Minmaxing Life

Apparently, the good Dr Kawashima - who inspired the Brain Age games that sold over 17 million copies worldwide - does not want a single yen from the 22 million dollars in royalties he is due:

“Everyone in my family is mad at me but I tell them that if they want money, go out and earn it.”

he says, because

“to hear this may put you off, but my hobby is work.”

Score one for passion, zero for money!

Also interesting, his comment on work versus play:

“Having fun is not studying. Making them study is not to entertain children but to pressure them to make efforts. People fall to lower and lower places unless they are driven to go higher.”

This correlates with my own observation that strictly favoring fun over anything else prevents one from learning those skills that demand hard dedication and self-discipline. Unfortunately, there are some things in life we don’t (yet) know how to teach in a fun way but that still need to be learned…

Garrett Lisi simply rocks. He might very well turn out to be the guy who cracked the Theory of Everything with his - tongue in cheek - Exceptionally Simple Theory. But whether he’s right or not, the simple fact that he managed to have a shot at this after having spent the last 10 years surfing around is nothing short of amazing. Not everyone has been zombified by teevee after all!

As if that wasn’t cool enough, the slashdot reading, self-declared “contemplative hedonist”, says stuff like:

“I want intense pleasures from life. This means not spending too much time in a lab but finding balance between thinking and having fun”.

(loosely translated back to english from an interview in Le Monde)

and

“The best thing there is to do on this planet is surf. There’s just nothing else that even comes close to generating the feeling you experience as you paddle like crazy to catch a wave, drop down the face, crank a hard bottom turn in the pit, and pull into the barrel as the lip throws out over your head. The desire for those perfect waves wreaks holy hell with the rest of your life. It makes you spend all your dough on plane tickets to crazy places just so you can risk your butt paddling over jagged reef and camping out on lonely beaches.”

All that and he doesn’t believe in string theory. And he hangs out at Burning Man. And he still finds time to teach. So yeah, I’m a total fanboi but seriously: how much cooler can you be and what more do you need to revive your faith in humanity? Now if only kids would pick him up as a role model instead of the usual cretinous MTV celebs…

Live long, Garrett Lisi and keep catching those waves!

EDIT: another nice interview he gave, complete with a Douglas Adams reference and a picture of E8.