Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 22:52:19 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: 5 Best Sf
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

"Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> wrote:

> Then there are the folks who have taken it into the realm of "art",
> and they tend to build things that represent the true chairness of
> the chair, or which embody that which is essential to all furniture
> boiled down to essentials, or some other hogwash.  I call it hogwash,
> because in doing what they have done they have forgotten the most
> important thing about a chair: that you be able to sit on it.

"I've suffered for my art; now it's your turn."

I've heard that Frank Lloyd Wright buildings aren't much fun to live
or work in.  The roof usually leaks, etc.

For a couple years, I had an absolutely minimal piece of furniture
which I built:  A bookshelf consisting entirely of one horizontal
piece and one vertical piece, held together with one nail.  (The
other end of the horizontal piece was propped on a bookcase.)
(After a couple years, I got another bookcase to prop the other end
on, and reused the former vertical piece as another horizontal shelf.)

> Most of these take great skill to produce, as the techniques needed
> aren't easy, but that same skill could be better used to produce
> something useful if you ask me.

There's something to be said for magnificently useless
accomplishments.  For instance the translation of Hamlet into "the
original" Klingon.  Or much of what I did for WSFA.  Now that my
leaving WSFA had freed up more time, I've been spending much of that
time on pure math.  I'm taking yet another try at a deep understanding
of the math associated with the Riemann Hypothesis.  While that
hypothesis has an amazing variety of deep consequences within pure
mathematics, it appears to have none whatsoever to anything practical.

  "I have never done anything 'useful.'  No discovery of mine has made,
  or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the
  least difference to the amenity of the world.  I have helped to
  train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind
  as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have
  helped them to it, as useless as my own.  Judged by all practical
  standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside
  mathematics it is trivial anyhow."  -- Godfrey Harold Hardy, one
  of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.