"Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated"

[drwex]

What the heck is a cellular automaton?

We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.

A beautiful (to me) quote drawn from an essay at Long Now by Danny Hillis telling the story of Richard Feynman's involvement with Thinking Machines.

The desire and drive to make things simple and concisely explainable is something I admire a great deal. I wish I had more of that talent myself.

Comments

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

I second that.

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

He is one of my heroes, way more than a physicist.

[dpolicar]

I'm sorry... I don't quite understand. Can you -- ow!
Um... yeah. What you said.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

That's why I love teaching in general, and loved teaching basic Java programming is particular. Sun loves to give fancy-schmancy names to very simple concepts, so I got to be the Great Demystifier. ;-)

And now I'm going to go on to writing courseware, which is even better, because it's like I'll be helping to teach every class done by every instructor.

[drwex]

That's a very good point and it is one of the things I liked about teaching.