Richard Gehr twitted a link to a list of rules created by Thelonious Monk, who died thirty years ago today. (Monk didn't write them down, but Steve Lacy took notes more than fifty years ago.)
The second of these made it into "Against the Light", if I'm not mistaken. Monk -- who hated the extraneous -- and Elmore Leonard would have had much to discuss.
Samples:
STOP PLAYING ALL THOSE WEIRD NOTES (THAT BULLSHIT), PLAY THE MELODY!
IT MUST BE ALWAYS NIGHT, OTHERWISE THEY WOULDN’T NEED THE LIGHTS.
DON’T PLAY EVERYTHING (OR EVERY TIME); LET SOME THINGS GO BY. SOME MUSIC JUST IMAGINED. WHAT YOU DON’T PLAY CAN BE MORE IMPORTANT THAT WHAT YOU DO.
YOU’VE GOT TO DIG IT TO DIG IT, YOU DIG?
A GENIUS IS THE ONE MOST LIKE HIMSELF.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Advice
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On Facebook: "If you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough." -- Albert Einstein
"Ninety-five percent of all internet-sourced quotations are bullshit" -- Thomas Jefferson
Although this one is close.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Einstein
From the "Misattributed" section (which is huge, by the way, since Einstein is a favorite name to drag along when you want to get authority for your ideas):
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
variant: If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself.
variant: If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Frequently attributed to Richard Feynman
Probably based on a similar quote about explaining physics to a "barmaid" by Ernest Rutherford
P. 418 of Einstein: His Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark says that Louis de Broglie did attribute a similar statement to Einstein:
To de Broglie, Einstein revealed an instinctive reason for his inability to accept the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics. It was a reason which linked him with Rutherford, who used to state that "it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid." Einstein, having a final discussion with de Broglie on the platform of the Gare du Nord in Paris, whence they had traveled from Brussels to attend the Fresnel centenary celebrations, said "that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' "
The de Broglie quote is from his 1962 book New Perspectives in Physics, p. 184.
Cf. this from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle:
Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.
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