Safi Bahcall, Paul Graham, Vladimir Nabokov - #18 - 1/15/2020
· Safi Bahcall is a really interesting guy. According to his site bio at https://www.bahcall.com/about/ -- Safi is a second-generation physicist (the son of two astrophysicists), a biotech entrepreneur, and former public-company CEO. I have listened to his interview on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast a couple of times already, always finding something new. He delves into honing skills, seeking the cure for cancer, and how the film industry is kind of like the bio-tech industry. Really worth the listen, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/BH_hf18ICqM
· Paul Graham. His site’s bio: “Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which now gets around 15 million page views per year. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 2000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a new Lisp dialect written in itself called Bel.” On the side, he likes to write a lot of essays about Silicon Valley, business, tech, what it means to create a startup, and etc all on his blog. One essay of his is quite famous throughout the Valley: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. It’s a short read, so give it a shot: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
· Vladimir Nabokov – Russian Spoken Here. Is one of the many short stories published in Nabokov’s “Short Stories”. Below is a passage that I copy-typed from the short story so I could study it. I was in a Westwood coffee shop in the corner drinking Rooibos tea when I typed this. The date: Friday, November 29 2019, 9:48 PM (according to my Evernote – that Friday, I had nothing going on). Enjoy:
o I was puzzled. Petya, who loved anything mechanical, was picking with a penknife at the springs of his watch and chuckling to himself. His mother worked at her needlepoint, now and then nudging the toast or the jam toward me. Martin, clutching his disheveled beard with all five fingers, gave a sidelong flash of his tawny eye, and suddenly something within him let go. He banged the palm of his hand on the table and turned to his son. "I can't stand it any longer, Petya - I'm going to tell him everything before I burst." Petya nodded silently. Martin's wife was getting up to go to the kitchen. "What a chatterbox you are," she said, shaking her head indulgently. Martin placed his hand on my shoulder, gave me such a shake that, had I been an apple tree in the garden, the apples would literally have come tumbling off me, and glanced into my face. "I'm warning you," he said. "I'm about to tell you such a secret, such a secret... that I just don't know. Mind you -- mum's the word! Understand?"
And, leaning close to me, bathing me in the odor of tobacco and his own pungent old-man smell, Martin told me a truly remarkable tale.