The thing that Von Neumann had, which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that’s important.
I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.
The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. “A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres,” wrote Robert Payne. “The French aristocracy acquired new titles, new experiences, new mistresses, new diseases.”1.
He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean.
He believed in eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he said prevented the body from forming harmful.
Why in the world would you involve Steve in a decision like this?” Amelio replied, getting angry. “Steve is not even a member of the board of directors, so what the hell is he doing in any of this conversation?” But Woolard didn’t back down, and Amelio hung up to carry on with the family picnic before telling his wife.
As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to “the difference personalities make”.
Here is our gentle and beloved Leonardo, who became a vegetarian because of his fondness for all creatures, wallowing in horrifying depictions of death.
If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he wouldn’t do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was talking to. It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.
He would not kill a flea for any reason whatsoever,” a friend wrote. “He preferred to dress in linen, so as not to wear something dead.” A Florentine traveler to India recorded that the people there “do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”3.
I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.
The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.
His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, “Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity.”9 On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself. Einstein.
We’d buy brochures of Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them. Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.
When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines “cooperate in making decisions.” In other words, they would augment each other. “Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.
This concept of the cosmos that Einstein derived from his general theory of relativity was elegant and magical. But there seemed to be one hitch, a flaw that needed to be fixed or fudged. His theory indicated that the universe would have to be either expanding or contracting, not staying static. According to his field equations, a static universe was impossible because the gravitational forces would pull all the matter together. This.
This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation.
But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.
In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.