AdamSmith

NYTimes : ... The generation coming up behind him, with the advantage of hindsight, still found nothing predictable in the paths of his thinking. If anything he seemed perversely and dangerously bent on disregarding standard methods. "I think if he had not been so quick people would have treated him as a brilliant quasi crank, because he did spend a substantial amount of time going down what later turned out to be dead ends," said Sidney Coleman, a theorist who first knew Feynman at Caltech in the 50's. "There are lots of people who are too original for their own good, and had Feynman not been as smart as he was, I think he would have been too original for his own good," Coleman continued. "There was always an element of showboating in his character. He was like the guy that climbs Mont Blanc barefoot just to show that it can be done." Feynman continued to refuse to read the current literature, and he chided graduate students who would begin their work on a problem in the normal way, by checking what had already been done. That way, he told them, they would give up chances to find something original. "I suspect that Einstein had some of the same character," Coleman said. "I'm sure Dick thought of that as a virtue, as noble. I don't think it's so. I think it's kidding yourself. Those other guys are not all a collection of yo-yos. Sometimes it would be better to take the recent machinery they have built and not try to rebuild it, like reinventing the wheel. Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart. He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot." Coleman chose not to study with Feynman directly. Watching Feynman work, he said, was like going to the Chinese opera. "When he was doing work he was doing it in a way that was just -- absolutely out of the grasp of understanding. You didn't know where it was going, where it had gone so far, where to push it, what was the next step. With Dick the next step would somehow come out of -- divine revelation." The characterization below is one of my favorites. We all stand in awe of the magicians! "There are two kinds of geniuses, the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians,' " wrote the mathematician Mark Kac. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/11/feynman-and-secret-of-magic.html

Latest glad tidings on the environment front. After 60 million years of extreme living, seabirds are crashing A new study finds that the world's seabird populations have plummeted by almost 70% in just 60 years. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/sep/22/after-60-million-years-of-extreme-living-seabirds-are-crashing

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a great tradition!

Which thread am I in?

Corn on the cob! One could fairly easily envision her buck-toothed sister so doing! I read that about her liking McD's in some UK online paper like the Independent or somewhere but can't find it now. When I Google for it, all that comes up is news that she owns or has part ownership in a McDonald's franchise near one of her properties. But that's a different story.

Along similar lines, I read the other day that every couple months Queen Elizabeth gets a hankering for a McDonald's burger and fries. So her driver takes her to one near the palace, they go through the drive-through, then like any of us she eats it while they drive around.

Was just rereading Huckleberry Finn and there is a scene where Huck has gotten into company of two traveling 'circusmen' one of whose acts consists of stripping, sticking a lighted candle up his ass (UNlighted end in the ass), then capering across stage on his hands. Not having read the book since age 11 or so, the likely nature of the two stage gentlemen now becomes clear.

Good. Then I can leave it to others, for I heartily loathe riddles. And I find they happily return the favor.

Last time I followed you down such a rabbit hole, remember where we ended up.

Sounds very Egyptian. Or Hebraic.

Usually a "top's secret" is that he IS a bottom.

And then this thing Clarke said after K had tried but failed to get Clarke to help him in K's ultimately failed effort to make AI: "Well, you know -- Stanley's Stanley."

The upside is the productive public discussion in media like The Guardian and elsewhere about the stupidity of the criminalization of consensual adult sex work: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/07/rentboy-closed-govermnent-saved

Laughing at my sexual practices is not really too polite.

Mention of Princeton reminds (off point but before it flees the memory ) how Hahvahd & Jale enjoy looking down on each other but jointly regard Princetonians as dull white bread concerned with not much beyond their eating clubs. Harvard types are specifically selected for being not 'well rounded' but 'angular' (their own admissions office's word) while the saying I like best about my alma was a WWII phrase: 'If you have something that absolutely must get done, get a Yale man.' (A Bonesman I presume it meant.)

I keep salt on hand only to use the requisite 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon in cake recipes. It is needful there for the taste note and also the little bit it adds to the leavening.

The Economist, a fairly rock-ribbed center-right editorial point of view, never misses a chance to express their fierce admiration for post-presidential Carter. They deeply admire how he, as they love to say, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. For example that he was long one of the only public voices to call Israel out on its brutality toward the Palestinians.

Oddly, possibly, I understand each of those personality attributes, and don't think they undercut my admiration for him. We all live in the real world, and navigate its shoals, external and internal.

"...I met Jimmy Carter twice -- the second time in 2010 when he was 85 and the head of the Carter Center in Atlanta, and the first time in 1976 when he was 51 and running for president, giving a speech to college students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the speech, a young African-American woman with a Southern accent standing next to me said to him (half as question and half as prayer), "I hope you'll actually do the things you say you'll do." He looked her in the eyes with an intensity that I'll never forget and said, "I promise you, I will." In my bones I knew he meant it, and that was enough for me then, as it is now..." http://m.deseretnews.com/article/865635957/In-retrospect-Well-done-Jimmy-Carter.html?pg=all&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F%3Fref%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

Jubilo Allen Tate To Arthur Mizener Hit mus be now de Kingdom comin And de year of Jubilo . . . Tail-spinning from the shelves of sky See how it dips and tacks and tosses To cast a beam in the mind's eye: Who will count the gains and losses On the Day of Jubilo? Public accountant with double entry Enter in red war's final cast In the black column the pacing sentry, Old women picking the hogs' mast For the Day of Jubilo Lean to the crowded air and hear, Eavesdropper, how it goes inside Your own deaf and roaring ear: Boys caress the machines they ride On the Day of Jubilo After the dry and sticking tongue After our incivility Who will inflate the poet's lung Gone flat of this indignity Till the Day of Jubilo? Scholar, no dog will have your day For all your capital's run out, Wry baby in wet disarray- Scholar, prepare your meagre clout For the Day of Jubilo Under the slip and slide of day Think, at the end you'll never be Trapped in a fox-hole of decay Nor snip nor glide of history After the Day of Jubilo All our jubilant eyes are raised, Jubilo. Over the barbican On the great Day pure and dazed, Empty of heart the empty man Of the Day of Jubilo Then for the Day of Jubilo The patient bares his arm at dawn To suck the blood's transfusing glow And then when all the blood is gone (For the Day of Jubilo) Salt serum stays his arteries Sly tide threading the ribs of sand, Till his lost being dries, and cries For that unspeakable salt land Beyond the Day of Jubilo. 1943

If man walk through door sideways, he is going to Bangkok!

A decade & a bit younger am I but so much overhang & familiarity. Jesus. Just so strong.