Transcript for:
Insights on Growth, Style, and Learning

well welcome to EC 4000 and I believe it hits on Tuesday Thursday and Friday is it 3 o'cl 3 o'clock on Friday right three right 3:00 there's been some confusion locally I'm in Hispanic 518 2655 I'm typically in in the mornings because I'm only teaching halftime so I go home work in the afternoons there are some notes here and for those not here don't come I can't give you out sets of notes by mail because the book is being published by a publisher and he has a right to profit by it it'll be out within a year but meanwhile students in this class can get a set of notes and if there aren't enough at the end of the day I'll bring some more tomorrow the first lecture is on orientation what am I trying to do the purpose of this course is to prepare you for your technical future there really is in this course no technical content although I'm going to talk about digital filters and all kinds of things there are things you presumably know I am concerned about Style I have studied great scientists ever since I was at Los Alamos during the war what is differing those who do and those who do not do significant things mainly it's a matter of style many a person I've known work just as hard as others but didn't have much to show for it so my problem is to instill in you something called style so you will amount to something after all the Navy is paying a large sum of money to have you here and it wants money back by your later performance now I will examine criticize and talk about various people's style mainly my own but other people's where I can use it now there are many of things I'm going to tell you I wish somebody had told me I had to find out for myself this course is not a normal technical course it's all about the topics they never told you in class that they should have because each course is taught this way and a large amount Falls in between that's what I'm trying to pick up now style cannot be put into words I can only approach you by particular examples and let you infer what it is now there is a belief that you probably have that anything could be talked about this goes back to Socrates Plato Aristotle in the early Greek times they thought they could talk about the Gods truth beauty Justice love all those things at the time they were saying these things there were the mystery Cults in Greece who said you must experience you cannot talk and if you remember the Middle Ages various Saints said you can't talk about God you've got to be experience him and the same way the muhammadans about Allah you can't portray him you can't put pictures you must sense so there is a long been a school which says you cannot put everything into words and one of them is style I really cannot say what I mean I can only give you these examples and struggle hoping that you will get the idea now to be effective in a course like this I have found that I have to talk about myself if I make abstract remarks it just sounds like so many Pious words if I talk about me what I've done maybe it will penetrate you now it gives a course an attitude of bragging I'm always talking about myself but I will tell you several mistakes that I made Lulu so you won't do the same sort of a thing simly I have to get you to quit your modesty I have to get you individually to respond to my challenge that you're going to be great that you have to say to yourself yes if that guy Hamming can go out and become a great stist I can or I can become a great person I have to get you to say to yourself that you want to that is worth the effort and you're going to try to be something more than just the average person now while we speak of teachers we are really coaches I cannot run a mile the four minute mile for you I can comment upon your style but you know you must do the work the same way I cannot make you a great scientist I can criticize style and other things but I cannot by mere words make you a great scientist you just says in running a 4minute mile must do the work which means you have to take what you hear and read think it over carefully discuss with your friends and see what you can adapt to yourself there is no one style which is successful painters paint many different styles you have to find a style if it's you which means you have to take what fragments you can from other people use them and adapt them and become yours you can't copy me directly you won't get away with it and I will use the analogy of painting as an example in painting once you've learned color mixing and form and sketching and so on you study under master who you temporarily accept as knowing what he's talking about well there are limits what can be done you know that if you copy the master style exactly you will not be a great painter you know also that if you paint in the style he did or she did it's too late the future wants a different style thus I can tell you about the style I used in the past but that won't be the style you'll have to have to cope with the future you must manufacture the style which will make you a significant person in the future so it's not easy while I only talk about past ones and make references to possible future ones it's the problem you face what I did would not make me successful if I were starting now just as my predecessor got successful on other things that I couldn't do and get successful on now it's another part that's very difficult for you when I went to bille Laboratories in 1946 I looked around since I was already interested in what made great scientists and I looked at what they did and when I looked at what they did to become famous it didn't look that difficult they tend to do the easy problems now I found in the course of my time there a couple of holes they left but fundamentally they did these easy problems My Generation did the somewhat harder ones and we left to the others the harder still every generation has more difficulty but you stand on our shoulders to some extent yet the task is harder having got man to the moon the next real good feat in space is going to be a lot harder therefore you have difficulty it's very definite now when I came to Labs there were four of us at the same time about we came in about the same time and we were about the same age within a year we privately called ourselves the four Young Turks and many many years later I discovered top management called us the same we were troublemakers we didn't do things the way the previous generation did we did new things the previous generation didn't like it we didn't do things right for example my my boss Henrik Boda in network Theory had made a reputation Doing Network Theory with complex variable and knew that's how you do things after all that is what made him famous this guy Hammond comes along and keeps using Computing machines which is not the way to do it in his eyes but it was the thing that needed to be done this is a lesson which I want to get across to you regularly supposing I am successful and you do rise to the top would you please remember that what made you great is not appropriate for the Next Generation you know how to get great CU after all you were great but the things that you did may not be appropriate for the Next Generation all too often we have that trouble with bosses they know by God this is why I did and I got the top it must be right they're very often wrong and I want you to think seriously when you rise to the top that your method of success is not appropriate now that the world has changed I want to talk to education education is what when and why to do things training is how to do it most of your courses have been training I'm trying to talk about the education part it's not easy but the school has allowed me a great deal of latitude in putting this course together which is concentrating on education now if you have one without the other it's not much good I've had very able technical people reporting to me who apply their technology and methods to the wrong problem and it had to be undone and I have other people who had all CR of theory but couldn't do anything there are not much use either you need both Theory to guide you and skill and technique to do one without without the other isn't too good now in a certain sense I'm engaged in medic education I'm talking about education constantly because that's what you're going to have to do you're going to have to educate yourself constantly that's what the future says now I'm going to constantly try and project forward what the world's going to be like but let's look back first to history the modern era in science and engineering began with Sir Isaac Newton roughly 1642 he was born Christmas day the same year that Gallo died and he lived to be about 85 so we can say it's around 1700 from G from Newton's time to ours we have about double the knowledge every 17 years the doubling period of science from then to now is roughly 17 when I came to Bell Laboratories in' 46 they were trying to shrink down from the war size down to 5,500 people I watched through 30 years of management putting hiring free and doing everything else like that double every 17 years with small Wiggles they had to hire the people to keep up with the expanding knowledge publication of books journals and so on for example I think I have the numbers here no I guess I don't now I'm going to make a degression oh another thing about the situation is is that 90% of the scientists whoever lived are now alive it's a common statement I'm going to now turn to a back of the envelope calculation which I learned by watching familyy and other people and shle and other people when I used to go lunch with them I'm going to suppose first we have an exponential growth of num of scientists that comes from a differential equation the rate of change is proportional how much you have and the solution is as you know the exponential growth now if I assume that the amount of knowledge being generated is proportional to the number of scientists this is the amount of rate and in the up to 17 years ago this is how much we generated this is the amount up to now now I put minus infinity on because it doesn't matter what lower limit I put it's so small it doesn't matter the exponential is very very small out there so who cares well I simply work it out I do the integration I come up with that and the statement was half the stuff has been done the doubling every 17 years from 17 years ago now we've doubled that says the ratio and a half I've got a formula for B now take the other statement 90% of the scientists who ever lived are now alive from now back 55 years that's what I'm going to take for lifetime of a scientist you probably don't mean a living scientist when he's two years old you probably mean a scientist alive when he's become or beginning to be a scientist and until they Decay somewhere in the 80s you consider him a scientist so 55 years is a reasonable number if I put that in over the whole of all signs whoever lived I come up with this using that this is a B I will come up using that substitution here I come up with 89 which is close enough to 90% now let's see what happened I got a clearer idea of what I was talking about and I had to answer the question which I hadn't thought about what did I mean by a lifetime of a scientist but you see those two statements are compatible we double every 17 years and 90% of the scientists who ever lived are now alive you have seen enormous growth of science from Newton's time to now well let me project well let me say now a good estimate of the number of various branches of science sence which we have developed in Newton's time we had only one thing called natural philosophy now we have lots of Specialties there are something like 10,000 Specialties it certainly is more than a thousand and almost certainly is less than 100,000 so 10,000 is a good number now if I project forward doubling every 17 years for 340 years that's a millionfold to the 20th that would make 10 billion fields of a specialty well you don't believe it you don't believe in 320 40 years there'll be 10 billion Fields specialy consequently science cannot go the way it has been for the next 340 years the doubling and the growth cannot go on one of the things we have done is we've got an exponential number of people in the field we can't go on that either every well every would have to be a scientist so you know that the past is not too good a guide to the Future now the reason why I want to put those back the envelope in is it's widely used I observed that fairy and uh chakle and those I used to eat lunch with them they did back the envelope and you saw what I had to do not only that but it also does two things it puts the thing firmer in your mind having shown you the calculation you may retain it a little longer plus it gives you practice in quick modeling nobody pretends this is really accurate I don't pretend 17 is the exact number it's somewhere around there but back the envelope calculations are very useful I found it very very useful when I hear things over TV or something else radio read newspapers and so on do a quick modeling and ask myself are these numbers possible and very frequently two things emerge either they're not possible or B you didn't even know what they were talking about to make a model you found that they failed to tell you what they were talking about just gave you a spectacular answer so doing back the envelope modeling is a very very big help now this doubling business is a very serious one I've had to live through my life with that fact so I put it here to table double is 17 years triple that 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 times about 56 years something like that tell you how you read that one way is ask the time from now to retirement look at this column that's how much knowledge will be that much times of what you now have if we go on the same way you face a rather horrendous future another way to look at is this suppose you were 34 when your child was born now your child goes to college there's four times as much knowledge not just mathematical theorems recordings of bosen's 9th where to go skiing what channels to read listen to on TV there's going to be four times as much knowledge for your poor child to face now you remember when you hit College how much there seemed to be don't be surprised if your children are somewhat more disoriented than you were and God knows you were sometimes disoriented this is what that means furthermore the doubling all the doubling occurs worst in the last period almost half the half the episodes occur in the last doubling period and that's what causes saturation saturation comes on quite rapidly so another way of looking at doubling is simply this table here which is disconcerting if you think you'll be Chief of Staff in say 44 years from now oh say 39 years there'll be five times as much knowledge needed to run the Navy as is needed now that is what you face well what's my answer my answer to that is learning to learn was the only thing I could do things become obsolete something like half of what we have taught you lovingly in other courses will be obsolete in 15 years either we're no longer doing it or it's been replaced by something else consider what I had to live through I came to Bell Laboratories in 46 and they were running vacuum tubes and so on it was a very important part so I started having a mathematical background studying like engineering what vacuum tubes were and so on but in some years I began eating with the physics department and I ate with the guys while they were perfecting not when they started but when they were developing the engineering side of transistors I did a great deal of calculation for them on transistors I obsolet all the knowledge I knew I haven't seen a vacuum tube for a long while except in my friend's office where he keeps going around to show students what a vacuum tube is you don't see them very often now you can say well the original transistors were te can and three legs yeah now there's a million am to ship that size I've had to endure that at Los Alamos we calculate atomic bomb designs on relay calculators which probably averaged maybe an operation or a second or maybe a second and a half around the clock six and a half days a week for a month sometimes three months but typically about a month to get one solution now you can punch in a modern machine go Boop and there's the answer I've had to live through a tremendous change furthermore I was educated as a mathematician I certainly had no course in numerical analysis I never knew about a computer I knew a little physics but uh Los alos taught me some more but fundamentally when I went to Bell Labs because I believe that the Computing I did I should understand the nature of the problem I had to learn something of the Brett the physical sciences some chemistry as well as a lot of physics some social science and a little bit of biological science because the Laboratories had such departments and some social science I spent a lifetime getting background knowledge out of something you have to have background knowledge enough to penetrate jargon which I'll talk about extensively a later date now one thing you can do is to try and cling to fundamentals which is very glib until you ask what do I mean by fundamentals well I have two criteria which are not adequate one is from the fundamentals you can derive the rest of the field secondly they've been around for some time but the fundamentals of amplification which were vacuum tubes doesn't count now true heartly uh the formula for gain I have trouble with names frequently I'll come to pretty soon Nyquist Nyquist formuls are still good the gain formulas used out of back and tubes are still useful although we have to apply to other things feedback is still the same but a lot of things are not now I need to discuss science versus engineering science if you are doing it you shouldn't know what you're doing if you know what you're doing you shouldn't be doing it not in science because science is supposed to be exploration of what you don't know engineering you should be doing it unless you do know what you're doing well nothing is pure science involves a great deal of engineering and Engineering devolves a great deal of new material so it's a great blend but what is painful to you it's going to be worse is that they two fields are growing together because of a simple fact again going back to I first came to Bell labs when something was discovered in physics the telephone company was not in that great a hurry to get it developed into the field after all have pretty much Monopoly why hurry now as you know we are not willing to wait for scientific principles to be develop we want in the field tomorrow so the two fields are coming together like that and the Leisure which we used long ago and which we are still using to some extent develop the ideas first and then apply it is going to be less and less acceptable when an idea is first around you want to apply it I just read last night that one of the presidents who were was at a museum uh one of these World's Fair was shot and the bat was his back right in his back boat the doctors refused to operate because they didn't know where the boat was but there at the thing were x-rays being demonstrated they didn't use the new technique was right ready available they cut a wheel in there got in a picture no they were conservative we don't allow that much anymore we're pushing very hard and you're going to be pushed very much to go from from idea to developed item and get it on the market rapidly now I once read there was some 76 different methods of predicting the future which is what I'm engaged in doing to some extent one is to predict tomorrow will be like today whatever temperature it is today predict tomorrow is the same it's a pretty good prediction a somewhat better one is to note the linear trend and predict a linear Trend and that's good for a while but not too long and furthermore it depends on which variable you pick to be linear if you pick the coefficient in front to be linear it's one thing if you pick the exponent it's something else it doesn't work too well I made many predictions on how much Computing I'll do pretty soon because I need to know how muchu capacity we would need and so on I was regularly wrong on the low side so one time I got miffed and said I will predict high so I got out some formulas and predicted real high couple years later the piece paper turned up my desk I looked at it I was low again the growth of computing has been unbelievable on the other hand on the other side take artificial intelligence the predictions made by almost all the experts 10 20 30 years ago have not been realized so you can't always go on things nevertheless there's a saying short-term predictions are optimistic longterm predictions are pessimistic and the reason is very simple the longterm are pessimistic because nobody can believe a geometric aggression I say again when we got transistors going nobody in his right mind would have predicted a million transistors on a chip that big nobody it's beyond belief but that's what we did and you know it so predic the future is a very very hard business but you have to do it history is important now some people believe the history repeats itself and some people believe exactly the opposite but one thing you can be sure of what we now regard as the past was to some people the future and what you think is a future will be the past there'll be a time when some of you will be in the history books yes you live long enough and do enough and you end up in the history books so what do you think is the future will become the past now another thing against history is Henry Ford senior's remark history is bunk and I think he said it for two reasons one is history is rarely reported correctly there are a great many descript Des what happened at Los alos during the war no two of them agree and they don't agree with what I think happened indeed one time a mathan ulam wrote his experience about the matter and published it and I came into Los alos on my regular summer visit and said to my friend I just read ulam's book that isn't how I remembered it he said that isn't how I remembered it either I was just going to say how did you remember it and I suddenly realized no two people remember the same now you're familiar with this an accident several witnesses see it they report different things there is no reliable report of what happened in the past it's what has come down to us and accepted secondly I think in Ford's mind was the fact that the past is being more rapidly disconnected from the future the invention of a computer tells you how much the world is different than what it was before computers appeared it's a change in the way we do things engineering now is to a great extent getting a computer to do the job writing a program and putting some terminal equipment around to affect the real world but the heart of much of engineering now is a computer now some historians when you read them they will give you the impression that that it was inevitable this was going to happen it was inevitable that Rome would fall fall or this or that and on the other hand they will tell you the future is very open-ended many things are possible can this be true that the past was very determined the future is very open it seems unlikely so you're left with saying maybe the past was not so determinate for example consider the individual lives of Alexander the Great Napoleon and Hitler if they had died in their childhood would not the world be very different on the intellectual side Pythagoras uh Aristotle Newton Maxwell Einstein are examples who people who had they died in their youth the world would be rather different so individuals do matter I suggest that the past was less determinant the historians like to make and the future is less open-ended than you would like to believe but there's a great many possibilities for you the future has got great possibilities now one other thing against history is unforeseen technological inventions can ruin anything like I told you transistors the development of vacuum tubes was practically cut off a technological invention can change completely the history of something and one can hardly foresee technological inventions but there are also social inventions which are important you people have been trained mainly in the physical side and I've got to make you more sensitive to the fact that all of your life takes place in a social society which has restraints thus I will claim that the future of technology will be less determined by what technology can do than social legal and other restraints on what we can do thus if you stop think about uh Highway controlled computer controlled highway traffic it sounds good to you ask yourself who do I sue in an accident and you begin to decide you know it's going to be a very very difficult thing to get going it's very difficult social conventions are going to stop a great many things from happening now I want to talk another thing a story which I'll use several times a story of the drunken Sailer he staggers a couple steps this way and he staggers this way and he staggers this way and he staggers this way in N steps typically he'll get the square root of end distance in 100 steps he'll get about 10 in 10,000 steps it'll be about 100 times away he may be right where he started he may be further away but that's typical on the other hand if there's a pretty girl over there he stagers like this back like this over like this he's going to get a distance proportional to n if I can create in you a vision of where you are headed you will make a progress proportional to n if you do not have a vision you will wander like a drunken cigar and get very little so one of my major purposes is to get you to form a reasonable vision of what you are going to do with your future what kind of a person you're going to be now you're going to say to me Hamming how do I know the future and I'm going to say it doesn't matter much from what I've examined in life what goal you set whether do you want March that way that way or that way if you have a goal you'll get somewhere near and if you don't have a goal you're a drunken cig my problem is to make you form your goals and some extent try to achieve them to make you something important rather than just drifting now it's comfortable to drift through life and a great many people when question closely will assert that perfectly content to drift through life I don't think too good idea of the whole thing now it's none of my business what goal you take it is my business to force you one way or another to set up some reasonbly decent goals to try and Achieve something in your life again the society is paying a great deal of money for your education it's entitled to something those who do something generally have somewhat kind of goals and see where they're headed and their lives add up those who don't are just a bunch of isolated events they did this they did that they did other thing but nothing added up so my problem is to get you to choose your goals even if you want to merily be a great guitar player I don't mind so long as you set a goal that is struggling that is the essential part that I'm really after and that's what this course is about to some extent forcing you somehow or rather to do more than you would have done other wise now the standard method of teaching is to have departments departments breaks things up in subject matter like calculus linear PR linear programming and so on too much Falls between and this course is an attempt in one way to plug all those holes the engineering courses you had you had a lot of engineering courses they taught you this that the other thing there are vast holes between them the optimizing of the components individual courses is not optimizing a total education as I will come to in systems engineering now another goal I have is to show you that in spite of different departments there's an essential Unity of all knowledge when You Face a difficult problem of unknown type it doesn't matter whether it comes from chemistry physics or anything else you have to find the answer and knowledge is pretty homogeneous then it's no longer divided up into courses no longer divided up in apartments although at Bell Labs I was in the math department almost all the time in fact I was doing great many other things I was doing statistics I was doing Computing I was doing physics I did a lot of other things chemistry we did not observe too tight a division but for purpose of organization you do have to have some structure but I want to get in your minds knowledge is sort of a homogeneous body which we have specialized with certain names but it's all reconnected together now the course will center around Computing not I like to think because I'm Prejudiced and my life in Computing but rather in fact they are going to dominate science and engineering and there are reasons for this very powerful reasons economics for example computers are far far cheaper than human beings far cheaper and they're getting Cheaper by the year humans are getting more expensive by the year speed far far faster your nervous system if you drop something on your toe signals up to your head about 100 m per second light 300,000 kilometers per second you aren't in a league you can't even touch electronic speeds there's no way you come near it so speed is overwhelmingly on the side of the machine accuracy name a number of digits of arithmetic a carry yes they can be quite precise they can do double Precision if necessary you would have trouble doing double Precision arithmetic probably if you tried doing it you could work it out but you'd have trouble reliability they're far far ahead of you God or nature however want to do it didn't make you to be a reliable thing you've been walking for years and still every now and then you trip and stumble you can't do anything really reliable that's why man ended up on the top of the Heap he has the flexibility built in but don't ever try to get humans to do something reliable take for example bowling all you can do is throw the ball down the alley exactly the same way every time have a perfect game perfect games are rare even among the most skilled experts Precision flying and other things are very hard to do we recognize that being very precise drill teams and so on are something remarkable the human animal wasn't really designed to do that he was designed for something else rapidity of control because the machines got Rapid Control we are now building airplanes which are basically unstable and we have a computer every millisecond is correcting the instability so we get better performance out of it but the pilot couldn't do it if that computer goes out the Pilot's through the pilot is left with a large scale the broad planning but the millisecond and millisecond is left under a computer because a human just can't act act that fast another one which I dwell on very much freedom from boredom it sounds trivial you cannot put a human being on a job to look for something for 3 years and when it happens respond promptly you can put a computer on the job you can put the computer on job to watch for the rare event if such and such happens in the atomic pile do this well it hasn't happened for four years now the dial goes over like that the human being isn't going to do very well he has been looking at thing for the last two and a half years even you can't get humans to be freed from boredom machines don't know what the word is bandwidth in and out in any rapidly changing situation the person in charge can only get so much information in and out and there's a general belief that really you can process only about 50 bits per second maybe 60 something like that but you can't process 10,000 bits per second a machine's got enormous moral bandwidth now not only visual auditory put all your inputs together they won't match a modern machine for bandwidth not only coming in but giving orders out for central control the human simply cannot in a complicated situation compete with a machine if it is merely bandwidth in and bandwidth out if it's making judgments that's another story but the machine simply cannot cope with it thus we no longer have a crew aiming a gun at an airplane we have a self-contained the human is too slow he just isn't much good we need much more rapid things than humans can cope with the bandwidth in and out which is really speed of getting information is fundamental computers have got it all over you ease of retraining training to a great extent is you learn to do something and now we I changed the equipment you've got to unlearn the old habits and learn some new ones and you've got to repeat them many many times to learn them with the computer I change the program and it's done no elaborate training no endless hours of constant practice Bing just put a new program and the Machine behaves a new way very easy hostile environments outer space underwater High radiation Fields Warfare manufacturing situations are unhealthy and so on I can put machines in those situations where humans are very very difficult in space I got to keep this human being in a atmosphere somewhat he's used to oxygen so on has to be employed High radiation will kill them and so on how we're going to manage you got people to Mars and back in the radiation field that's coming from the Sun I don't know whether we sort of radiate them thoroughly or maybe decide not to send human beings that far it's a problem now personal problems is another one it's one I'm much sensitive to personal problems dominate management there are all kinds of troubles with people with machines that are no pensions there are no personal squabbles two machines don't get squabbling with another but I've had two girls squabbling and wouldn't even share the same room together uh unions no personal leave no egos no death of relatives your mother died machines don't have that Recreation if I turn the machine off that's the end of it I have a human being I have to provide reasonable Recreation machines got it all over humans now all of you probably already been saying oh yeah but what about the advantage humans have I won't have to list those you're trying to do it already but I gave you a bunch of details which you could find very hard to get around that the machine has got great advantage in many places and because it's economically sound you are going to see more and more machines running organizations some computer well let's say computers the design of chips is under computer control to a great extent some computers are actually being assembled heavily by machines I was on a board of directors of a computer company for a while and uh at one point more than half the computers coming down the production line we were grabbing to mechanize the production line we're mechanizing the building of computers more than half the computers we sold less than half of them because we're mechanizing the line and getting production much cheaper that shows you how rapidly a company in Computing business was really izing itself and one of my friends said he ordered a bunch of machines the message came in overnight a bunch of machines assembled those particular computers they wanted and the next day those computers were on the loading dock designed just what they wanted with the parts they wanted now lastly this is in a certain sense a religious course I am preaching a message that with One Life to lead you ought to do more than just get by now there are a great many religions and I don't want to get involved in ones or the other too much uh it is however an emotional matter I'm really appealing to now it's very frequently said that a happy life is one who has some goals they achieve well studying the matter over and reading about it and talking people everybody pretty much agrees that it's not the achievement of the goal that really is the best part it's the struggle the struggle to success is what makes you what you will be remember in your old age you're going to have to live with yourself there's no escaping living with yourself in your old age you're stuck with yourself and an old age you can't change much as you can when you're younger consider the kind of person you wish to be in your old age and start now being that kind of a person this is what the course is all about really in one sense now it's an opinion it's not a fact it's an opinion that most people believe that the struggle to do achieve Excellence is worth the struggle also when you look at people's lives I can tell you a story which I may repeat a couple of times as a child I went to a movie they were called Nickelodeon my day but we actually spent a dime to go to the movie one Saturday I went with a friend of mine and it was one of these you laughed and laughed and laughed all ridiculous situations we walked out and he said to me you know that wasn't a very funny movie I thought for a while I said you're right all the laughter did not make the movie funny at all and the same way with life the pleasant life is not the one the sum total of the Pleasant moments somehow or other it's added up very very differently the good life is not the life of pleasure from moment to moment and you know it in fact you are well aware that you cannot get up in the morning and say I shall be happy today and make it work the good life has to be snuck up upon and I'm saying the an opinion of myself and many other books the way to do that is to take yourself in hand and manage yourself to be the person you wish to be to achieve the goals you wish and be more articulate than just idle drifting like a drunken Sailer now in ancient Greece our boy Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living so what I'm saying goes back that far I was crossing elel campus one time as consultant for the president on a job a whole committee put put together I walking across I heard a professor walking across the campus right ahead of me saying to a student the unexamined life is not worth living and in the course of cross crossing one quadrangle he managed to say it three times so I'll repeat the third time the unexamined life is not worth living see you Thursday right and there are notes Here on the course and if there aren't enough I'll bring some more tomorrow oh to Thursday