Sets of 3
Skills I would like to learn:
- Sailing
- Calligraphy
- Violin
Things I vehemently oppose:
- Xenophobia
- Ethanol as a fuel source
- Indoctrination
Role models:
Mister Rogers. Tom Junod, in Esquire:
Mister Rogers went onstage to accept the award — and there, in front of all the soap opera stars and talk show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Ten seconds of silence.
And then he lifted his wrist, looked at the audience, looked at his watch, and said, ‘I’ll watch the time.” There was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch, but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked. And so they did. One second, two seconds, seven seconds — and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier. And Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said softly, “May God be with you,” to all his vanquished children.
Su Song. From Wikipedia:
Su Song was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock tower, crowned with a mechanically-driven armillary sphere, which was erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. His clock tower employed the escapement mechanism two centuries before it was applied in clocks of Europe; the tower also featured the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive in the world, as outlined in his horological treatise of 1092.
Gottfried Leibniz. Paul du Bois-Reymond, in a biography about Leibniz:
As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to [Leibniz] for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations — the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.
Your thoughts, as always, are quite welcome.
Comments
Caley
I used to dabble in calligraphy…I had such bad handwriting when I was younger that my parents thought making me see it as an art form would improve my penmanship. It didn’t work. I just ended up with ink stained hands and to this day I have awful handwriting. BUT, it was fun while it lasted :)