Mark Reynolds > Recent Status Updates

Great stuff!

I’m reading along with listening to the CD. The narrator is very good, except that he voices Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, with a cockney accent. That’s just wrong.

So far so good. Kepler's investigation into the shape of snowflakes is very interesting, and related to "Kepler's conjecture."

A very nice tutorial on the Queen’s Gambit in chapter 7.

Quote: “There are only so many things humans can say, and over the course of history, people have therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.”

Excellent. An excellent storyteller, and funny too!

Excellent. The tiny stories embedded in the big story serve to flesh out all the characters and give you a sense of the narrator’s personal philosophy, and seem to be more important than the big story.

So it’s rather the effort to be here again and again and again, and to truly see that things arise and that they pass away; that they’re born; that they die; that we don’t own anything; that none of it is ours.

So far, so funny!

“The summit of Mt Everest is marine limestone."

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret

Two principles: first, the words are true for right speech; and second, that they’re kind or helpful.

Very illuminating look at the German university system in the 1920s. Of course there’s the typical discrimination against Jews, but also the advanced gymnasium requirements and the free form lecture attendance.