Sultans of Slink

The previous post discussed Claude Shannon’s lifelong question, “What’s a better way to get information?” This question gnawed at the Father of the Information Age from his boyhood fence-telegraph to MIT’s differential analyzer to wartime cipher machines at Bell Labs. Each of these systems was innovative yet overbuilt, weighed down by its own complexity. Now … Read more

It was the 1920s in rural Michigan, not far from the little logging town of Gaylord, and a skinny boy in a wool cap was wondering, “What’s a better way to get information?” He had connected a battery to the wire fence that ran to his friend’s house half a mile away. The fence wire … Read more

It has been more than half a century since Bruce Lee passed away, but the evolution he experienced from a potential career-ending injury serves as a lesson for innovators, improvisors, and creators of all stripes. Lee demonstrated what I call transformation through refraction. For those who only know Bruce Lee as an actor performing choreographed … Read more

Up close, the paintings of Chuck Close look like swarms of color fragments. Step back, and suddenly a vivid face emerges, alive with detail. That simple shift in perspective holds a lesson for innovators everywhere. I call it transformation through expansion. The idea is simple: small, ordinary units, when linked together in certain ways, can … Read more

I was back in New York recently and made a stop at the East 86th Street subway station. Tucked into the walls there are Chuck Close’s mosaics, giant portraits staring at commuters and shimmering in tile and glass. They are a fitting tribute to an artist whose life’s work was obsessed by faces, even though … Read more

Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, has discovered some remarkable scaling laws that turn out to be useful in many domains, including biology, urban planning, economics, and corporate strategy.   West researched the food consumption of animals (including humans) and found that larger animals use energy more efficiently than smaller ones. For instance, imagine a woman … Read more

Claude Shannon really enjoyed thinking about problems and tinkering with mechanical devices, but he was not a big fan of publishing papers. Throughout his life, he kept copious notes, sketches, and personal journals related to his work and ideas, mathematical lemmas, theoretical problems, and musings about wide-ranging topics, from juggling to robotics to music to … Read more

In a previous post, we talked about how the decision-making process is the act of rescuing one potentiality from a field of uncertainty and delivering it permanently into the certainty of your past. Think about that for a moment. When you are faced with a decision, there is an array of possible outcomes based on … Read more

The hedge fund manager Michael Burry said he met his wife through the dating site Match.com with a profile that read, “I am a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and $145,000 in student loans.” Burry said she wrote back, “You’re just what I’ve been looking for.” She understood that if … Read more

This is the first of a series of posts about Claude Shannon, mathematician, engineer, and computer scientist whose work beginning in the late ’30s helped to define the Information Age that emerged over the subsequent decades. Shannon is largely credited for having developed Information Theory. Over the next few posts, we’ll dive into some of … Read more

In recent posts about Bruce Lee, we looked at his technical prowess as a fighter, including his use of the one-inch punch and the stop-hit, as well as a fight that exposed the limitations of his approach. By 1964, at the age of 23, Lee had become a fighter who possessed blinding speed, incredible strength … Read more

In hand-to-hand combat, being taller has advantages, all else equal. If you are taller than your opponent, your reach will tend to be longer than your opponent’s, meaning you can strike from a distance that is outside your opponent’s range. To counter, your opponent has to lunge forward to reach you, making him more vulnerable. … Read more

The year was 1964. The scene was a small residential garage in Oakland, California, that served as a martial-arts school run by Bruce Lee. The space was cluttered with homemade sparring devices pieced together by Bruce’s assistant James, who was a welder by trade, making it appear like a cross between a boxing gym and … Read more

Bruce Lee was neither tall nor heavy, but he could beat up larger opponents. What he lacked in brawn, he made up in speed, smarts, and heart. He also knew how to put on a show. The son of an opera singer and film actor, young Bruce Lee grew up in show business. He happened … Read more