Equational

 My summer 2000 lunches were taken sitting under the twin towers in New York. I was there for the recently opened Actant's NY office , and would either have lunch at Battery Park or looking up at the towers. I have sometimes described my work as "if I were an architect, I would design skyscrapers", to then add "it is a pride thing, but also life is short, so let's push things forward". To eat my lunch below the towers, was in part to bask in the marvel of engineering tall buildings, but also to feel the ego that drives us to surpass ourself, and often others too.  These are some pictures of the towers I took: When the towers went down, I truly could not believe it. My old black and white TV had been switched on in the office (in Zug, Switzerland), my colleagues were huddled in front of it, I walked over, to hear someone say "one of the towers is down", to which I answered: "that is not possible, it must be hidden by the other". It was a s...

How best to learn? How best to build deep personal growth?  I noted this 1995 advice from James Taylor (in this YouTube ), on how to become a 'musician like him': Be as self-contained as possible, to keep the overheads to a minimum... spend as much time free and lonely as you can. ... I think lonely and free go together... somehow. And then you can’t help but evolve, if you keep your mind open, and you are not denying your experience, not shutting yourself down, not sort of clamping yourself down, or letting other wastes of time come in and claim all of your time. If you keep yourself open and free, then things will happen to you, and you will be educated by them and you will evolve, you will grow. Is this good advice? Does deep personal growth only happen alone? To contrast this with George Polya who states in 1966 : Teaching is giving opportunities to students to discover things by themselves. We might rephrase this as: To learn, students must be given the opportunity to disc...