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Take the word ghost, for example. Always having seen it speld in this way, we hav come to associate the feelings arousd by the idea ghost with its accustomd form of visual representation. To meet the word in our reading instantly and instinctivly excites those feelings in our minds. To meet the same word speld gost…
It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field new to me—and to read it in a different place. New associations…
An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand…
One way of dealing with errors is to have friends who are willing to spend the time necessary to carry out a critical examination of the experimental design beforehand and the results after the experiments have been completed. An even better way is to have an enemy. An enemy is willing to devote a vast amount of time…
There is no way to interpolate between two smell molecules. True, odors can be mixed together to form millions of scents. But the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient; there is no “smell pixel.” Think of it this way: colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be…
I got a kick, when I was a boy, [out] of my father telling me things, so I tried to tell my son things that were interesting about the world. When he was very small we used to rock him to bed, you know, and tell him stories, and I'd make up a story about little people that were about so high [who] would walk along and…
When people first sit down to design and architecture or write a program, things tend to be linear. That's the way most people think--do this and then always do that. But thinking this way leads to temporal coupling: coupling in time. Method A must always be called before method B; only one report can be run at a…