General Education was designed to help students gain the ability to appreciate life, but when life kind of sucks because you don’t know how you’re going to pay the bills or where your life is going, it really is amazing how immersing oneself in some excellent creativity can nurture the soul.
Continue readingCategory Archives: The Intellectual Life
For along time I’ve noticed that I seem to do better writing when at least some fraction of the work is done on paper with a pen or pencil. I particularly like using a nice rollerball pen or, better still, a fountain pen.
Continue readingI’ve recently begun taking a class at nearby Foothill Community College in an effort to gain some mastery over mathematics. It’s an old, old project of mine. Ostensibly I’m at school for the same reason most of the other students … Continue reading
Note: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the role of mentors in one’s educational development and remembered the following essay I wrote for the Virtual Conference in Informal Science Education, sponsored by the Society for Amateur Scientists in … Continue reading
Amazon’s second generation Kindle, the D00511. Recent months have seen an increase of posts and news items on the coming eBook revolution. This way of delivering books has been a bit slower to catch on than proponents had hoped. The … Continue reading
Every other week or so my spouse and I meet with some friends for dinner and conversation, usually at a favorite Chinese restaurant where we enjoy stimulating banter over excellent cuisine. An evening’s dinner conversation recently turned to the matter … Continue reading
A skill not commonly taught in school, and certainly not taught (or even encouraged) in our deadline-driven workplace is the art of incubating ideas. Not all ideas spring from our brains like the Athena fully grown from the head of … Continue reading
In Ray Bradbury’s insightful and sometimes prophetic novel Fahrenheit 451, Montag, the book-burning “fireman” comes to a crisis of conscience as he realizes that his career of burning books has created a society bereft of meaning, life and vibrancy. He … Continue reading
The previous post on the unsuspected nature of genius needs a follow-up, and this is it. It is now clear that what we call “genius” is a function of hard, relentless work leavened with good instruction and mentoring. But the … Continue reading
I’ve heard several definitions of genius. The usual one concerns high IQs and the ability to multiply nine-digit numbers in your head, play piano concerti without practicing, speaking colloquial Fortran… that sort of thing. Another comes courtesy of a friend … Continue reading