If you visit Darwin's home in the UK you'll also see that he had a slide made that fits on the staircase so his kids could slide down it. And there's a section about the effect the death of his daughter had on him. Clearly, a guy who loved his kids.
Say what you want about Darwin's ideas and how they have been used and abused by others, but everything I hear about this guy endears me to him.
I'd like to think if I were in alive his time and lived in his neighbourhood that he's the kind of man who could tell a fantastic story, dazzle you with his knowledge and various ideas, but above all be humble enough to treat you with the same respect.
I wish I could say the same for scientists today, so many I've run into are so focused on their own area of research that they have lost the ability to relate that learning and wonder they see to anybody who isn't just like themselves.
The "news" takeaway from this is for those of us who are fathers to young children, we can still involve our children in our work, be actively involved in their lives, and still be incredibly successful. I know I'm guilty of sometimes thinking my kids "get in the way" of my career. This is an excellent post for setting us straight, thank you for this. I need to be reminded of this once in a while!
My ideal, beautiful children have never interfered with my work in the slightest, and my ravishing wife has never complained that (as was alleged about Richard Feynman) I never annoyed her by being lost in thoughts about Calculus. My children turned out perfectly, and my wife always looks like Ellen Page on her best day (http://www.nerdacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ellen_page...).
The reason? I never married. I never had children. Life is complicated enough without looking for trouble.
But joking aside, I personally must say that the chaos that having children brought to my life is a positive aspect of the whole experience. It keeps me from becoming complacent and has forced me to develop some intrisical organizational habits and discipline.
As a father of three, with #4 on the way, I can get on board with that last sentence. But there's nothing like being married, having kids, and living the constant struggle to be a good husband and a good dad. Having a family will make it painfully obvious what your faults are, and how they affect other people. You will have to face up to those faults, and deal with them. If you don't, it's a disaster.
Life certainly is complicated, but the good stuff never comes easy (or cheap). You can stay single, be happy, and hide from yourself. Marriage and kids drags you out of bed and forces you see the light of day.
> You can stay single, be happy, and hide from yourself.
Again, I'm not pretending that my choices are for everyone, but I think the case can be persuasively made that an equal number of people hide from themselves by getting married as by staying single.
My point is that there are a great number of "right choices", not just one.
I don't disagree. My point was that choosing to be married and have children is a unique undertaking that is extremely challenging, but a lot of goodness can be gained by submitting to the hard work of being a good spouse and a good parent.
Sure, you can shoot it down with counter-examples of bad parenting, bad spouses, bad children, etc.. Still, there's nothing like it, and it's worth speaking about the positive aspects of heterosexual marriage in a forum dominated by, quite frankly, people like you who have an irrational, negative, and hostile attitude towards non-gay marriage and families, to the extreme point where mutilation of your reproductive system is an acceptable choice.
Yes, there are a great number of "right choices", but some are objectively better than others. A lot better.
Very true, and in the long term, there's nothing but it -- only those who make this choice are represented in the future population. The rest of us live on, not as organisms, but as memes.
> Yes, there are a great number of "right choices", but some are objectively better than others. A lot better.
Surely you understand that that sentence contradicts itself, yes? If one "right choice" is a lot better than another, this means there's only one right choice -- the choices aren't equivalent, or even comparable.
> Still, there's nothing like it, and it's worth speaking about the positive aspects of heterosexual marriage in a forum dominated by, quite frankly, people like you who have an irrational, negative, and hostile attitude towards non-gay marriage and families, to the extreme point where mutilation of your reproductive system is an acceptable choice.
Ah -- now I get it: choosing not to have children is mutilation. I read your post out of order, but in sum it makes its point very clearly.
To those reading this thread who expressed doubt that there are people who refuse to accept any choice but marriage and children -- hey! I found one, and there are many more.
My ideal, beautiful children have never interfered with my work in the slightest as my work is an interruption of my interaction with them (and my wife). My ravishing wife has never wrongfully complained that I annoyed her for be lost in thoughts. When my family is around, why should I be "zoned out".
Married (and childrened) people often try to convince those who do without that they too should indulge - "you don't know what you're missing". If you came to the decision that a family isn't important to you, then you'd also be horrible at it (resentment can be a big issue). When an "unfamilied" person declares how pristine their life is, why can't they stop there? Your "without looking for trouble" phrase turns your personal choice into a religious battle ... there was no need.
As for how your comment ties into the post shared here? It doesn't. My kids have defaced my papers (and sometimes the walls of our house) ... they're now cherished keepsakes!
There's a lot of societal pressure to find a partner and have children. It's not hard to understand where a feeling of resentment comes from for those who aren't interested in that lifestyle after decades of being pushed towards it.
I can understand that some have pressure from family. But societal pressure? I've never seen or experienced that, certainly not for males. Could you describe some concrete examples?
> But societal pressure? I've never seen or experienced that, certainly not for males.
Not my experience. For years, when I was younger, I was pressured in many overt and subtle ways to be married and have children. A number of friendships eventually ended because my unwillingness to be married was a deal-breaker.
On hearing me express my lack of interest in marriage, one guy asked, "When are you going to start living up to your responsibilities?" That was the day I found out what "proletarian" means.
My favorite story in that connection was the day a woman I was dating confessed that, contrary to outward appearances, she had chosen me for my intelligence and was doing all she could be become pregnant by me. I instantly ended the relationship and began to seek a vasectomy.
But then the fun began -- most doctors refused to perform the vasectomy because I wasn't already married and I hadn't already had "my children". Others insisted that I had to get my wife's signature -- no wife, no procedure. One doctor initially agreed, then, when he discovered I wasn't a member of a minority group, refused.
Finally I met the ultimate western doctor who, on hearing my request, launched into a seemingly rehearsed speech that began, "Your sperm belongs to the state, son." I regretted not recording the conversation for posterity.
Then I heard about Planned Parenthood. They gave me a short speech about how the procedure was irreversible, then performed it.
Since then, since the vasectomy, on a couple of occasions I've had women say, "I'm late! And I think it's yours! Okay, I might have forgotten just this once to be disciplined about birth control, but haven't you ever been swept up in passion?"
There was a couple at our church who asked when we were going to start a family - the Sunday after we returned from our honeymoon. I think perhaps there can be a localized societal pressure, but I don't think you can look at the US and say there's an overall pressure.
indeed in earlier societies children were joining the parents in the "serious" part of life earlier than it's the case nowadays. My little 1.5 years old is doing his best to prove he can use a smartphone, tablet, and notebook the way his father uses, alas he can't join me to do the real work i'm doing on emacs. if we were hunter/gatherers i could show him the grown-up life earlier :)
Can anyone help me understand why the writings of great authors, theorists of past are barely legible. More examples like, War and Peace[1], or Lord of the Rings[2]. I can barely comprehend a word, let alone the whole text.
I think it's because they write mostly for themselves and mostly as fast as they were thinking of things. It's better to have to interpret something for your publicist, then to lose a thought you had while focusing on writing.
There's some notable exceptions by the way, you can't have a post on academic handwriting without mentioning Dijkstra:
Funny, I hadn't recently read the article I linked before posting it, and in the first paragraph he actually explains why he writes so prettily. Although the context is programming notation:
"[..] the underlying idea of which is that, even if you have only 60 readers, it pays to spend an hour if by doing so you can save your average reader a minute."
It's an established fact that all highly intelligent people have bad handwriting. I made a note of the reference for this but, unfortunately, I can't read what it says.
An important factor is simply time. Handwriting styles change over time, and the cursive styles used in the past are especially hard to read for modern readers, since as we write less and less by hand, cursive writing (which is optimised for speed of writing) is rapidly falling out of use. And since we're not used to them, they're hard to read.
Is there any hint that the children understood part of the topics or the drawings are totally unrelated? (I prefer to use "hint" instead of "proof", because it's easy to cherrypick some drawings and find whatever meaning you want.)
I have a daughter and when she asks what I'm working in, I try to explain it. (Usually Maths or Physic. Apparently, I always start the explanation with "It's complicated. ..." because she mocks me.)
For example, I think that the topic of artificial selection is easy enough to explain to a child, and it's not difficult to make a drawing about it.
I find, if I can't explain the nitty gritty details, I can still talk about why the work is interesting to myself and to other people, what it's like to work on it, and why it's fun!
I wonder if carrot horses and blueberry camels are more ecologically friendly than their contemporary counterparts. They are most certainly more delicious.
I noticed that too ... perhaps Darwin and Babbage were going to collaborate on a book (tentatively titled "Computation of the Species by Natural Selection") which dealt with the probability of traits being passed on?
That caught my eye as well! No mention in the article, but on the scribbled out page of Emma Darwin's diary, she's describing how she's been ill, and what she's been eating (interestingly, I suspect she was trying to see if what she ate helped/harmed how she felt).
Starting on Sunday, it says:
Sick from half-past 12 to 5. 9 or 10 __ ___ copiously ___ ...
isnt it great:
interested browsers can also check out the Darwin Manuscripts Project, a collaborative initiative based at the American Museum of Natural History.
technically they are called aubergines and eggplants, but saying 'aubergine' gives blanks stares anywhere I've been in North America. As a designer I love fancying up eggplant dishes on restaurant menus with 'aubergine' in the name if they'll let me, and then still include the word 'eggplant' in the description of the dish for those who aren't aware of the meaning.
You're relatively new, so you may not know yet that HN generally doesn't like comments that are just jokes. The moderation system exists to promote the signal over the noise, and one-liners are mostly noise.
