The reasoning behind it is sound. A lot of coursework is moving online anyways as convenience for students, and it seems like the right thing to do. I’m fortunate enough to be a student at a well-funded private university, but that luxury isn’t available to most people. With the popularity of this model from sites such as Khan Academy and the pipeline to do it, it seems almost unfair to restrict the content to the few who can afford it.

It’s not perfect. For many classes, there’s no replacement for the ability to work hands-on and in-person for a class. You lose the physical environment of a college campus and the ability to collaborate with instructors and other students directly. Some argue that the most valuable part of college is not the class but the people you meet. If you can’t have that, though, this is pretty close. The traditional teaching model with hour-long lecture and problem sets don’t really involve interaction to a large degree.

At the risk of sounding privileged and snooty, however, I’m a little disappointed by how this change is being embraced in class design for in-person students. Since this was an initiative in the Stanford Computer Science department, I’ve taken several classes (and am currently taking a class) that are now in the online format. To accommodate the students, they’ve made some changes to how the class is taught, both for online and in-person students. And I think they’re a little worse for it.

Most professors really do just lecture, and a recording is no different. I actually depend heavily nowadays on watching lecture online to work with my schedule. But some professors are really good in class, and it’s a shame to lose that. For example, Dan Jurafsky is teaching an online class on Natural Language Processing. I took the class from him junior year, and the lectures were great. He actively pushed students to think in-class, ask and answer questions, and just made it a really fun environment, even though he did teach by lecturing from slides. Even though the class was early in the morning, everyone was awake and could really be a part of things.

That class, however, might be an exception. The other substantial change that I’ve noticed is a change in the workload for students. In order to make classes available to possibly thousands of students, grading must be automated: it isn’t practical have TAs go through all the assignments by hand. This model isn’t really scalable for, say, English classes, where most of the work is discussion and essays. But for many technical fields, where work boils down to getting the right number at the end of a derivation or writing a program that computes the correct output for some specification, it might work.

Having gone through these classes, however, I think that might be cutting students short to some degree. Let’s take Computer Science as an example. Past the 3 course introduction to programming series, most of my work has been tailored towards proofs and conceptual understanding. Once you has a sense for how to program, actually programming in classes becomes much less relevant: if you need to implement a program, you take a few days and learn the specifics of the language. The real trickiness comes in understanding how to build systems, which requires conceptual understanding to compose and extend systems.

Take, for example, Probabilistic Graphical Models. Roughly, this class on artificial intelligence is about modeling phenomenon using probability. This class is historically known to destroy students. In the past, there were biweekly problem sets involving derivations and proofs for 5-ish problems, often the results of research papers in the field. TAs were responsible for grading these lengthy, often page-long proofs involving a mix of mathematical derivations, cleverness, and intuitive explanation. This syllabus, however, needed to be switched up, so it’s now weekly programming application projects.

So admittedly most of my response to that is bitterness at having been brutalized by the problem sets for this class while current students can just write a little bit of code. But it seems to me that students now aren’t getting the same depth that they would have thinking through problems. For many advanced algorithms, the actual implementation is relatively easy when it’s already outlined: it’s basically just translating a description into code, which often doesn’t require much insight into the algorithm itself. Trying to re-derive the same result or prove a similar concept, however, is much more difficult and requires understanding of how things work. I don’t need a class to teach me whether I did something right: I need a class to teach me whether I understand.

We’ll see how this shift goes moving forward. I’m all for providing content online as long as it doesn’t displace valuable aspects of current teaching methods. By focusing on the most tangible products of coursework, such as lecture content and quizzes, we might lose out on more subtle parts of an embodied, learning experience. Let’s democratize education as best we can, but don’t sacrifice the vitality of colleges while we’re at it.

Not all classwork is valuable beyond its own context. Mechanical math problems and proofs of known results are obvious examples of classwork for its own sake, so I hope you won’t be offended if I avoid posting addition and multiplication worksheets. A lot of other classwork, however, emphasizes critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity in research and projects.

I’ve tried to make most of my original and less embarrassing writing available on this site, either in blog posts or on my Writing page. Despite its pedagogical purpose, classwork can still be original and contribute to knowledge as a whole, especially given how sparse some of the content may be. For example, Google Analytics tells me that my essays and responses for Moral Philosophy are some of the most popular content from google searches on specific philosophers and philosophies. Posting this content is cheap and easy for me, and it may be extremely valuable to anyone else who ends up researching similar topics to those papers.

Even so, most of my work has been relatively simple, and I have often been frustrated by how difficult it can be to find similar resources for some actual published papers. Many researchers have released open frameworks for their work, but more often than not, the details aren’t available. Datasets, stimuli, program code, and all sorts of other work are poured over by researchers for months and sometimes years, yet are basically forgotten after being summarized and presented in a paper. I’m not a full-fledged researcher and don’t understand most of the logistics, red tape, and politics that probably drive most of the reasoning behind the process, but in the pursuit of knowledge, it only seems right to make as much known as possible.

Along those lines, I’ve taken that first step and released several of my projects on GitHub, where you can view much of the code for research I’ve done, along with some results and write-ups. As you might expect, the code is something of a mess, though should anyone want to use or understand it, I would be happy to clean it up. In all likelihood, the repositories will likely sit on the web, unseen and unimportant, but for how much I complain about not being able to find things, I can at least say that, “I tried.”

For many of my peers who have also worked on various projects, I recommend that you do the same. I’ve seen some really impressive work come out of class projects, and it would be a shame for that to be the end of it. And use it for current projects as well. Should you be doing any coding or research, you should be using a version control system anyways, so you might as well make it publicly available as well. In academia, we’re always all collaborating with everyone.

But first, let’s check in with last year’s Hopes:

1) Be more informed and open-minded.

I feel like I succeeded on this one. I still only read The New York Times as my only source of mainstream media news, but I have at least branched out to reading the conservative op-eds that they have. That’s getting a different perspective, right?

More seriously, though, I think another good switch that I made was using reddit instead of Google Reader as my primary stream of internet content. Although reddit has its limitation, Google Reader has more: I was only getting information from a fixed set of sources that I predetermined to be of interest to me, i.e. similar to my own mindset and views. reddit is a strange community, and it has the mob mentality and young, libertarian bent that you might expect from an internet community. Even so, I have been reading content from many sources I would have never found otherwise, and I can read reaction to content in the comments on reddit.

2) Stay in touch.

This was less successful. I think I have done as good a job staying touch with people as I ever have: I usually try to round up a couple big groups at this time of year, but otherwise, I haven’t really reached out too often. Cold-calling is a little awkward, especially in a growing world of asynchronous, digital communication, but I should probably work to overcome that a little more.

So what do I have on tap for this upcoming year? I honestly contemplated not putting any hopes out there since I’ve recently been going through a weird zen phase where I’m trying to avoid planning and setting goals too much. Even so, I do have a few things on my mind that I would like to do, and I would be deceiving myself to deny that they exist. Hopes are just hopes anyways, right?

1) Write a book, and get everything done to get to that point.

I’m currently planning on finishing my master’s a quarter sooner than I originally anticipated, and although school comes to an end, I want to keep up with the same sort of things. For one of the term papers I wrote this past quarter, I ended up with a dozen different topics surrounding an issue that I thought were interesting, each of which could turn out to be an interesting chapter. While thinking through that, I read several interesting books and sources that I would have loved to spend more time reading as leisure. I’ve thought quite a bit about doing this, but we’ll see what comes of it.

2) Play a few more video games.

Specifically, I currently have 4 different role-playing games in my Steam account that I haven’t played, and I would like to catch up on those. Through college, I played a tremendous amount of Super Smash Bros. and found a few other fun things to do with my friends, but computer games, a staple in my pre-college days, were left behind.

I think this was the correct thing to do, but over the past month or so, I’ve been playing The Witcher. Although the gameplay is a little weak and monotonous, the decisions and plot were very compelling. Specifically, the moral choices are very complex. I’ve played many RPGs, and most have a good/evil split, with the “correct” choice being quite obvious. In The Witcher, nothing is clear: do you help the Order of the Flaming Rose, who is sworn to killing monsters, protecting humans, and maintaining order, but also is racist and intolerant of non-humans? Or do you help the Scoia’tael, the freedom fighters who believe in equality but have resorted to crime, terrorism, and hostage-taking to achieve their goals? I could go on quite a bit about some of the rest of the content, but it suffices to say that this game, for the first time ever, legitimately had me thinking for a minute about what the right response was in some conversation or decision. Perhaps I’ll discuss this further in another post.

3) Cajun cooking.

For the past few summers, I’ve had a goal of something that I wanted to work on with my cooking. I think the next goal I have is Cajun cooking. That probably means that my mostly vegetarian cooking will need to come to an end as I start using seafood and sausages, but we’ll see how that works when I get there.

I think I have more that I want to do but don’t immediately have in mind. These types of Hopes come up regularly, so maybe I just need to follow the thoughts I have in the moment. Let’s count that as another Hope, too.

But Christmas is extra-special, because we put extra planning into everything: my mom coordinates all of the gifts, my mom determines what we’re going to cook for her birthday (often celebrated along with Christmas since they’re close and we’re all home), my mom makes sure that the house is organized for all of our arrival, and we all dredge up old stories to jab each other with. This particular Christmas, we all have our own kitchens to stock, so my mom appears to have amassed a huge pile of on-sale kitchen gadgets from which we can all snatch what we need. My haul was particularly good:

But moving past my obsession with containers and random gadgets, let’s focus on what we actually cooked up on Christmas. And all pictures are credited to the Zanbato iPad, which at least takes better pictures than my phone.

When it came time for planning our contributions to cooking for my mom, I was politely asked, “What are you doing?” I shrugged and offered up my services anywhere they were wanted, but my mom threw me a bone and said, “I liked the bagels you made last year.” That might make her the exception, as they were universally regarded as too salty and a little small and not fluffy, but I accept any low standards that I manage to set for myself. It makes it more difficult for people to be disappointed in the future. At the recommendation of Lisa’s Jewish boyfriend Matt, I looked specifically for a kosher bagel recipe, which I found here.

The recipe called for far too little flour, and I ended up adding close to another cup of flour to get the consistency of the dough right. It also calls for very large pieces of dough for each bagel. I made them much larger than last time, but not quite as big as recommended. I think I got the size just about right.

This recipe said to put the bagels in hot but not boiling water as well. I’m not entirely sure if this is correct, but at least they floated this time. The dough also rose more at each stage (resting, boiling, and baking).

The tops of the bagel browned up quite nicely after setting the oven to broil for the last 2 or 3 minutes of baking. The consistency is a little funny, which I think has to do with how I rolled out the individual bagels. You’ll note that there aren’t any toppings on it. In my excitement, I somehow ignored the etymology of “toppings” and got the notion that the bagels would work better if I had the toppings on the bottom where it would be pressed into the bagel more.

The bottom looks a little gross, but it ended up being delicious. They got a crispy side that beats any baking I’ve ever done, and it ended up being quite a success. Like many of my creations, they don’t look perfect, but the usual criticism ended there. We fortunately had some lox in the fridge, and they made a nice lunch before we started baking.

The menu for dinner ended up not being nearly as extensive as it has been in the past, but we didn’t need more food with stacks of leftovers in the fridge and more in our tummies from bagels and snacking. Nicole headed up the shrimp ravioli made entirely from scratch. I beheaded some of the largest, ugliest shrimp I had ever seen, and she made and rolled out the pasta by hand. It sounds like it was a lot of work.

The ravioli were quite large, but Nicole managed to dole out all of the shrimp filling, so it worked out. I guess this is preferable to ravioli without enough pasta around the edges that might burst. The recipe didn’t make a lot of sauce, but it made enough to coat all of the ravioli, of which it was difficult to eat more than 1 or 2 because of the size.

We had about an extra 1/2 pound of shrimp, so Lisa used that to make some Greek shrimp. Unfortunately, mint didn’t quite make it onto the shopping list, but it still ended up being pretty tasty, even if there wasn’t quite enough shrimp. She ended up slicing them in half, which worked because with the huge shrimp we had, this meant that we still had 8 pretty meaty halves.

To fill out the rest of the meal, we also had a few crackers with some very ripe brie and leftover cranberry sauce:

some asparagus:

and a simple salad. The most exciting part of the salad, from my perspective, was the avocado we used. I carried it back with me from California in my luggage after Julie and I picked it off of a tree at Stanford. We were worried that we picked it too soon, but it ripened nicely. The inside was bright green, soft, and juicy:

The other big effort was in making the birthday cake. My mom wanted something not too sweet and relatively light so that it wouldn’t languish in the fridge for a long time like the rest of our leftovers. It took a good portion of a car ride for her to describe a fruity cake, which was essentially the fruit tart we had always done, except with a sponge cake on the bottom instead of a crust. Why we couldn’t have just done the crust we’ve always done is beyond me, but I don’t do any planning.

The recipe we found for it turned out to be a vegan recipe, which we only realized after Lisa made the cake, and we started the custard, all without using eggs. Quick tip: if there aren’t any eggs in it, it’s not custard. Anything pretending to be is suspect, and by suspect, I mean probably bad. While I was stirring the custard, we tried a bit, and it wasn’t very good. Lisa made a game-time decision and tossed that custard down the drain and started again with a real custard. Better success followed.

Although it’s probably not the fruit cake you’re thinking of around Christmas time, it ended up being pretty good. The cake had an interesting (but not bad) consistency and definitely held its lime. The custard was as delicious as you might expect, and the array of fruit all worked pretty well.

I hope you saw something that you liked!

This particular vacation has been interesting because it’s 4 years since high school graduation, and many of my friends are just out of college. Oddly, I happened to end up meeting up with quite a few I haven’t seen at all since high school, which makes it as though college never really happened. It seems like people are all over the place: some have moved out of Texas, most stayed. Some are doing something related to their college major, most aren’t. But across the board, it sounded like they just didn’t really know what they wanted the rest of their life to be yet.

Which is fair. Unlike in other education systems, it seems that American students often make very late choices about what they want to do. I’ve heard that in Europe, some students are tunneled into a profession as soon as they reach high school. Here, most high school students don’t specialize at all. 4-year colleges often don’t require students to choose a major upon admission, and even if they do, they have the flexibility to change well into their 3rd and 4th years. And as I’ve discovered, even college graduates don’t know what jobs they want. It’s a sentiment I can understand given my huge changes over the past year or two, but I was surprised by their approach to dealing with it.

Many of them mentioned that they were just working jobs and not working on their careers. The sense I got is that they were biding their time: uncertain of what they wanted to do, they were trying something out to gain a little experience, like a small job at a big corporation, and they were continuing to explore and see what might come their way. While holding down the fort 9-to-5, they could spend their evenings learning about other opportunities and enjoying life. Instead of returning home and becoming dependents again, they wanted something temporarily stable until they found their true passion and could jump on that opportunity at that time, with a resume and work history that demonstrated their commitment.

Put that way, this plan seems very reasonable, and I happily agreed that this was the best thing for them to do at that time. Only after thinking about it a little longer did I realize that this very sound plan for any college graduate completely contradicted my own plan.

The mindset that I came into was that this time after college was the best time to go for the biggest, craziest idea possible. At this time, my only commitment is to eat and have a warm roof. I don’t have a family or any dependents and am not locked into a corporate ladder. Even if I fail, I can learn a lot, and even the worst failure is still work experience. By the time I’ve waited to find my passion, I’ll have lost that window of freedom. I only need that really steady position a few years down the road, and I can reevaluate the rest of my life at that point.

This mindset is undoubtably a product of my time in the Bay Area, where you can’t miss the optimism that anyone can change the world and the urgency that someone else will if you don’t. And even then, it can be hard to follow that plan. Many of my friends, even from Stanford, are heading out to well-paying jobs at big companies, some of which will definitely pitch their startup roots but realistically can no longer maintain that excitement and enable individuals to really go for the big thing. Even I almost took the safe path of job opportunities with Silicon Valley firms. It actually took some external forces to push me along the path I am now that has really allowed me to embrace this headlong mindset.

That difficulty and serendipity, however, reminds me how hard it is to believe these perspective from the outside. Out of my great confusion from CS378, one thing I learned is how important it is that one be immersed in a particular community and circumstance to really understand certain ideas. Just as how a halfback pass play isn’t very tricky to someone who doesn’t understand football conventions and strategy, it’s hard to really believe the mindset I’m in without being where I’ve been.

So for my peers reading this, I’m kind of directing this post at you. I understand that this mindset doesn’t really work for everyone, but don’t let that be an excuse for you. I think it applies to more people than they themselves realize. But don’t take my word for it: I think just reading my words on it is exactly the sort of passive engagement that I don’t think will change your life and is characteristic of learning about what you might do instead of going for it. I have an open couch for anyone outside of the Bay Area who wants to visit, and I’ll extend an open invitation for anyone around the Bay Area who wants to have lunch at Zanbato. At least take enough of a step to see what you might be able to do: once you start, it’s awfully hard to stop.

My mom still mails out a Christmas newsletter to family friends, but since it appears that snail mail is dead and no one reads their email, this blog seems like the right venue for that. The fact that it’s publicly viewable doesn’t bother me too much: my rule of thumb is that I’m willing to write about anything I would tell someone sitting next to me on an airplane. Most of the important facts are also available via any number of social networking sites as well. So, here’s the rundown.

I ended up graduating with my degree in Symbolic Systems this past June, right on schedule. My concentration was in “learning,” which was just a convenient way for me to fit the classes that I wanted to take. In reality, my studies were more directed towards computational models of cognition. Think of it as the flip side of artificial intelligence: instead of trying to make computers intelligent for its own purposes, I looked at how we could use the same technology to better understand how people think. I applied to PhD programs in psychology hoping to continue that type of work. That isn’t what I’m doing now, and I often skim over that fact by saying that I decided not to do that. The more complete truth is that I didn’t get accepted to anywhere that I applied to, so there wasn’t much of a choice. Instead, I decided to finish up a master’s in Computer Science at Stanford as part of a 5-year program that I was already accepted to.

Instead, I’ll be working at Zanbato, a startup in Mountain View that I co-founded, as a software engineer and have been working at part-time during school. Currently, I’ll be finishing up my degree at the end of March and going full-time after that. The basic pitch is that we’re building a marketplace for infrastructure investments. Infrastructure, such as bridges, powerplants, and schools, has a pretty fragmented market, and given how much interest there is from both sellers and investors, it’s a shame that it isn’t easier to work in this space. If you’re interested, check out the 5 minute video at sokoni.com on what we’re doing for Africa. Although it’s not quite what I envisioned myself doing a year ago, I legitimately think that this is the most important thing I could be doing right now and can change the world with it.

As such, I’m planning on staying out in the Bay Area for awhile. Meanwhile, my parents ended up never moving to Boston and will now be staying in Houston for the foreseeable future. The house is a little more empty, and all of my possessions are in (many, heavy) boxes, but it’s still good to see everyone around here.

StackMap, the other startup I’m a part of, is going well. We hired a CEO and have been picking up clients and making improvements. You can see it live at appstate and Stanford, where it’s hopefully making students’ lives much easier. It’s been around for 3 1/2 years now, but I think we’re just starting to make things happen with it. Given how many student startups fail, I’m proud to see us endure through all of that and still offer a valuable product on the far end.

Cooking continues as you’ve likely seen between my blogs. The biggest change happened this summer when I tried the mostly-vegetarian thing, which Julie, as my co-chef, also endured. She actually puts my attitude best in that I don’t cook meat for myself. I’ll happily eat meat when I go out to eat but have switched to meatless sandwiches and various alternatives for dinner. Future goals for cooking might show up in my new year hopes.

I played quite a bit of sand volleyball during my senior year, taking it 2 out of the 3 quarters. I haven’t played much since, but I have been playing racquetball regularly. Although we aren’t going to the national championship, I spend another season obsessed with Stanford football. Throw in a bit of Starcraft and ton of awesome potlucks, and that’s pretty much what my life is like.

Identifying Actors in Political Activism over Twitter

This paper was written for CS378, “Phenomenological Foundation of Cognition, Language & Computation.” I was interested in the use of Twitter for political activism (such as the Egyptian protests) and thought that there were interesting questions about identity and commitment in that context. I take some ideas from network models to understand the roles that individuals have in terms of concrete actions, and I connect that to some empirical work on types of actors in activism on Twitter to understand where identity comes from.

Evolution of Internet Information Consumption Through Bookmarking

This paper was written for CS224W, “Social and Information Network Analysis.” The question I had going into this was whether we could quantify how information overload might be reflected in changes in internet usage. Particularly, Neal Gabler here complains that we can’t grapple with big ideas and are stuck in the constant flow of unimportant data. I tackled this hypothesis by looking at Delicious data and seeing whether the distribution over bookmarks has changed from year to year. If he’s right, we should see more bookmarks happen sooner and less of a long tail. The basic result is that over 3 years, things look pretty much exactly the same, and I also try to come up with a model to explain the data.

I recently discovered how much I enjoy green bean casserole. I don’t remember it ever being on the family menu, but tender beans, creamy mushroom sauce, and crispy fried onions are just perfectly delicious. Putting it in a pie may sound strange, but in retrospect, it’s similar to a very similar chicken pot pie, where you replace all of the chicken and vegetables with green beans. We ended up scrambling to get it baked in time, but Julie showed off her pie-making skills again and made a flaky crust for the casserole.

Well, most of it. Unfortunately, the recipe for casserole made far more than fit into the pie, and without another Thanksgiving dinner for me, I needed to figure out how to down the rest of it.

The first night just mixed it with leftover rice, but the next, I found some inspiration online for creative uses for leftovers. The green bean casserole pasta sounded good, so I got some water boiling for spaghetti, then took a look in the fridge for the rest.

Fortunately, I had gone to the grocery store earlier that morning and picked up a few roma tomatoes. I had intended to get a beefsteak tomato for my sandwiches, but they were in awful condition: maybe it was a sign. I chopped one of those, a large garlic clove, and some onions as the extra kick for the casserole.

From there, it all kind of came together. Saute the onions and garlic in olive oil with some red pepper flakes, toss in the casserole and tomato to warm it up, and top it with some parmesan.

In retrospect, this also should’ve been a pretty easy call. Lots of casseroles have egg noodles or pasta, and pasta is delicious with cream sauces.

I mentioned earlier that my friends had left town while I didn’t, and you might be wondering how my Thanksgiving went. It went very well, thanks. I sat here on my couch, watching Texas-Texas A&M and eating macaroni and cheese from a box with peas, carrots, and avocado, just like my Thanksgiving last year.

You make your own traditions.

• we are already thrown into our normative context
• a lot of philosophy is based on truth
• in reality, you “bring it forward” with you with logical performance
• not processing information; more interpretation, performing as a minister
• email is treated like “information” – there are no commitments with it
• synchronization of people is dependent on the commitments they make
• in Mexico, they don’t have a culture of commitment; by workshop, they figured it out
• commitments are for humans: can’t really be automated
• so far has failed in politics: it’s about hope, image, not commitments
• how does such an efficient society end up with such messed up government?
• short answer: politicians don’t distinguish between promises & expectations
• politicians do things in public life that are very different from private life
• 3 ways for a promise to fail
• 1) competence – within a domain, can you do it?
• 2) sincerity – you can lie all you want
• 3) care – caring about the person, which is context-specific
• trust is an assessment
• unfortunately, we are thrown in culture of trust – “thrown assessment”
• “The Tea Party is a mood against Obama”
• this is pre-history; it’s a sentiment
• Occupy Wall Street is using the financial system
• “Projects need to be related to the concerns they are”
• Objectivity
• so we’re objective to the point of our experience
• in World of Warcraft, he had a “poverty of world” – not something you can do strictly by description
• can reprogram your history with games
• problem with the US today: we’re based on ideas of social mobility and life always getting better
• this may not be true anymore
• can the internet bring the “disposition of being” universally? (question from Kevin, not me)
• technology affects people in different places differently
• Heidegger’s concern: we have a metaphysical blindness of the west in how we conceptualize language
• most people think that language is about passing information
• some take the commitment interpretation
• astronomy: “how do people with such poor instruments have such big interpretations?”
• “what ar the central concerns of people?”
• we’re trying to build tools, but we’re in a history
• 3 concerns to care about
• 1) care – issue, not a problem
• 2) wonder – mood, questions
• 3) dwelling – being mortal, having an identity in a culture
• “thinking is synonymous with calculation, not mood or listening” – this is a mistake often made at places like Stanford
• “we need to bring sacredness back to tradition”
• Churchill did this, to create unity
• you can guarantee success, but you can all be on the same page
• US has a problem of mood right now
• we’re realizing we’re not the world power and can’t solve everything
• design is manipulating us for care – anticipating ready-to-hand
• but we can’t always anticipate
• wonder has to do with design because we deal with materials with properties we don’t control (Dean)
• accidents need to coalesce in a space, and they develop a possibility
• “a little bit of whim, a little bit of contingency, and a little bit of wonder”
• a big question with the internet has to deal with identity
• “the essence of language is poetry” – not logic, not precise in concept
• Steve Jobs built a sentiment that no one else has
• “Who said that geniuses and good people need to be saints?”