My late-20’s will be remembered as the phase of my life where I did boring things in fun places.
Sometimes when I ask people about the majors they picked in college, I get an answer—regardless of the major—akin to “because it’s like, just so fundamental, you know?” The neuroscientist thinks, the brain, the brain! Everything starts with the brain. The writer thinks, where would we be without language, without the ability to communicate our ideas? The investment banker thinks, money runs the world, and he who commands it shapes the entire planet. The environmentalist thinks, none of this would matter if we didn’t have an earth to live on. The designer thinks, everything is designed and design can solve all the world’s problems.
Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.
If you need me, I’ll be in the backyard.
I wanted to be an engineer. My uncle Jack was an engineer, and I love my uncle Jack.
When Uncle Jack’s family visited from Minnesota, he and I would play catch. Sometimes we’d even play a modified, capitalist version of the game 500. Jack would throw a tennis ball (or baseball, as I got older)…
I wrote this for the Real HQ blog.
Reblogged from Real HQ Blog
Close encounters on my walk to the grocery store…
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree
The Magnectic Fields
Realism
Everything is One Big Christmas Tree - The Magnetic Fields
Nein, vielleicht ist Alles nicht ein Traum
Ist Alles ein Albtraum? Nicht, nicht!
Alles ist ein großer Tannenbaum
Rotierend im Weltraumgeschichte
No, maybe not all a dream
Is all a nightmare? No, no!
Everything is a big tree
Rotating in space history
The sub-par, yet slowly improving missives of Tim Hackbarth, man about town in Austin, TX.
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