For most of that time, I’ve also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.
On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
I view Linux as something that’s not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it’s coupled with file systems.
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won’t have another book finished by next week.
I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
When in doubt, use brute force.
Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.
I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
I don’t think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven’t really had experience with.
One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can’t.
But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.