Knowledge and Wisdom

"There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing not to include it in a fruit salad."
- Anonymous

A stone of hope

"With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yesterday saw the official opening of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC. A great American and a great human being.

Here's to the Crazy One(s)

Here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules

and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,

are the ones who do.

Thinking Different

Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple yesterday after 14 years of helping Apple to Think Different again:

"Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion CAN change the world for the better [...] that those people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who actually do."
- 1997, Steve Jobs introducing the "Think Different" marketing campaign.

"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will."
- 2007, Steve Jobs introducing iPhone.

"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."
- 2011, Steve Jobs introducing iPad 2.

For what it's Wirth

A classic article by Niklaus Wirth on Writing Lean Software reminds us about the basic engineering virture of producing more with less. We (engineers) have been spoiled by the (seemingly) endless supply of engineering resources, like energy, storage and memory capacity, processing power, or even money (especially for military projects). But, as we all know, or should know, no supply of anything is endless. This extravagant approach ultimately produces only one result: bad engineering.

J. M. Keynes vs. F. A. Hayek

Round 1:



Round 2:

Kaspar: Prince of Cats

I've just started reading Michael Morpurgo's Kaspar: Prince of Cats to the boys at bedtime. A great find. The boys and I are enjoying it immensely. It'll be a very sad night when we get to the end of this one. Morpurgo writes beautifully. Here he explains how Kaspar came about:

I'm a story detective. I hunt down clues because I need evidence to write my stories. So what was the evidence behind the writing of Kaspar?

A year ago I was asked to be Writer-in-Residence at the Savoy Hotel in London. This involved putting on some literary events and staying for three months at the Savoy. My wife Clare and I had a bed the size of Ireland, and breakfast every morning looking out over the Thames. Everyone in the hotel was very kind. We were treated like royalty - which was great!

Then one day, in the corridor next to the American Bar, I met Kaspar, the Savoy Cat. He was sitting there in a glass showcase - a sculpture of a huge black cat - very elegant, very superior. I made enquiries, as detectives do, and found out why he was there.

One day, almost a hundred years ago, thirteen men sat down to a dinner party at the Savoy. One of them scoffed loudly at the suggestion that thirteen might be an unlucky number, said it was so much tosh. Only a few weeks later, he was shot down in his office in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thereafter The Savoy decided that they would never again allow thirteen people to sit down together for dinner. They would always have a fourteenth chair, and sitting on the fourteenth chair, there would be a specially carved sculpture of a lucky black cat. He was known as Kaspar.

My first clue.

My second clue: I came down to breakfast one morning, and was walking down the red carpeted stairs into the River Restaurant, when I looked up and had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The whole decor and atmosphere reminded me of pictures I'd seen of the restaurant on the Titanic. I knew then my story would be about a cat called Kaspar, who would live at the Savoy and become the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.

But it was the people who lived and worked at the Savoy who gave me my last and most vital clue. I discovered that they came from every corner of the globe. And I soon discovered also that their lives were very different from the lives of the guests they looked after. It would have been very much like this, I thought, in 1912, at the time the Titanic went down.

My evidence was complete. A little dreamtime, to make some sense of all the clues, and I could begin my story, about how Kaspar was brought to the Savoy by a very famous diva - an opera singer, a Countess from Russia...

the sky in monocle

WATERMAID

by Christopher Okigbo

EYE OPEN on the sea,
eyes open, of the prodigal;
upward to heaven shoot
where stars will fall from.
Secret I have told into no ear,
save into a dughole, to hold, not to drown with –
Secret I have planted into beachsand
Now breaks
salt-white surf on the stones and me,
and lobsters and shells
in iodine smell-
maid of the salt-emptiness,
sophisticreamy,
whose secret I have covered up with beachsand…
Shadow of rain over sunbeaten beach,
Shadow of rain over man with woman.

BRIGHT
with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness,
she answers,
wearing white light about her;
and the waves escort her,
my lioness,
crowned with moonlight.
So brief her presence-
match-flare in wind's breath-
so brief with mirrors around me.
Downward…
the waves distil her;
gold crop
sinking ungathered.
Watermaid of the salt-emptiness,
grown are the ears of the secret.

AND I WHO am here abandoned,
count the sand by wave lash abandoned,
count her blessing, my white queen.
But the spent sea reflects
from his mirrored visage
not my queen, a broken shadow.
So I who count in my island the moments,
count the hour which will bring
my lost queen with angels' ash in the wind.

THE STARS have departed,
the sky in monocle
surveys the world under
The stars have departed,
and I-where am I?
Stretch, stretch, O antennae,
to clutch at this hour,
fulfilling each moment in a
broken monody.

Opportunities

“We pass through this world but once and the opportunities you miss will never be available to you again.”
- Nelson Mandela

And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night

The Malawian poet and linguist Jack Mapanje has a gift for striking titles. And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night (Ayebia, 2011) is the title of his latest book, a memoir (some 20 years in the writing) of his detention without charge or trial on the 25th of September, 1987. He spent the next "three years, seven months, 16 days and more than 12 hours" in Malawi's infamous Mikuyu Prison. He was released on the 10th of May, 1991. He has never received an official explanation for his detention.

Some of Mapanje's other titles are:

• Of Chameleons and Gods (1981), his first collection of poems.
• The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993), more poems.
• Skipping Without Ropes (1998), even more poems.
  
• Gathering Seaweed (2002), a collection of African prison writing (selector/editor).
  
• The Last of the Sweet Bananas (2004), poems again.
• Beasts of Nalunga (2007), his latest collection of poems.
  

Between the devil and the deep blue Zambezi

On Zambia Online: Chanda Chisala has written a very lucid and balanced analysis of the dilemma facing the Zambian electorate this year.

Ridley vs. Gates

From The Wall Steet Journal:

• Bill Gates reviews The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley.
• Matt Ridley responds.
  

Ridley vs. Mackay

Dr. Matt Ridley, author of the The Rational Optimist, debates some of the finer points of climate change in response to a long letter by Prof. David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air and Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which, in turn, was written in reponse to an earlier article by Ridley.

Models behaving badly

Dr. David Stainforth of the London School of Economics took part in the Royal Society's recent Summer Science Exhibition. His exhibit was on the uncertainties involved in climate modelling. Some of his ideas are discussed in a new article on the Scientific American website.

The fundamental problem with the climate (and any long-term models of it) is this: it is chaotic. That's chaotic, in the mathematical sense. That means that the climate and certain other nonlinear dynamical systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Change the initial conditions, even slightly, and the long(er) terms results of your predictions diverge substantially. That's the basic reason why meteorologists are only able to offer us fairly short term predictions of the weather. The further out the prediction, the less likely it is to be accurate.

This phenomenon of sensitivity to initial conditions was discovered by Edward N. Lorenz. It's often called "the butterfly effect" because of a paper given by Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?". Lorenz's papers are a model (no pun intended) of scientific profundity and clarity (a rare combination in science). Virtually all of his key papers are available on this link at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Definitely worth a look.

The danger of a single story

Who is Keyser Soze?

From The Usual Suspects:

Verbal (Kevin Spacey): Who was Keyser Soze?

Verbal (Kevin Spacey): He's supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody ever knew him or saw anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. [...] and like that, poof, he's gone. Underground. Nobody's ever seen him since. He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night: "Rat on your pop and Keyser Soze will get you." And no one ever really believes.

Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri): Do you believe in him Verbal?

Verbal (Kevin Spacey): Keaton always said: "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him." Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.

Noble Soul

Nelson Mandela turns 93 today.

His latest book, Nelson Mandela by Himself, an authorised collection of his own quotations, was launched recently. It's on my wishlist. Alongside, the launch his foundation published some publicity material for the book which is well worth reading. It contains some of the quotations featured in the book. This is one of my favourites:

On Equality

I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.

From a letter to General Du Preez, Commissioner of Prisons, written on Robben Island, Cape Town, South Africa, 12 July 1976

A great man.

A great man.

Googlean Memory

Have you ever wondered about the impact that being able to Google anything has on our (more traditional) mental capabilities? I certainly have.

A new article published in Science, by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, reports on four experiments to investigate the effects of Google on memory. The results are intriguing.

The write stuff

Evidence-based advice on overcoming graphophobia, one of the scientist's occupational hazards.

Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice

Bill Gates @ TED2010 on energy and climate change: