office of Dr. Norman Ramsey, who was a young PhD from Columbia University. He ran the fusing and firing section. Q: Nobody ever said atomic in that briefing? A: No, no. No way. They just told me "a weapon." Ramsey said that they wanted this weapon to burst over the ground at a precise altitude and they had been working on the problem but they weren't nearly as far along as they should be. We would have lunch at the lodge and there were names like Nils Bohr bandied around, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe. It all began to add up. Then in conversations with Ramsey one day he pretty much filled me in without ever saying words like atomic bomb. He talked about fundamental forces of the universe. He hit all around it, and it spelled mother... http://brucegoldfarb.com/beser.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/20/obituaries/jacob-beser-dies-at-71-flew-a-bomb-missions.html https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/jacob-besers-lecture https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/jacob-beser

Surprised by Sin The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition with a New Preface “Thirty years after its original publication, Surprised by Sin remains the one indispensable book on Milton. This dazzling, high-stakes work of mind taught a generation of readers how to read anew. And, lest we thought its rigorous injunctions had been dulled or blandly assimilated by the intervening years, Fish dares us, in a formidable new preface, to think again.”—Linda Gregerson, University of Michigan “Thirty years ago, Surprised by Sin initiated the modern age in Milton criticism. Still the one book necessarily engaged by Milton scholars, it continues to provoke, irritate, and illuminate. Reissued now, with a substantial new preface, it clarifies in fascinating ways not only the course of Milton studies but also the continuing career of its controversial author.”—Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland at College Park “The first edition of Surprised by Sin revised the critical landscape of Milton studies more significantly and more influentially than any other analysis of Paradise Lost in modern history. The second edition contains a substantial preface, not only an apologia but also a brilliant critical manifesto in its own right. Fish thereby affirms the validity, preeminence, and timeliness of his ‘great argument,’ which will continue to inform critical debates unremittingly in the future.”—Albert C. Labriola, Duquesne University http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476&content=reviews

'Gate of Hell' -- William Blake http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/gallery02.html

“THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST. JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH. DIVINE POWER MADE ME, WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.” https://classicsincontext.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/canto-iii-per-me-si-va-ne-la-citta-dolente/

Inferno (Dante) Canto III: The Gate of Hell Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l'etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina potestate, la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. Through me you go to the grief-wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope — Ye Who Enter Here. Variant translation: 'Through me the way to the suffering city; Through me the everlasting pain; Through me the way that runs among the Lost. Justice urged on my exalted Creator: Divine Power made me, The Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love. Nothing was made before me but eternal things And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope - You Who Enter Here.' Variant Translation: 'I am the way into the city of woe. I am the way to a forsaken people. I am the way into eternal sorrow. Sacred justice moved my architect. I was raised here by divine omnipotence, primordial love and ultimate intellect. Only those elements time cannot wear are beyond me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.' https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Canto_III:_The_Gate_of_Hell