作者带着他的儿子和一些朋友骑摩托车穿越美国。从在高速公路和乡间小路上人们的差异讲起，走乡间路往往会和路人聊很久从哪里来到哪里去，而高速上看到的却是后座哭泣的孩子和一张张面无表情的脸，渐渐地作者想说在这美好的旅途当中去谈些事情点开本书的命题： what’s good而不是what’s new, 在思维的河流里把淤积在下面的已经不知道来历脉络的一些东西梳理清楚:
Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
从身边一起游玩的一对夫妻说起，他们对技术很排斥，从两件小事：摩托车点不着时和家里水龙头滴水，作者说这背后一定隐藏着一些东西值得去深挖一下。最后提出世界观的冲突：
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
有一种人喜欢看表象，有一种人更喜欢背后的逻辑。
两种划分没有谁对谁错，因为：
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he dose at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.
而为了解决这个矛盾冲突就要理性分析，理性分析之前还要对分析手段–理性–进行抽丝剥茧的根本分析，所以后面基本上从亚里士多德到Home到康德都会讲一些。
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
- 当谈到什么是鬼魂的时候，作者有一段解说，中古时候的人或者Indian与现代人他们思维的上下文（context）已经不一样了。现代人信原子/质子/中子和中古时候信鬼魂是一样的。只不过ghost所代表的含义不一样而已。
Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.
Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad.
- 首次引入Phaedrus这个人物（spent all his whole life doing nothing but hunting for a ghost, and it was just a waste of time)，P45。
- 矛盾/差异 引起的原因，看问题的角度问题，一种是
in the term of underlying form一种是immediate appearance. conflict of visions of reality.
We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except the was looking, seeing talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.
Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin.
- Phaedrus的解释： Evil spirit. Insane. From a world without life or death.
although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
这就是作者为什么选择这样的一个过程去阐述他的思想。
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of regid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.
这里引出问题，逻辑的矛盾，正所谓道可道非常道。
The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It’s the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find.
下面是Kindle的阅读摘要，暂时未排版
==========
She wasn’t ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! ==========
Of course she’s not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. ==========
That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying No TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” ==========
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. ==========
physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. ==========
I said before, on a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely part of it. ==========
The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. ==========
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. ==========
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else. ==========
ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. ==========
Ach, du lieber! ==========
You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge. ==========
It was an intrusion on his reality. ==========
What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here. ==========
It goes over and over again through my thoughts…mein Kind—my child. There it is in another language. Mein Kinder…“Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.” ==========
==========
The purpose is to bury him—forever. ==========
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. ==========
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. ==========
bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. ==========
Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
I remember sitting back in the dentist’s chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
How hard he worked on part of a painting didn’t depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless. ==========
From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. ==========
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. ==========
I add, “If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They’ve got stamina. They know how to keep on going.” ==========
Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. ==========
Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are. ==========
(1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high-school lab notebooks but the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose now is precise guidance of thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate. ==========
Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on. ==========
They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form. ==========
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. ==========
One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyana, mispronounced in Chinese as “Chan” and again mispronounced in Japanese as “Zen.” ==========
Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it. ==========
“Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.” ==========
I add, “What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. ==========
the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind. ==========
“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something. ==========
The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. ==========
The Church attitude is that civilization, or “the system” or “society” or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. ==========
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. ==========
“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. ==========
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. ==========
If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.” ==========
before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be ==========
before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. ==========
This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality! ==========
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. ==========
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. ==========
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. ==========
You have to depress for a while before you can get down to doing it. Then, once you have depressed into a really low-key mood, it isn’t so bad. ==========
It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. ==========
It’s always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It’s never been reality itself. ==========
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. ==========
The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. ==========
The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right. ==========
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all. That was what it was about that wall in Korea. It was a material reflection of a spiritual reality. ==========
What keeps me from thinking I’ve hit them all is that with every job I discover more. Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting. ==========
What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down—you’re going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not—but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you’ve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to…well…just stare at the machine. ==========
If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. ==========
In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldn’t be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren’t doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don’t throw away those mu answers! They’re every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. They’re more vital. They’re the ones you grow on! ==========
Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing’s quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you’ll never regret it. If you want to save money don’t overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, don’t wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogs. You can learn a lot from them. ==========
predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. ==========
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together. ==========
Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed. ==========
We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. ==========
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all ==========
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things—it fits. And they taught rhetoric—that fits. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. ========== Effective Python: 59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python (Effective Software Development Series) (Brett Slatkin)
To convert Unicode characters to binary data, you must use the encode method. To convert binary data to Unicode characters, you must use the decode method. ========== Effective Python: 59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python (Effective Software Development Series) (Brett Slatkin)
In Python 3, bytes contains sequences of 8-bit values, str contains sequences of Unicode characters. bytes and str instances can’t be used together with operators (like > or +). ========== Effective Python: 59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python (Effective Software Development Series) (Brett Slatkin)
In Python 2, str contains sequences of 8-bit values, unicode contains sequences of Unicode characters. str and unicode can be used together with operators if the str only contains 7-bit ASCII characters. Use helper functions to ensure that the inputs you operate on are the type of character sequence you expect (8-bit values, UTF-8 encoded characters, Unicode characters, etc.). If you want to read or write binary data to/from a file, always open the file using a binary mode (like ‘rb’ or ‘wb’). ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
“Those things that hurt, instruct.” ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
All you need to do is be part of a small group working on a hard problem. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace.11 One piece of evidence is what happened to countries ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
If taste is just personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
GOOD DESIGN IS TIMELESS. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
GOOD DESIGN SOLVES THE RIGHT PROBLEM. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
GOOD DESIGN IS HARD. If you look at the people who’ve done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you’re not working hard, you’re probably wasting your time. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
GOOD DESIGN IS REDESIGN. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
The ambitious are not content to imitate. ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit. ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
It is in such ways that character-disordered parents almost invariably produce character-disordered or neurotic children. It is the parents themselves who visit their sins upon their children. ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
By casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow spiritually, and have become dead weight for society. ========== The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck)
“If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.” ========== The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (Timothy Ferriss)
To do the impossible (sail around the world, break the four-minute mile, reach the moon), you need to ignore the popular. ========== The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (Timothy Ferriss)
The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit. ========== The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (Timothy Ferriss)
Recreation is for fun. Exercise is for producing changes. Don’t confuse the two. ========== Daily Rituals How Artists Work (Mason Currey)
“He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas. ==========
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. ==========
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
And looking down on the user, however benevolently, always seems to corrupt the designer. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
In software, my rule is: always have working code. If you’re writing something you’ll be able to test in an hour, you have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you. The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting. ========== Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham)
Design means making things for humans. But it’s not just the user who’s human. The designer is human too. ==========
You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge. ========== 重新定义公司:谷歌是如何运营的 (奇点系列) (埃里克•施密特;乔纳森•罗森伯格)
你的头衔可以让你成为管理者，但让你成为领导者的，是你的员工。 ========== 重新定义公司:谷歌是如何运营的 (奇点系列) (埃里克•施密特;乔纳森•罗森伯格)
那些无论你是否批准都按自己的想法做事的人，才值得你投资。你会发现，这样的人往往会成为企业最为宝贵的创意精英。 ========== 重新定义公司:谷歌是如何运营的 (奇点系列) (埃里克•施密特;乔纳森•罗森伯格)
。第一印象是双向的，你在审视别人，别人也在审视你 ========== 学箭悟禅录 (欧根•赫里格尔)
真正的艺术，”大师高声说道，“是没有目的、没有目标的！你越是一心想学会以射中靶子为目的的射箭，你就越射不好箭，靶子离你也会越远。你的拦路虎是你的主观意愿太强了。你以为不经过你自身做过的事是不会发生的 ==========
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. ==========
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. ==========
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. ========== Mickey Petersen-Mastering Emacs (2015)
- 您在第 103-103 页的标注 | 添加于 2016年1月5日星期二 下午9:36:36
You can view your current buffer’s syntax table by typing C-h s — it may take a while to load. In it you will see a human readable version of the characters and their assigned syntax class ========== Mickey Petersen-Mastering Emacs (2015)
- 您在第 108-108 页的标注 | 添加于 2016年1月6日星期三 上午10:30:33
C-M-f Move forward by s-expression C-M-b Move backward by s-expression ========== Mickey Petersen-Mastering Emacs (2015)
- 您在第 109-109 页的标注 | 添加于 2016年1月6日星期三 上午10:31:20
C-M-d Move down into a list C-M-u Move up out of a list ========== Mickey Petersen-Mastering Emacs (2015)
- 您在第 116-116 页的标注 | 添加于 2016年1月6日星期三 上午10:48:11
C-M-a Move to beginning of defun C-M-e Move to end of defun ========== Common Lisp Recipes_A Problem-Solution Approach-Apress(2015)
- 您在第 4-4 页的标注 | 添加于 2016年2月15日星期一 下午10:09:16
All external symbols of the used package become inherited symbols of the package using this package. ========== How To Win Friends And Influence People (Carnegie, Dale)
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. ========== How To Win Friends And Influence People (Carnegie, Dale)
When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. ========== How To Win Friends And Influence People (Carnegie, Dale)
Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. ========== How To Win Friends And Influence People (Carnegie, Dale)
‘A great man shows his greatness,’ said Carlyle, ‘by the way he treats little men.’ ==========
Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this inter-weaving is formalized as scientific method. ==========
Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are. ==========
(1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. ==========
One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely. ==========
Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on. Part Three, that ==========
Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on. ==========
An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another. ==========
An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. ==========
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. ==========
you have to have faith in reason because there isn’t anything else. But it was a faith he didn’t have himself. ==========
“To travel is better than to arrive” ==========
“Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. ==========
The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.” ==========
“It’s an unconventional concept,” I say, “but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” ==========
“That’s self-contradictory. If you really don’t care you aren’t going to know it’s wrong. The thought’ll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong’s a form of caring.” ==========
“What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. In this case, if you’re worried, it isn’t right. That means it isn’t checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn’t checked out is a ‘down’ machine and can’t be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven’t completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly.” ==========
the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind. ==========
“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. ==========