embrace the paradox

Ted Kaye's 5 Basic Principles of Flag Design

1. Keep It Simple
The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory…


2. Use Meaningful Symbolism
The flag’s images, colors, or patterns should relate to what it
symbolizes…


3. Use 2–3 Basic Colors
Limit the number of colors on the flag to three, which contrast well and
come from the standard color set…


4. No Lettering or Seals
Never use writing of any kind or an organization’s seal…


5. Be Distinctive or Be Related
Avoid duplicating other flags, but use similarities to show connections…

link

Richard Florida says...

Creativity is the decisive source of competitive advantage.  Creativity comes from people [and that means] people are the critical resource of the new age.  Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel making.  For a city to succeed in today's economy, it must attract and retain talented people.  Because creative people are the "critical resource of the new age," then a city eager for economic development must attract them.  Highly skilled creative people gravitate to places that are centers of creativity, places that are multifunctional and diverse, full of stimulation and cultural interplay.  Successful places will need to cultivate "a people climate" as well as a business climate.  Successful cities will insure that their people climate is especially appealing to young creative people.  The cities that succeed will be talent magnets.

Puzzle

Dieter Ram's 10 Principles of 'Good Design'

The 10 principles were clipped from this SFMOMA article

Good Design Is Innovative— The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Good Design Makes a Product Useful—A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Good Design Is Aesthetic—The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Good Design Makes A Product Understandable—It clarifies the product's structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Good Design Is Unobtrusive— Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

Good Design Is Honest— It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept

Good Design Is Long-lasting— It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail—Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly— Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible—Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Kary Mullis's Recommended Reading List

This list is from karymullis.com

Mullis is the '93 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry

Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide

Halton Arp
Seeing Red: Red Shifts, Cosmology and Academic Science

Lyndon Ashmore
The Big Bang Blasted

Jean Auel
Clan of the Cave Bear

Robert Aunger
Electric Meme

Julian Barbour
The End of Time

John D. Barrow, and J. Frank Tipler
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

John D. Barrow
New Theories of Everything and The Infinite Book

John M. Barry
The Great Influenza

Gregory Benford
Timescape

David Berlinski
A Tour of the Calculus

Harvey Bialy
Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS

Douglas Bohm
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Colin Bruce
Schroedingers Rabbits: The Many Worlds of Quantum

Chandler Burr
The Emperor of Scent

Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game

Sean Carrol
From Eternity to Here

Marcus Chown
We Need to Talk About Kelvin

Brian Cleg
The God Effect

Brian Cox, and Jeff Forshaw
Why Does E=mc2

Matthew B. Crawford
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Michael Crichton
The State of Fear

Richard Dawkins
The Ancestors Tale
The Selfish Gene

Daniel Dennett
Breaking the Spell
Consciousness Explained
Darwins Dangerous Idea

David Deutsch
The Beginning of Infinity
The Fabric of Reality

Jared Diamond
Collapse
Guns, Germs and Steel

Freeman Dyson
Disturbing the Universe also Infinite in All Directions

Loren Eiseley
The Star Thrower

Paul Ewald
Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease

Brian Fagan
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

Richard Feynman
Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman

Michael W. Friedlander
A Thin Cosmic Rain

Max G. Gergel
Excuse Me Sir, Would you like to buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide

Rebecca Goldstein
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel

Brian Greene
The Elegant Universe
The Fabric of the Universe

Sam Harris
The End of Faith

Jack Heighway
Einstein, the Aether and Variable Rest Mass

Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker

Douglas Hofstadter
I am a Strange Loop

Bruce M. Hood
Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable

Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant V. Narlikar
A Different Approach to Cosmology

Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Michio Kaku
Hyperspace
Visions

Robert Kaplan
The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero

Serge Lang
Challanges

Robert Lanza, and Bob Berman
Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Eric J. Lerner
The Big Bang Never Happened

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics

David Lindley
Boltzmanns Atom

David J. C. MacKay
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air

Cormac McCarthy
The Road

Mark W. Moffett
Adventures Among Ants

Richart A. Muller
Physics for Future Presidents

Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos
The Non-Local Universe

V. S. Naipaul
Beyond Belief

Isaac Newton
The Principia

Steven Pinker
How the Mind Works

Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire

Dean Radin
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experience in a Quantum Reality

Lisa Randall
Warped Passages

Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All

Dan Rockmore
Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis

Benjamin Rosenbaum
The Ant King and Other Stories

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner
Quantum Enigma

Gunter Sachs
The Astrology File

Oliver Sacks
The Island of the Colorblind

Erwin Schrodinger
What Is Life

Kathyrn Schulz
Being Wrong

Charles Seife
Zero

Walter Semkiw
Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation

Simon Singh
Fermats Last Theorem

Lee Smolin
The Life of the Cosmos
The Trouble with Physics
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Willie Soon, and Steven Yaskell
The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection

Russell Standish
Theory of Nothing

Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok
Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang

Gunter Stent
Paradoxes of Free Will

Ian Stewart, Jack and Cohen
Figments of Reality

Leonard Susskind
The Cosmic Landscape

Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder
The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change

Bryan Sykes
Adam's Curse

Thomas Szasz
Ceremonial Chemistryand The Myth of Mental Illness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan

Michael Ray Taylor
Dark Life

Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott
The Electric Universe

The Urantia Book
ostensibly by Extraterrestrials

Vlatko Vedral
Decoding Reality

Alex Vilenkin
Many Worlds in One

Andrew Weil
The Natural Mind

Julia Whitty
The Fragile Edge

Ian Wishart
Air Con: The Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming

Peter Woit
Not Even Wrong

Herman Wouk
The Language God Talks

Charlie Cook's 3 Rules of Human Nature

People are attracted by solutions to their problems.

People forget.

People want to be confident they are making the right decision.




from Charlie Cook's Marketing for Success

David Gergen's 5 Gathering Storms

In an article in May 29, 2006 issue of USN&WR,
David Gergen cautions about the following 'gathering storms.'

The Danger of Drift

Education

Healthcare

Worldwide Competitiveness

Energy and Environment

Unfunded Government Liabilities

Dr. James Canton's Top 10 Trends of The Extreme Future

Fueling the Future - The energy crisis, the post-oil future, and the future of energy alternatives like hydrogen. The critical role that energy will play in every aspect of our lives in the 21st century.

The Innovation Economy - The transformation of the global economy based on the convergence of free trade, technology and democracy, driving new jobs, new markets, globalization, competition, peace and security. The Four Power Tools of the Innovation Economy are Nano-Bio-IT-Neuro.

The Next Workforce - How the workforce of the U.S. is becoming more multicultural, more female and more Hispanic. Why the future workforce must embrace innovation to become globally competitive.

Longevity Medicine - The key forces that will radically alter medicine such as nanotech, neurotech, and genomics, leading to longer and healthier lives.

Weird Science - How science will transform every aspect of our lives, culture and economy—from teleportation to nanobiology to multiple universes.

Securing the Future - The top threats to our freedom and our lives, from hackers to terrorists to mind control. Defining the risk landscape of the 21st century.

The Future of Globalization - The new realities of global trade and competition; the rise of China and India; the clash of cultures and ideologies; and the cultural-economic battle for the future.

The Future of Climate Change - How the environment is changing and how we need to prepare for increased global warming, pollution, and threats to biodiversity.

The Future of the Individual - The risks and challenges from institutions, governments, and ideologies in the struggle for human rights and the freedom of the individual in the 21st century.

The Future of America - The power of America and its destiny to champion global democracy, innovation, human rights and free markets.

2012 50y USMS Nat'l QTs

50 Free 26.51
100 Free 56.88
200 Free  2:04.61
500 Free 5:45.13
1000 Free 11:59.26
1650 Free 20:33.66

50 Back  31.60
100 Back 1:07.86
200 Back 2:23.56

50 Breast 33.93
100 Breast  1:14.60
200 Breast 2:39.76

50 Fly 28.64
100 Fly  1:04.50
200 Fly  2:26.74

100 IM  1:07.23
200 IM  2:23.41
400 IM 5:14.19

Mona Simpson's Eulogy of Steve Jobs

Op-Ed Contributor
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
By MONA SIMPSON
Published: October 30, 2011


I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.
Related


Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs

From NYTimes.com
Opinion
The Genius of Jobs
By WALTER ISAACSON
Published: October 29, 2011



ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)

Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit telling God what to do.)

Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.

Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.

In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.

In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.

In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.

This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.

China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.

Walter Isaacson is the author of “Steve Jobs.”

David Brook's 8

Harvard Bound? Chin Up? by David Brooks appeared in the March 2, 2006 edition of the New York Times.

If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great education:

Read Reinhold Niebuhr

Read Plato's "Gorgias"

Take a course on ancient Greece

Learn a foreign language

Spend a year abroad

Take a course in neuroscience

Take a course in statistics

forget about your career for once in your life

Stephen Pratt's 25 Superfoods

Pratt's website lists the following nutrient rich foods:

broccoli or other cruciferous vegetables including cabbage, cauliflower and brussels sprout

blueberries or other berries or grapes or cranberries

spinach or other fresh greens

green tea or other tea

tomatoes

walnuts or other nuts or nut butters with no transfats or added sugar

wild salmon or other high omega 3/low mercury fish including sardines and herring

turkey breast or other skinless poultry breast

nonfat yogurt or kefir

orange or other citrus

sweet potatoes or carrots or pumpkin or squash

oats or other whole grain especially wheat germ

soy or tofu or edamame

beans or other legumes

red onions or other onions or shallots

garlic

cinnamon

avocado

pomegranate

kiwi

apple or other fresh fruit

extra virgin olive oil

dried fruit  like prunes

dark chocolate  70+ percent cocoa solids

honey

plus others include the following foods as super:
water, hot peppers and hot pepper sauce, mushrooms, spices especially turmeric and ginger