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12 out of 13 found this helpful: On Living Life
Review: The Conquest of Happiness
I wrote the following a while ago. While it is not entirely about Russell's book, the post was inspired by it. To inspiration!
An old math joke goes as follows:
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying in a hotel. The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and douses the fire. He goes back to bed. Later, the physicist wakes up and smells smoke. He opens his door and sees a fire in the hallway. He walks down the hall to a fire hose and after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure, trajectory, etc. extinguishes the fire with the minimum amount of water and energy needed. Later, the mathematician wakes up and smells smoke. He goes to the hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He thinks for a moment and then exclaims, "Ah, a solution exists!" and then goes back to bed.
Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer that many consider the father of the information age. His master's thesis started the field of digital logic. In his seminal work, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (later republished as The Mathematical Theory of Communication), Shannon proved that it was possible to transfer information reliably over unreliable media by digitizing it and adding sufficient redundancy, an insight that has led to innovations ranging from deep space communication to scratched-up CDs that continue to play music. While there is no Nobel Prize for engineering, Shannon was one of the first recipients of the Kyoto Prize, the Japanese equivalent.
When not revolutionizing the world, Shannon found several ways to keep himself busy. His hobbies included running, playing the oboe, and juggling. Shannon also loved tinkering. He built a machine that could juggle, designed a robotic mouse that could "learn" how to solve a maze, and converted his Volkswagon into a camper for family excursions.
Richard Feynman was one of the famous physicists of the twentieth century. A biography of him by James Gleick is titled simply Genius. During World War II, he was among a select group of scientists involved with the Manhattan project. He helped develop the field of quantum electrodynamics. The work won him a Nobel Prize in physics.
Feynman had an extensive set of hobbies, too. While at Los Alamos, he developed a reputation for cracking safes. Whil...... full review
2007-01-01 16:45 | 9 comments
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