Twentymiglia
Posts by: Thomas
Of the many articles and interviews that praise Elon Musk, few focus on the aspect of his thinking immediately applicable to our own lives. That is, his method of problem solving.
Musk calls it “proceeding from first principles,” but for those of us who can’t grasp what he means by this, we need only look to the year 1637.
For long before there was a YouTube, transistors, or even Calculus, there was Descartes’ “Method,” and it’s one of the most powerful problem solving tools ever invented.
I stumbled upon Atomic Rocket surfing the net and lost a whole evening reading about the technological challenges facing Slower than Light (STL) travel. It reads like a primer on rocket science and references (critiques) hundreds of Sci-Fi novels, and specifically, their misunderstanding of physics. Mind you, this isn’t an actual Rocket Scientist who wrote this.
I am not a rocket scientist, merely an amateur that has read a lot of books. Any and all of the information on these pages may be incorrect or inaccurate.
But since I have yet to find a website like this written by a real live rocket scientist, I had to write it myself, as unqualified as I am. However, if I do put inaccurate information on this site, occasionally Internet readers will send me corrections. This is the “stone soup” method of website design, with me
supplying the stones. Frankly this website is a glorified term paper.
And despite what some of you believe, this website is not written by a team of people, it is just me. I do it all alone with little or no help (except for those kind souls who point out inaccuracies, alternate data, later developments, and spelling mistakes). So cut me some slack.
1969 Bacon, Francis
When we see someone talking to themselves–and it is not obvious they are using their phone–we are always struck with horror.
What is that horror?
Perhaps it’s the degree. That someone’s madness can be so profound that they give it voice! People have been burned at the stake for such transgressions. Perhaps it is the utter distrust we must now have for the person who uses such an essential tool so irresponsibly and unreliably. How can we understand someone who has abandoned such a primal tool as speech? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But what if the word is the madness of a god?
Fifteen years ago I learned about a letter written by Guaman Poma to Phillip III. The letter—a critique of Spanish abuses of the Inca people— was written in a mix of Spanish and Quechua around 1616. It was lost until 1909 and then wasn’t transcribed 1936. No one believed the Quechua was a written language. In 1980 he first digital edition was put together, but it wasn’t translated to English until 2009. Today I share this book with my students for BSA’s LatinX Cultural Festival.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on the jesters of antiquity and Medieval times. In the course of that reading, I’ve gotten to take a peak into different times and conditions under which human beings lived.
One hard truth that has struck me is how much worse things could be.
And here, I suppose I’m speaking in terms of our increasing political divide. Things seem bad right now. Some people believe we are on the precipice of a greater conflict. I certainly hope not.
Yet existence permits so much more than our culture norms usually allow. To be obnoxious at a party is a paltry offense compared to the cruelty of mankind. What history teachers us is that the world can be infinitely terrible if we allow it to be.
Consider this section from Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars on the reign of Tiberius:
