It’s not Rand’s fault that the title of this chapter evokes not one but two David Bowie references, both of which come well after Atlas Shrugged and probably neither of which is related. Regardless, though, for the time being when I think of Hank Rearden, my mind sings, “You’re face… to face… with the man…
Author: Clio
There is no “try”
Do or do not, there is no try. — Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back Yoda’s absolutism aside, there’s a significant kernel of value in this perspective. I consider myself a liberal, and I was raised in the “Free to be you and me” post-hippie glow. Even so, one aspect of that mindset that I feel…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 10: Wyatt’s Torch
One reason I wanted to post (if possible) after each chapter was that I figured it would keep me motivated to keep reading if there were evidence of my progress. Another reason is that it keeps me honest, so when I finish the book, I can’t pretend I had different opinions as I progressed than…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 9: The Sacred and the Profane
I’m not sure if it’s my commitment to try to be more pleasant towards the book, or if this chapter was genuinely better than the previous one. Either way, it was a more positive experience. Chapter summary: Taking up where we left off in the last chapter, Dagny and Hank have an, um, discussion about…
Atlas Shrugged: Reassessment #1
Reflecting on the tenor of my summations of the last few chapters, it occurs to me that perhaps I have been less generous to Atlas Shrugged than I had originally intended to be. It is, after all, merely a book; perhaps Rand had meant it in the same way that Rearden had meant his metal,…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 8: The John Galt Line
Egocentrism abounds. When the first page of a chapter is an entire dialog, as in, involving two people, and there’s no telephone involved but we only get one person’s words and the other person is identified solely as “the worker,” well, we shouldn’t expect much balance to the perspectives presented. Chapter summary: As the train…
Battleships update
I’ve been rather obsessively working on my Battleships program the last few days, and have quite a bit to show for it: The autosolver works now, as does the random puzzle generator. The random puzzle generator is nowhere near as speedy or elegant as the one in Fathom It!, but it’s a start. For the…
Let’s do start
Yesterday, I was discussing the German imperative with my wife. Due to habits formed in high school and college language courses, we tend to use the formal version of imperatives even with our toddler unless we think about it (for instance, “Kommen Sie hier!” vs “Komm hier!”). This got me thinking about how German has…
Embracing ethnic pride
I was raised as a cultural mutt. Half my family or so on each side is German but largely indifferent to that heritage (with occasional exceptions, such as my mother’s fondness for a specific cookie, I believe it was springerles). The other half of my genetics is “generic Western European.” As a teen, I was…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 7: The Exploiters and the Exploited
What a whiny chapter. More after the summary. Chapter summary: It’s Dagny and Hank against the world. Dagny oversees the construction of the rail line. There’s a bridge that needs to be remade; her engineer tells her to just fix it for now and replace it later because it would too expensive to replace now,…