What to him from England?

Scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, and anything that may not misbecome the mighty sender, doth he prize you at.

どろ に しだるる

aoyagi no:

the green willow
drooping down into the mud
at the ebb tide 

Bashō. 

You’ve Gotta Be Cruel to Be Kind in the Right Measure

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the… pic.twitter.com/5fzvRHMnSC

— Ihtesham Ali (@ihtesham2005) May 9, 2026

The meat:

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked... 

The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. 

Is this a universal absolute?  Maybe not, but does seem to be a pattern.  Even when you look at a GOAT like Simone Biles, who has essentially done gymnastics since she was 6, she isn't just the best at the balance beam or another particular skill, but has learned general physical and mental control to do pretty much any damned thing she wants.

Einstein rode a bike and played violin.  Life is a rich pageant.

Selah.

The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart

I think about this bit in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway (October 12, 1786) now and again:

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: & he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks & shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, & to suffice for our own happiness.

The larger context isn't the point here.  It just resonates with an introvert who has had...suboptimal experiences navigating human relationships.

Selah.

Oh well, who wants to live forever?

When love must die?

O Wave God who broke through me today

Burning Island:

Who wavers right now in the bamboo:   

   a half-gone waning moon.

                  drank down a bowlful of shochu   

                           in praise of Antares

                  gazing far up the lanes of Sagittarius

                           richest stream of our sky—

   a cup to the center of the galaxy!   

                  and let the eyes stray

   right-angling the pitch of the Milky Way:   

                  horse-heads   rings

                  clouds      too distant to be

                  slide free.

                              on the crest of the wave.

Each night

O Earth Mother

   I have wrappt my hand

   over the jut of your cobra-hood

                               sleeping;   

   left my ear

All night long by your mouth.

O   All

Gods   tides   capes   currents   

Flows and spirals of

      pool and powers—

As we hoe the field

   let sweet potato grow.

And as sit us all down when we may   

To consider the Dharma

   bring with a flower and a glimmer.   

Let us all sleep in peace    together.

Bless Masa and me as we marry   

   at new moon         on the crater   

This summer.

Gary Snyder.

Everything Fails All the Time

I do love a good historical fire:

On Sunday, May 8, 1988, a fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company. One of the largest switching systems in the state, the facility processed more than 3.5 million calls each day while serving 38,000 customers, including numerous businesses, hospitals, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway Airports. Around 4 PM, the Division Alarm Reporting Center for Illinois Bell began receiving automated reports of power failures and fire alarms at the Hinsdale Central Office, but it was nearly an hour before a technician arrived at the facility to investigate the alarms. By that point, however, smoke was pouring out of the building and telephone service had been knocked out for much of the region. In fact, the telephone technician had to flag down a passing motorist to ask him to drive to the Hinsdale Fire Department to report the blaze in person... 

The fire at the telephone center had a significant impact on Hinsdale and the surrounding region as telephone service was lost for more than 40,000 local phone lines. As restoring service to the airports, hospitals, and emergency services was the priority, many residential areas were simply out of luck until new circuits, cables, and other materials could be brought in to replace the telephone equipment lost in the fire. It took Illinois Bell four weeks to completely restore telephone service for the entire affected region.

This was right around finals my frosh year of college, so didn't really clock it at the time (I was busy not studying), but did learn about the incident from a slide in one of the first telecom courses I taught circa 1994.

On a related note, the Canvas LMS that we and many other institutions use went down yesterday, finally was back up today.  That impacted two programs I work with.  Not the same stakes as the Hinsdale Fire, but funny that it happened around the same date.

Anywayz, still wicked busy (I shipped my very first production app for testing today!), but I had to note this one.  Post title comes from our esteemed CTO, Werner Vogels.

And now, I watch the WNBA season tip off.  I have missed it so...

Selah.

Starting over when the story's got an astounding twist

Happy 202nd Beethoven's Ninth Day!

In the Moment

Now:

Out of your whole life give but a moment! 

All of your life that has gone before, 

All to come after it, —so you ignore, 

So you make perfect the present,—condense, 

In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, 

Thought and feeling and soul and sense—

Merged in a moment which gives me at last 

You around me for once, you beneath me, above me—

Me—sure that despite of time future, time past,—

This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! 

How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet—

The moment eternal—just that and no more—

When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core,

While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet! 

Robert Browning.

#throwbackthursday

Old Man Nugget.  (2020)

Don’t worry all about me

I don’t need you at all.

Though the Mountains Divide And the Oceans Are Wide

Minuscule Things:

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it,

and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle

there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection

that could contain, like a microchip, an epic

treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld.

And at the base of our glass there’s nothing

so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous

patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text

so short it consists only of the author’s signature,

which has to stand, like the future, for what might

have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life.

Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s

like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched

Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets

a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!

William Matthews.

I think that somehow, somewhere inside of us

We must be similar, if not the same.

Boundaries

Venus, Or Maybe Mercury:

The evening star, that is not a star,
comes out, but was there all the time,
over the sunset, that is really
the earth's turning;
and this is what we wish on:
may things be what they are not,
may blessings uncover themselves,
may we be restored to our rightful place
in the center of things,
the sky inflamed with our desires,
crowded with messengers
anxious to carry them out.

Robin Shectman.