Thursday, October 10, 2013

As a Matter of Fact


I am easily amused.

4 comments:

Kathleen said...

The more I think about this the more outraged I get. David Brooks discussing heroes on a panel. I just saw "Fly", a play about the Tuskegee Airmen, and it is one of the most powerful pieces I have ever seen. Those men were heroes, as were the Civil Rights activists and underground railroad conductors and slaves who dared to learn how to read, union activists, women fighting for my right to vote... and David Brooks will babble about some Burkean bullshit. I'm too pissed to even try to come up with some funny David Brooks Hero analogy, like a hero is his decorator who found just the right shade of ekru for his media room in his 14 room mansion designed for entertaining. (yeah, pretty lame). Grrrrr. Please excuse my rant. Sigh

Horace Boothroyd III said...

If I may throw in my two cents, I would question the classification of Nobel Laureates as heroes.

Familiarity breeds contempt, perhaps, but I have known quite a few laureates and "hero" is not the word that leaps to mind. Ambitious, driven, commanding: they are all smart but not necessarily as super duper smart as people suppose. When you play in that league everyone has a five sigma IQ so failure and success hinge on a constellation of other factors.

At least we can be grateful that no celebrity CEOs are being horked up as heroes of corporate warfare.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

I get it, and that's cool: I wouldn't believe some random blogger either if he started shooting his mouth off about Nobel Prize winners...

But I really do know a whole bunch.

I was Dick Schrock's personal assistant.

I worked in Barry Sharpless's research group.

I lived in the same housing complex with Woody Hastings and Dudley Herschbach was across the street. As ambitious young scientists we had lunch together all the time.

I'll leave that as a sampler. This is not for publication, but I do want let you know that you are not dealing with some schmuck.

On that note, I apologize if the David Atkins dustup caused you any inconvenience. You have probably noticed that I consider him a muddled thinker, and a tireless self promoter with a dangerously swollen head - a description that seriously overstates the extent to which I think of him at all. It probably would have been better to let that sleeping dog lie. Sorry, I will strive to do better.

jim said...

♪ ... ain't that America ... ♫