Category meditation

Aspiration

When I was a boy, the old man interrupted, life was simple.
When you were a boy, his wife said, you were simple.
Yes, I always had a goal. Always a goal. When I was a little boy, to be a big boy.
When I was a big boy, to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, [...]

Photographs: Honoring Heroes of the Civil-Rights Era : The New Yorker

When you have eighty-seven-year-old eyes, there is always a haze. But the eyes of my soul at that moment could see the Lincoln Memorial and the ears of my soul could hear Martin’s voice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial summoning the nation to move out of the low land of race and [...]

Masters of …

Thinking literally – The Boston Globe

metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH | More Intelligent Life

Specialisation is hard on polymaths

On global warming: what’s the right temperature?

Missing from the global warming debate, at least from the popular accounts, is the question of choice. Assuming we could set the global thermostat anywhere we wanted to, where should we set it? What is the right setting, and why? Qui bono? Who gets a say? What if we can’t agree? What if the northern [...]

Alternative reality

Friday, the 13th

!/usr/bin/env python
“”"
SYNOPSIS
fri13.py []

DESCRIPTION
fri13 takes no arguments; it returns the days of the week of Friday the 13th
for regular and leap years in which January 13 falls on successive days of
the week.

Based on Problem 1.1 in Niven, Ivan Morton. Mathematics of choice or, How to
count without counting. [Washington]: The Mathematical Association of
America, 1965. Print.

EXAMPLES
usage: python fri13.py

AUTHOR
Richard [...]

Winston Churchill

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me

Babylonian Dreams — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

But if Herodotus didn’t get it right, who exactly did?”