Richard Feynman. For his boundless curiosity and his ability to convey that love of finding things out and making things to others.
Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
121–130 of 240 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#122Thomas Jefferson. A man who saw the world as it could be and did everything he could to get it there.
Alexander Hamilton: The Man who enabled Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase with his shrewd policies (like debt assumption - cool economic hack) as Secretary of the Treasury. Federalist Papers are/were invaluable too. Bonus point for not having a mausoleum, library or any other grand memorial as a monument to him.
...though he does have an entire Manhattan neighborhood named after him!
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#123Feynman, Einstein, Jiddu Krishnamoorthy, Sardar Patel, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin..
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#124Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true that individuals that live a little bit longer but have the same end of their reproductive period do no better in the gene pool. However, if it were advantageous to live longer, and those folks had a slightly longer reproductive period, then we would expect the lifespan-while-fertile to increase. Presumably this would also increase the overall lifespan as well, but really that's irrelevant to this discussio…
Through your own argument, you've conceded that aging happens when the body doesn't invest enough resources in controlling damge, and that the amount of investment made can vary widely between species and even within a species. So then what in the world leads you to believe that, provided with appropriate medical support, the body can't be made to invest far more?
I conceded nothing. You're confusing investment on an evolutionary timescale with investment on an individual timescale. A male spider couldn't spontaneously decide to live another 6 years- it would take hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to achieve that.
On a physiological level, increasing investment in the individual is difficult because so much about how we are built is developmentally fixed. You can't cure a kid with Down's Syndrome by taking out every extra third chromosome in every cell.
However, we know what genotype would produce a non Down's baby. In the near future, we might be able to clone a trisomy 21 person and produce a non Down's syndrome clone. But we can't produce a clone of that person that won't age.
We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#126Mr. Rogers. The guy was amazing on so many levels; there are lots of examples but I'll go with a HN related one. He contributed valuable testimony to the betamax case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers
So glad you said that. An outstanding human being.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure the authors put as much effort into the conspiracy theory as they did the spelling of his name.
I am unsure of what you mean. I have no love lost for the author of that article: parts of that article are true but he seems clearly biased to the point of having included outright fabrications in other parts. But, Gandhi is correctly spelt Gandhi in the article and not Ghandy or Ghandi as others often do. Edit: Ah I see, the link spells it Ghandi. The article, however, gets it right.
What are the outright fabrications?
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any examples?
Murray Gell-Mann
A bit of searching turned up this really interesting article about the two: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/07/johnson.htm.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am unsure of what you mean. I have no love lost for the author of that article: parts of that article are true but he seems clearly biased to the point of having included outright fabrications in other parts. But, Gandhi is correctly spelt Gandhi in the article and not Ghandy or Ghandi as others often do. Edit: Ah I see, the link spells it Ghandi. The article, however, gets it right.
What are the outright fabrications?
The implication that Gandhi supported Bose and his Indian National Army, as I mentioned in my comment below.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#130Nikola Tesla