The book invokes the pagan notion of a pantheon of gods, rather than the Judeo-Christian God. He describes a ritual where he propitiates the Muses (the gods of creativity) before sitting down to write. You might find it easier to swallow, because when people invoke the J-C God they often mean it completely literally, while the Muses are clearly allegorical.
But to get through the book, you have to suspend your rational empiricism quite a few times. Perhaps no more than to read The Odyssey or Macbeth, where internal human struggles are illustrated with supernatural imagery.
Many of the greatest human achievements in both art and science have had explicitly religious motivations. I'm an atheist myself but it seems like it might be worth exploring / understanding that if one wants to achieve something great. I've no idea if this book is helpful for that - I've never read it though I have seen it recommended several times - but it seems like an interesting topic to explore regardless of one's personal religious beliefs.
Despite my own lack of belief, to my taste religiously inspired art and architecture of the past seems to reach a level of greatness that seems missing from much of the modern God-free stuff.
I think we are going off-topic, but: 1) a lot of old art was commissioned with religious themes, regardless of artists' feelings, because that was the socially-acceptable thing to do; artists simply illustrated stories, giving it a personal spin. They are more akin to, say, illustrations for a modern movie production, than to a Warhol or a Duchamp. You might be responding to that. 2) if your parameters of greatness include "life-likeness", anything since the invention of photography will be disappointing, because artists stopped trying (they obviously couldn't compete); and 3) democracy freed artists from having to convey The Message, be it God, Nation, Progress or whatnot. Left free to choose topics, artists moved in other directions. Contemporary art is very cerebral and polemic, all the fun and sentiment is in pop.
I read this book this week. Its not well written, the „wisdom“ in it could be broken down to one page, and the religious explanation leaves a bad taste. Still there are some parts in it which are true imho and are often forgotten. For example that its necessary to be not cynical about your work, and treat it like something valuable which is not owned by you. To leave your ego out of the work and do the work for the work.
Love wget! The waybackmachine is a great tool but I wish there was a more robust/complete service out there. Maybe the government is/will archive the top million sites or something like that.
The thing I'm most confused about the whole article is how did some homeowners go years (a decade?) living in their home without paying a mortgage and not get evicted? The article implies this is happening but I didn't realize any lender allowed that amount of time to pass.
I assume the properties were so devalued that it literally wasn't worth the bank's time to foreclose and try to sell, nor to keep hassling the non-paying borrower.
Very cool. I visited Johnson Space Center mission control in Houston last week and was reminded how really smart people are monitoring and flying the ISS 24/7.
ISS has planned communication outages resulting from satellite signal loss. Everyone in mission control knows when these disconnects will occur and how long they’ll last and plan their breaks around them.
I hope you will see this comment. I wanted to let you know that your account has apparently been "shadowbanned", which means that you can see your own comments but no one else sees them unless they have "showdead" turned on in their account settings.
If you view an HN page that you commented on in an incognito window, you will see what I'm talking about.
I can only guess that the moderators took this action because of the large number of Amazon affiliate links you have been posting.
Its fine to post an occasional product link when it relates to the topic, but affiliate links are not so welcome - especially when they are disguised behind an amzn.to shortened URL. Just post an original Amazon link, with everything removed from the URL except the minimum required to go to the correct page. The URL should look like https://www.amazon.com/dp/NNNNNNNNNN/ where the N's are the ASIN.
Some of your other comments, like this one, are good quality and people have "vouched" them which makes them visible to all.
I suggest you email the moderators (address is somewhere in the links at the bottom of every page) with an apology and a promise to not post any more affiliate links. Maybe they will reinstate your account.
Yes, as I said, this is because someone vouched it. Try turning on "showdead" in your account settings and view their comments in a logged in window, and you will see all the dead comments. Then view the same URL incognito or without showdead and you will see what I'm talking about.
Totally agree. GraphQL makes perfect sense for a large app with many endpoints but there isn’t a lot of benefit for smaller apps. I’m involved in an app now that “has to use GraphQL” but could easily be done with a restful api without the additional overhead of what is essentially middleware.
I agree as well. In a talk the creator of Asana said something along the lines of their goal is enabling others to do good and do so more effectively. Software is pretty amazing.
