The Saunterer

Admiral Hyman Rickover on the orthodontic approach

    Admiral Hyman Rickover was an entrepreneur, a fact I once explained this way:

    Certainly entrepreneurial was the project to create the first nuclear submarine. Did it require assembling a hive of people having requisite talents, their efforts joined in a common aim? Yes, tens of thousands. Was the hive the result of a queen bee? Yes, Admiral Hyman Rickover was the enabling factor: the visionary, the nerve center, the project’s lifeblood. Anyone but him was replaceable.
    Rickover called his method the orthodontic approach. “The application of continuous, steady pressure over the years to achieve eventual change” is how his colleague and biographer, Theodore Rockwell, explains it. Rickover brought it to bear against deterrents of technological complexity and tactics of political obstruction that tried to deny him access to sufficient funds and the best engineers. By selling Congress on the idea, he was able to recruit top people, winning them over with promises of interesting and important work, and with their respect for him as the project’s most toughly committed and aggressive worker, who put in the longest days. He set them to tackling unprecedented technical problems, compelling metallurgists to innovate new materials, and factories to produce them in quantities thought infeasible. And he instituted a model program of rigorous standards for selecting and training naval officers to operate the submarine. Eight years after the serious idea of it had first run in his head, the Nautilus put out to sea.

    (Quoted from page 89 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001)
    For a brief biography of Admiral Hyman Rickover, click here. For images of or relating to Admiral Hyman Rickover, click here.

George Herbert on recovering from grief

    Every spring flower, writes George Herbert, speaks the philosophy of recovery from grief:

Grief melts away
                     Like snow in May,
         As if there were no such cold thing.

      Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness?

    (Quoted from page 160 of The Temple, by George Herbert. Elliot Stock, 1885)
    For a brief biography of George Herbert, click here. For images of or relating to George Herbert, click here.

Richard Leakey on why creationism is ridiculous

    Most of the Saunterer’s neighbors believe that around 6,000 years ago a god created the universe, Earth, and all life in their present forms. For people like these neighbors, Richard Leakey has a question:

    If you don’t like the word evolution, I don’t care what you call it, but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up. So the question is why, how does this happen? It’s not covered by Genesis. There’s no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I’ve read from the lips of any God.

    (Quoted from page 13 of The Scientist, July 2012 issue.)
    For a brief biography of Richard Leakey, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Leakey, click here.

André Gide on making yourself be one of kind

    As André Gide put it:

    What could have been said by someone other than you, do not say it; what could have been done by someone other than you, do not do it; of yourself, be interested only in those aspects that do not exist except in you; patiently or impatiently create out of yourself the most unique and irreplaceable of beings.

    (Quoted from page 175 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of André Gide, click here. For images of or relating to André Gide, click here.