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“”Iată un om, cine știe cât costă un om? Toți spun că cea mai scumpă e viața omului, dar cât anume costă – nu știe nimeni.”  Everyone says that the most expensive is human life, but how much it costs - no one knows.

“Grădina de sticlă” by Tatiana Țîbuleac

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Civilization is merely a thin veneer we have put on top of our anciently derived instincts, but the veneer  is what makes it possible for modern society to operate.

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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Man is not a rational animal, he is rationalizing animal

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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There is a long history of people wanting an easy path to learning. Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave New World. Discusses the idea of learning while sleeping via a microphone under your pillow telling you things while you sleep, and he exposes severe limitations of it. During my years at the Bell Labs the Diabetic movement arose and promised it could “clear: your brain of all its errors, and then you would be able to reason perfectly. Another organization promises to reveal the secrets of the ancients (who were somehow so much smarter than we are now). We have endless adds for speed reading, speed learning, etc… all of which promise, in one way or another, to greatly improve your mind without the hard labor most of us have to put in if we want to succeed. The test of all the previous proposals is that not one of them has, as yet, produced a significant number of exceptional people (that we know of present.)

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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Notice first this essential step happened only because there was a great deal of emotional stress on me at the moment, and this is characteristic of most great discoveries. Working calmly will let you elaborate and extend things, but the breakthrough generally come only after great frustration and emotional involvement. The cake, cool, uninvolved researcher seldom makes really great new steps.

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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You ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get through life comfortably - the the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal of your life. It has often been observed that the true gain is in the struggle and not in the achievement - a life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living.

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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”I do not want machines to control my life”. You do not want to stop and go lights at intersections! See love for some other answers. Often humans can cooperate with machine far better than with other humans.

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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Hence my belief that current programming practice is closer to novel writing than it is to engineering. The novelists are bound only by their imaginations, which is somewhat as the programmers are when they are writing software. Both activities have a large creative component and while you would like programming resemble engineering, it will take a lot of time to get there - and maybe you really, in the long run, do not want to do it…. I made the comparison of writing software with the auto of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of “creative writing: courses we find most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses. Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily.

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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Society strives to organize itself as a society of workers and producers. Therefore work cannot be though of as servitude; it must be given stature and dignity. The dignity of work should not be interpreted as an egoistic sentiment peculiar to Western civilization. Scientific research enlightens us as much as spiritual intrusion. Mans’ destiny is to create. Work is creative, liberating. Man fulfills himself in work.

“Essays on on Peruvian Reality” by Jose Carlos Mariategui

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“Masterpieces are noted for their accessibility; they are not the heritage of chosen few but of all men of good sense. Homer and Cervantes are democratic geniuses: a child understands them. The talents that claim to be aristocratic and incomprehensible to the multitude use abstruse form to conceal emptiness. Look at the great writers who shook men’s souls in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, especially Voltaire, whose prose was as natural as breathing, as clear as distilled alcohol”

Ibid from “Essays on on Peruvian Reality” by Jose Carlos Mariategui

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In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied

Abraham Lincoln

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… When the conduct if men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall

Abraham Lincoln

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…arrived the way most transformative things enter our lives - through the back door of the mansion of our plans

“Figuring” by Maria Popova

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The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable.

“Figuring” by Maria Popova

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A cross-disciplinary curiosity is vital for originality in any field of creative endeavor. But solving the major unsolved problems in any one discipline requires deep expertise in it, even if the final insight is aided by a wide lens of surrounding fields

Figuring” by Maria Popova

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Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself - meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood

“Figuring” by Maria Popova

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To be a revolutionary is to be in position of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in which what is gained eclipses the ill-serving comfort of what is lost

“Figuring” by Maria Popova