De-Romanticizing Voting

Ugh. In actual outcomes, voting isn't an expression of your heart, your soul, or even your emotion. The result of a vote isn't "the right thing" or "the thing I love" or "the cure for social ills" or "the perfect solution." It's not a mechanism of protest or a chance to be dramatic, and it's not a "gesture" or a stand -- that's what demonstrations, letter writing, and petition campaigns are for. A vote is a functional choice for the preferable viable outcome, an act that adds 1 to a tally th...

 Old Kepler On Reading His Young Work

I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.