Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

It’s interesting that two favourite writers of mine had worked for big tech companies. Kurt Vonnegut worked for the PR department of GE. His portrayal of the genius scientist in Cat’s Cradle was based on his interview of Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir of GE Research. Thomas Pynchon was a tech writer for Boeing. Yoyodyne, a defence contractor in The Crying of Lot 49, is a caricature of Boeing. Dec 4th 2020 update: I also learned that William Gaddis worked for Kodak and IBM.

In other parts of Africa, you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. - Paul Bowles

Anticipating the next release of macOS (10.16; Big Sur), I started to read the novel Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. It’s very interesting to me that in Chapter 12, Kerouac went to visit Neal Cassady, who was living in the Santa Clara Valley (more precisely, 1047 E. Santa Clara Street). So, in the late 50’s, Neal Cassady was practically living in today’s Silicon Valley. I had never associated with Silicon Valley with the counterculture movement. I found a couple of articles about Beat figures in the Silicon Valley. Al Hinkle, for example, lived in San Jose. Jack Kerouac’s early introduction to Buddhism was apparently from a book that he stoled from San Jose’s public library.

One of the productivity tips that I have found useful is oddly from Ernest Hemingway (hardly a man of high productivity). He said that he always worked to a point where he knew how to continue, and then stopped working for the day. This way, he always had a good start the next day. I read about it in an article on creativity but didn’t know where it was from. I just discovered it’s from Hemingway’s memoir A Movable Feast, in a chapter about his interactions with Gertrude Stein (“Miss Stein Instructs).

The plot of Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum involves two publishers: Garamond and Manutius. Both names refer to figures in the history of printing: Claude Garamond designed the Garamond font in the 16th century, while Aldus Manutius was a famous 15th century printer who invented italic type, a few punctuation marks, and the pocketbook format. This might be a joke because both names are relatable to Apple. The Garamond font was used in Apple’s logo, and Aldus Co. was the original developer of PageMaker (a killer app for the Macintosh) before it was acquired by Adobe.

Turing once dreamed that he was a Turing machine. When he woke up, he wondered if it was him who dreamed of being a Turing machine, or if it was a Turning machine which dreamed that it was Turing - a koan from a programming book published in Taiwan)

I saw this book in the Melbourne Rare Book Fair. To anyone who can read Chinese, this looks like the practice book of a young child starting to learn to write. The characters are intelligible, but the writer clearly has not mastered the basic principles. If Chinese characters are people, these little guys are seriously deformed. Some have really big heads, some have tiny feet, most of them look like zombies walking with their body parts dangling, ready to fall off. But this is a serious book. The asking price was over $10,000 AUD. This is Museum sinicum, published in 1730 by German sinologist Theophilus Bayer.

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization opens with the poetic imagery of Ship of Fools. But what is the ship of fools? Apparently it all started with this book. I saw it in an exhibition of books sharing the theme of traveling at the library of Monash University. This is the latin edition of Ship of Fools by German humanist Sebastian Brant, published in 1497. The illustrations are by Albretch Durer (!).

This is the famous world map by the 15th century monk Fra Mauro. I saw it in Museo Galileo in Florence. Unfortunately it was a replica. The real thing is in Venice. I found it very difficult to recognize landmarks on the map because the orientation is very different from our modern convention. North is down. South is up. Here’s a puzzle: What’s this? Anglia is England. Scotia is Scotland. What is Hibernia? My teenage obsession with Umber Eco finally pays off. It’s Ireland. In The Name of the Rose, there is a giant library with rooms organized as a word maze.

The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty - Don Quixote