Category: People
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The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research
This article was recommended to me by the PhD advisor of my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor, or, as I like to think of him, my PhD great-grandfather. He was prominent in my chosen field, old and wise. Scientists at English research labs like ours didn’t and still don’t make much…
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Hermits
Christopher Knight, called the North Pond Hermit, lived in the wilderness of Maine for 27 years. The Lykov family lived in Khakassia in Siberia without contact to the outside world for 40 years. Ishi was the last American native in California to make contact with the Western world in 1911.…
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Insider Attacks
In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by the name of El Mammoun (El Mammun in the English translation by Lewis Galantière). The location seems to be what is now Mauritania. This reminded…
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Wind, Sand and Stars
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot in the early years of aviation. He flew military and civilian aircraft in the 1920s and 1940s before dying in a crash during a reconnaissance flight over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. He is most famous for his children’s book The Little Prince, which…
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From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe
Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that the horns previously thought to originate from unicorns actually came from narwhals. With that name and a research interest in horns I’m sure there’s a…
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Kári Stefánsson
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when I was a PhD student. The weather was foul. He was grumpier than the drizzle and my questions about the talk he had just given…
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The Funny Side of Cancer
He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind unraveled the secret code of evolution while his heart laughed at fear. He once said: The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but…
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Rejecting Authenticity
It doesn’t matter much if it’s authentic. What matters is if it’s good. Good and inauthentic is better than bad and authentic. This is true for food and it’s true for literature. Richard Ford: If I can use whatever I make of myself to write something that will make a…
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Personnel as Policy
Despite all the research done on management best practices, all the articles and reports and books that have been written, despite all the experience accumulated by consulting firms and other organizations, it’s not clear if the quality of corporate management is higher now than it was fifty years ago. For…
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A Critique of Marginal Revolution
I’ve been reading and benefitting from the blog Marginal Revolution for more than a decade. It continues to be one of the most interesting aggregator blogs. I am so intimately acquainted with its two authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, that I know which of them wrote the post after…
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Visual Thinking
This is one of the books that influenced me as a kid but that I had forgotten about since. I only re-discovered it because I went through some old books of mine on a trip back home. Visual Thinking by Marco Meirovitz and Paul I. Jacobs introduces mathematical concepts and…
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An African Abroad
A recently published review of a travelogue first published in 1963 was intriguing enough for me to order and read it. An African Abroad was written by adventurer Ọlábísí Àjàlá. Everything about him is interesting, starting with the name: Never before have I encountered anyone with so many diacritical marks…
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Ted Muller
Personal websites, updated and added to over many years, tend to be more interesting than social media profiles. Klaus Dierks’ website is an example, and Nick Bostrom’s is another. I recently came across Ted Muller’s homepage while searching for information on trails in the Sierra Nevada. The trail reports on…
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Joseph Höger
I have inherited a number of 19th century paintings and watercolors from my father. I don’t think they’re worth much, but they’re pretty and they remind me of Austria more than contemporary photos would. This watercolor is an example. Apart from the artist’s name, which someone has written on its…
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Bad Advice to a Young Scientist
Freeman Dyson, in 2007: Sixty years ago, when I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. My prediction was an extreme example of wrongness, perhaps a world record in the category of wrong predictions. I was giving advice about future employment…
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The Hero-Jackass Continuum
The thing with self-experimentation is that, depending on the observer’s vantage point, your daredevilry makes you look either like a hero or like a jackass. Here are some men who fall on that continuum: As always, Wikipedia has a more complete list.
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Meaning and Miracles
Mid-way through reading this I paused and thought, “This is better than anything that I’ve read in a long time. I wonder who it’s by?” An expletive may have preceded that. I scrolled back up to the top of the page, and it turns out it’s by Richard Russo. More…
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Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller was the Jack Kerouac of Germany. Both were rebellious, youthful writers that didn’t only inspire a generation, but represented some feeling that still defines their entire nation. As a result, both of them may perhaps be more admired than actually read. Here is an essay on Schiller by…
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Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey held views that don’t align with our current political dimensions. He was an environmentalist, he was against immigration, he wanted people to have fewer children, he was pro-gun and as against economic growth. He also is one of my favorite writers, and one of the few miracles I’ve…
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The Sorcerer II
Around the time I was doing my PhD, J. Craig Venter was one of the most talked about scientists on the planet. At some point, he came to give a talk at my research lab and the lecture theatre was packed. Everyone knew about him, but not everyone liked him.…
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Autogenic Training
Autogenic training is a relaxation technique similar to mindfulness meditation. I’ve tried both, and I prefer autogenic training. How does it work? You lie down comfortably and close your eyes. You then, in your mind, go through different body parts. You start with your arms and tell yourself, “My arms…
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Commander’s Intent
From Robert Coram’s biography of fighter pilot John Boyd: In a blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize…
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Niven’s Laws
There are several laws, or maybe aphorisms, that science fiction writer Larry Niven has come up with. Wikipedia has a good list, and here are my favorites:
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Storms of Steel
This is a World War I memoir by German soldier Ernst Jünger. It describes his experiences fighting in one battle after the next while seeing almost all of his comrades die. I’ve never read anything more vivid about the horrors of war. What makes Storms of Steel particularly effective is…
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Every Man for Himself and God Against All
I have never seen a movie by Werner Herzog’s but after reading his memoir I will have to. Here are some of his insights: We weren’t backpackers who carry practically an entire household on their backs in the form of a tent, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment; we walked…
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Those I Admire
Here are some of the people I admire: Richard Feynman, Shel Silverstein, Jim Harrison, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Venki Ramakrishnan, Jack London, Stewart Brand, Max Perutz, Benjamin Franklin, Rüdiger Nehberg, Sven Hedin, Werner Herzog, Lola Montez, Wolfgang Clemens, Heinrich Harrer. What do they have in common? They’ve sacrificed to pursue that which…
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The Original
For three years, while working towards my PhD, I shared an office with eight to ten other students and postdocs. The office with its gray carpet was on the second floor of a brick building from the 1960s, the windows looking out over a gray parking lot under a gray…
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The Value of Doubt
The government of the United States was developed under the idea that nobody knew how to make a government, or how to govern. The result is to invent a system to govern when you don’t know how. And the way to arrange it is to permit a system, like we…
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Shel Silverstein
Writing for both young kids and for Playboy, Shel Silverstein has one of the most interesting biographies I’ve come across. He also wrote the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, and had sex with “hundreds, perhaps thousands of women”. Here he’s…
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The Value of an Education
Of my mother’s many siblings, there’s one I’m close with. When I was at high school, he gave me a summer job at his business, which was installing air conditioners in Vienna. I carried pipes and tools, drilled holes and patched walls. At the end of each day, I was…
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Drinking, Smoking and Drugs
Here’s writer Hunter S. Thompson’s daily routine, as reported by E. Jean Carroll. It’s likely made up, but of course the truth is a poor substitute for a good story. Here‘s Thompson talking with Conan O’Brien a few months before he died.
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Against Epigenetics
In the 1960s, biologist James McConnell conditioned worms to respond to light flashes, then ground them up and fed them to other worms. He reported that those cannibalistic worms learned to respond to flashes faster than non-cannibalistic control worms, suggesting that memory transfer had taken place. Others couldn’t fully replicate…
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Involuntary Explorers
I don’t find Jungian archetypes compelling, but if I did, I’d be drawn to the archetype of the Involuntary Explorer: Men who, due to events beyond their control, stranded in faraway lands, having adventures. A big part of the appeal is that the adventures are involuntary, which removes the suspicion…
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Richard Russo
All of Richard Russo’s book have enough in common that I’m always looking forward to the next one. The downside is that I also already know what it’s about, more or less. Russo writes so well that I sometimes feel guilty reading him. An author who knows how to tell…
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Max Steele
Writer Max Steele doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page, which is an injustice. I feel that he should be more well known, but not strongly enough to actually do something about it and start that Wikipedia entry. Also, I don’t know anything about him beyond what I can guess…
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Terry Pratchett
So much universe, and so little time. Terry Pratchett As a kid, I read all of Terry Pratchett‘s books that I could get my hands on, including those that aren’t part of the Discworld universe and those resulting from collaborations with Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter. An aunt gave me…
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Ishi in Two Worlds
Since moving to California, Lassen National Park in Northern California has become one of my favorite places. It’s less well known than Yosemite and the other national parks in driving distance of San Francisco, and therefore less crowded. On the contrary, it sometimes seems deserted, which is astounding considering the…
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Klaus Dierks
While doing some searches on Namibia for a previous post, I came across the website of Klaus Dierks, a civil engineer and politician during the first years of Namibia’s independence. His life appears to have been adventurous in the best possible sense. He was born in Nazi Germany, grew up…
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Lola Montez
In 1846, the Donner Party, a group of 87 men, women and children migrating to California, got surprised by a snowstorm while crossing a Sierra Nevada mountain pass. They had to stop and spend the winter in tents. 39 of them starved or froze to death and some were eaten by…
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Gangerl
Off the dirt track crossing a deserted mountain pass in northwestern Namibia, we encountered an ancient Land Rover stuck in the sand. Next to it stood its three passengers, desperate for someone to find and rescue them. Even before I was born, my father had taken every opportunity to go…
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Alice Munro Has Died
Alice Munro is dead. There are fragments from her short stories that I sometimes remember without any trigger I’m aware of, like the deception in Corrie. Since March, Paul Auster, Daniel Dennett and Vernor Vinge have died too. It’s enough now.
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Paul Auster Has Died
Paul Auster is dead. I keep returning to two of his novels, Mr. Vertigo and Moon Palace. Their protagonists, even though they are fictional, are more alive than many of us. Their lives aren’t anything to envy but they hint at what it means to live life to its fullest.
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Daniel Dennett Has Died
Philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett is dead. His book on Intuition Pumps, or thought experiments, is one I hope to return to here.
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Jim Harrison
I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Harrison lately. It’s an infatuation with his work that began a few years ago but has now reached new heights. I have purchased all of his prose and some of his books of poems. Four of the last five books I’ve read are…
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Vernor Vinge Has Died
This week, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge died. Rainbows End (2006) is one of the best science fiction novels of all time.
Nehaveigur 