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This was so much fun! If I had teachers or mentors like Kip Thorne in my youth, I’d have never had such a crippling fear of mathematics or the hard sciences. I’d have never plagued by doubt and fear, that I was not smart enough or good enough. I have just one note to share. This is Kip as he closes the book … Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain. And the richness and beauty of that science. More than anything, I’m moved by Interstellar’s underlying, optimistic message: We live in a universe governed by physical laws. By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes. But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important. I hope this book contributes to that understanding. ...

Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) *Clouds sailing across [Pangong Tso][wpt]. Click to enlarge* New month, new letter! As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being … ...

If I could distill everything that I have learnt about love and attraction and lust and life and persistence and bravery and marriage and children and facing your fears and growing up? If I could do that, it would be this slim book. I stumbled across Cheryl Strayed, in (as usual) a Farnam Street post. And then promptly bought all her books and forgot about reading them. Better late than never though. ...

This was the best collection of short stories, I’ve read since O’Henry. No O’Henriesque twists, but fate and life and love deal the characters and us readers, enough drama that none are needed. A couple of lines, that struck me … Raymond didn’t like to talk back to his sister, but this time he thought she was wrong to say what she did. ...

This little book, had me yelling, “YEA! HELL, YEA!” at every page. The book’s evolved from this really beautiful lament, which is available online and has a newer section titled Exultation. The article has the main thrust of the book and is worth your time. (as is the book, specially if you have kids, or you teach kids, or if you want to shape someone’s thinking about Mathematics) Highlights from the book follow … ...