Like all good caricatures, these interviews capture something of the truth, even if with exaggeration, and, as in all good interviews, the subjects speak freely, as if they were riffing unguardedly among friends.

Dr. Lamport received a doctorate in mathematics from Brandeis University, with a dissertation on singularities in analytic partial differential equations. This, together with a complete lack of education in computer science, prepared him for a career as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates, SRI, Digital, and Compaq. He claims that it is through no fault of his that of those four corporations, only the one that was supposed to be non-profit still exists. He joined Microsoft in 2001, but that company has not yet succumbed. Dr. Lamport's initial research in concurrent algorithms made him well-known as the author of LaTeX, a document formatting system for the ever-diminishing class of people who write formulas instead of drawing pictures. He is also known for writing A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. which established him as an expert on distributed systems. His interest in Mediterranean history, including research on Byzantine generals and the mythical Greek island of Paxos, led to his receiving five honorary doctorates from European universities, and to the IEEE sending him to Italy to receive its 2004 Piore Award and to Quebec to receive its 2008 von Neumann medal. However, he has always returned to his home in California. This display of patriotism was rewarded with membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. More recently, Dr. Lamport has been annoying computer scientists and engineers by urging them to understand an algorithm or system before implementing it, and scaring them by saying they should use mathematics. In an attempt to get him to talk about other things, the ACM gave him the 2013 Turing Award.

It helps toughen us, and it helps us understand the way the world actually is, which is to say, at times, really quite indifferent to our well-being. Maybe we grow up a little bit, or somehow become less attached to the material world. I like to think that maybe I grew a little that last time I was truly and terrifyingly lost in New Mexico, with no idea of which way to turn. At the very least, I gained a better appreciation for Jack London.

It may be that the generations after us are, like sheltered children, less used to loss and therefore suffer even more from it than we do now. It is something of the paradox of technological progress that, in our efforts to become invulnerable, we usually gain new, unexpected vulnerabilities, leaving us in vaguely the same condition after all.

Like anything that cultivates an association with magic, Crystal is less impressive once you know how it works.

But surely there’s a point at which algorithmically informed communication curls back around, mobius-strip style, and we end up even more remote and unknowable to each other than we were when we started.

Why sully a CV with papers from the ‘Journal of Failed Experiments’? Don’t we want our colleagues (and especially our competitors) to believe that we succeed at every undertaking?

Time spent publishing small papers is time not spent developing big ones

Thus, journal articles are research reports wrapped in literature reviews

Scientific papers are not historical records of the scientific process; rather, they are ahistorical texts designed to maximize their chances of acceptance by the editors and reviewers of high-impact journals.

Treat yourself as a writer and approach each commit as a chapter in a book. Writers don’t publish first drafts. Michael Crichton said, “Great books aren’t written– they’re rewritten.”

"OUR POINT OF VIEW IS THAT GAMES ARE PART OF CULTURE, LIKE STUDYING MUSIC, CREATIVE WRITING OR FILM,"