Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

I had a surreal experience reading Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, published in 1993 (I found a copy for free). Stross argued convincingly that NeXT was hopeless. Had I read it in 1993, I would have thought that the analysis was spot on. Who would have thought that in 2023, people would be still using essentially NEXTSTEP? Also, the entire workstation market has been wiped out, but IBM is still selling mainframes!

In V., Chapter 14, Pynchon made passing references to the Dreyfus Affair - a social controversy that divided France near the end of the 19th century. Just by coincidence, I read something about it earlier this year. The Father Brown story “The Duel of Dr Hirsch” by G.K. Chesterton is a very odd detective story, because it’s really a commentary on the Dreyfus Affairs. The other historical figure that plays a more significant role in V.

As a PhD student, I took a class in animal behaviour. I didn’t work very hard and have forgotten most of it. However, since I became a father, I have been thinking more about this class. One of the papers I read was the classic “The social function of the intellect” by Nicholas Humphrey, first published in 1976. The paper is packed with insightful analogies. For example, Humphrey offered an interesting interpretation of Robinson Crusoe.

An obscure historical note from Thomas Pyhcon’s novel V.: there is a Chopin museum in the Spanish island of Mallorca, where you can see a cast of Frédéric Chopin’s hand. Chopin spent a winter there in 1838.

In Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., there is a subplot involving rhinoplasty. A surgeon in the story (“being a conservative”) refers to his own profession as the “Art of Tagliacozzi”. This is reference to the 16th century surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who pioneered surgical techniques for nasal reconstruction. He was a professor of anatomy at the Archiginnasio of Bologna, whose famous anatomical theatre houses a statue of Tagliacozzi holding a nose. I visited Bologna in 2015.

What was the first time that we know that non-human animals have color vision? From what I can find, the first person who scientifically came to that conclusion was John Lubbock in 1888. What was so strange about it was that he studied Daphnia - a plankton (!). He discovered that the plankton was attracted to yellow light, but not to white light. Lubbock also reasoned that insects must have color vision, but was not able to scientifically demonstrate it.