This is probably the most important habit of Feynman, I tried to incorporate into my own life and studying:
"Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms."
I think this sentence from the essay does a nice job of summing up Feynman's character:
'The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.'
I'd recommend Hillis' Web of Stories interview series [1] to anyone who appreciated this piece. He shares several of the stories described in the essay in video form (e.g. 105, 106, 119, 127 & 234), and there are plenty of other anecdotes and insights worth listening to.
I think Hillis is pretty interesting in his own right, but he's crossed paths with some other people in addition to Feynman that HN readers might be interested in hearing about: Marvin Minsky, Jeff Bezos, Freeman Dyson, Steve Jobs etc.
This is one of those ones I’ll stop and read every time it gets posted.
Bit of trivia: in the novel, “Jurassic Park”, the park’s supercomputer is a Cray, but Spielberg picked a Connection Machine for the movie because he thought it looked cooler.
Also, the artist Karl Sims did some outstanding work using the Connection Machine that was mind blowing for the time, and still pretty darn cool today. The computer itself was part of the art installation:
This is the fat-tree connection diagram for one of the cabinets of a CM-5. It was posted on a wall at one of the national labs in the US which had the pleasure of working with a CM-5 around the time War Games was in theatres. People still gushed about how nice that machine was to program 10-15 years later. SiCortex[1] tried to do something similar with their computers, unfortunately they failed and with them the last interesting connector architecture and the last interesting "supercomputer". even cray does linux now...
Could perhaps someone try to elaborate on the calculation of buffers needed per chip?
Quote:
To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time.
How did he do it, conceptionally, and in practice?
However since the arrival of messages can be modeled as a probabilistic or continuous rate, differential equations can also be used. I'm not sure if this is how Feynman did it, but this paper shows how to model queueing using differential equations:
This one is totally worth bringing up once a year forever.
In general I’m a huge fan of the Long Now organization. What they do really is worth your time and attention. Go through the archives. You’ll find so much of what you wish TED could be.
He wrote a few books of reminiscences which are full of them, great reads.
But this was the first time I've seen his...extremely ugly sexist behaviour displayed, not just hinted about. Very odd. In his books he's just a bit of a ladies man.
What am I being downvoted for here exactly, downvoters?[0] Do people think the behaviour mentioned is at all acceptable?! Or that 'extremely ugly sexist behaviour' isn't a fair characterization? I can't see what else in what I said could cause offence. We are talking about Feynman, who believed in speaking the plain truth, pretty or not. And that story is just very creepy:
"in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said."
[0] Sorry to mention it, but this doesn't seem quite the standard case.
>"Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
I "left that out" because it reminded me of how people say "Yes, my husband was a violent psychopath, but underneath he was a gentle, sensitive man." or something. Being 'charming' is how sociopaths get away with it, not a balancing, redeeming feature. So don't tell me I have to mention the "redeeming feature", thanks.
(Besides, I thought it was strange she said "as if I could understand it", not "in a way I could understand"...it sounded to me like she didn't understand.)
Whoever this woman was, she was an engineer working at a cutting edge computer company in the 1970s. She likely suffered ridiculous prejudices to get to the point where she was. I'm inclined to believe that she did know (at least some) quantum mechanics and had to put up with people treating her as if she didn't know.
I can see how you've read the context and I think I've taken the opposite understanding. Either way, now people who didn't read the article can see both and decide for themselves!
I'm sorry I wrote the bit in parentheses as it meant you didn't respond to the important point, the part not in parentheses. The bit about his charmingness seemed like those justifications people give to arsehole behaviour - sociopaths are usually charming - not an effectively "balancing", redeeming one. Maybe you thought otherwise. And please allow me to make a point without being told to quote some part other than what I choose to. Thanks.
Well, why say that? Of course it's an attempt at excusing it. I almost included a sentence saying "Yes, he was a product of an earlier time, but (civilized) people didn't go around treating women like that then any more than they do nowadays, i.e. not at all."
We look up to historical figures who owned slaves. There were people who were morally opposed to slavery back then as well.
The fact is, people who accomplished great things also engaged in morally questionable stuff as well. If we try to erase all of these figures from our history books, they'll end up empty. We have to accept that social mores fluctuate over the generations and read history with the appropriate perspective.
Tell me about it, I'm vegan/non-animal-product-using. It's not just the distant past that's "morally questionable" for me.
So the problem you are fixing is that I haven't "accepted that social mores fluctuate over the generations"? And am "trying to erase" Feynman from the history books? Uh no. It sounds like you copied those bland clichés all out from your high school notes. I don't disagree with any one sentence, but put together, I wonder who benefits from hearing that speech. I'm no SJW or general hater of dead white males, don't worry. Maybe it's the standard reply to them. Sorry if this all sounds condescending - what you wrote comes over as super-condescending also. It's difficult when we have no idea who we're talking to!
> > Not to excuse it, but he was the product of a different time.
> Well, why say that? Of course it's an attempt at excusing it.
No it isn't. Because there's a difference between excusing something and explaining it. As my post was a recommendation for a book about Feynman's life, I felt was doing the latter not the former.
Just to be clear, then. Sexist behaviour was just as wrong during Feynman's lifetime as it is today. Unfortunately it's a fact that such attitudes were also more prevalent then than they are now. And Feynman's genius didn't, and still doesn't, excuse his sexist behaviour.
People who say "I don't mean to be racist, but.." almost always immediately say something racist, and never feel like it is racist. That seems exactly like "Not to excuse it, but.." - "Not to excuse it" comes out because your brain feels the need to say that, in the same way. Also I guess it's hard talking with people we don't know - assessing what to take for granted or not. Maybe you really did mean "not to excuse it"! Sorry.
I wonder what 'attitude' Feynman actually had. I've never heard of anyone actually doing what he does in that story, have you? It's not much detail to go on, but it sounds like he thought it was funny? Or enjoyed the humiliation, was turned on. He can't have thought it was appropriate. Can he? I mean, people never did that, even thousands of years ago. Just seems like an extremely gauche 'joke'...demeaning, insulting. So does that book shed any light? Was everyone like that then? (I don't think so)
[Disclosure: Besides his reminiscences, which I read as a kid, I've watched a load of his lectures, interviews and talks, (and introduced them to other people), as well as worked through as much of the 3 volumes of the Lectures on Physics as I could understand, a couple of times. He's one of my scientific heroes.]
> "Not to excuse it" comes out because your brain feels the need to say that, in the same way.
No. Its not the same thing. People who say "I'm not racist but ..." are attempting a pre-emptive distraction from their own breaking of a social norm. I wasn't doing that. And you have no idea know what my "brain feels the need to say". I don't even know why you'd think you do.
I could have written "I think he was the product of the different times he lived through. That doesn't excuse his behaviour, but I think it explains it." But I was short of time: that's all.
Feynman is one of the few dead people I wish I could have had many conversations with while on a long hike.
His talk describing computers to a lay audience at the Esalen Institute [1] is my goto resource whenever someone asks me how computers work. It's from the same era as the referenced article, he's even wearing the same Thinking Machines shirt.
"Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms."