The Collage That Follows Will Be The Essay (Proper) 😇

So what I’m really saying is simply this: The collage is the essay.

To elaborate the previous statement that may have startled some, we need to check out some brief yet endearing dialogs from the classic movie Chariots of Fire, which, by the way, I’ve watched 16 times so far—yes, it is that good 🎯 Imagine if you will, a royal, courtly setting in Paris where a ton of ladies and gents from around the world have converged in anticipation of the 1924 Olympics—it used to be called the Summer Games back then—and in particular a stately room where several important-looking gents are seated. A ragtag bunch of Cambridge University students is on its way to the room to meet those gents (in particular to have a word with the number one power-player who works the unmarked corridors of power). En route, the very cool, youthful, and fashionable Lord Andrew Lindsay confides in his Cambridge University classmate-friend, Monty:

The Collage (The Guts Of This Essay) 🎨

With a friendly reminder that, this time around—and breaking with the past, where I’ve unwittingly had you scale walls of texts—the collage that follows truly is the essay. Please indulge me, won’t you? 👺

I hasten to add a remark regarding the choice of words for the name  of this essay section (i.e. “The Collage (The Guts Of This Essay)”). As I deliberated on a choice—foremost in my mind being the thought whether the signposting was decent enough for you all, my friends in the Programming Digressions community—I couldn’t help but think to a hilarious piece I had read in an especially entertaining issue of the magazine Harvard Lampoon during my graduate school days at Texas A&M University.

Back then—and I date myself here—over a couple of decades ago, I was getting myself a fine education in the engineering and science of employing pattern-detection and artificial intelligence — specifically the algorithms we all know as our friendly neural networks — all in the service of designing a method for automated roadside traffic-sign recognition 🚳 🚸 🚯 🚱

Yep, so I didn’t let getting one kind of education (i.e. in the engineering and the sciences) interfere with getting the other kind of education (i.e. in, um, culture and the humanities) 👻

Anyhow, hastening now to add that parenthetical thought so as to spare the sensibilities, as it were: According to a side-splitting article in that Harvard Lampoon issue, the author of that article noted how readers sometimes weren’t sure if they had come to the end of any given article; readers would just keep on reading past the end 🚀  Oops! So the author resorted to the artifice of strategically placing a STOP sign icon at the end of the article, like so: 🚫  Okay, this is an entry-barred icon, since it’s the only relevant one I could find, you all… But you get the idea, right? 😂

Yep, that’s what I was rambling about a few breaths away in mentioning about how the foremost thought in my mind was whether the signposting in this essay was decent enough for you all 💪

What, There Is No Essay?! 🎱

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Boy: Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
~ The Matrix (the classic, dystopian movie)

Relax 🎻  I admit that the preceding narrative from The Matrix may have been a bit disconcerting and jarring to your fair sensibilities. So here goes my ad hoc attempt at some verses of rhyme, which I hope—indeed hope against hope—will soothe your nerves as well as unruffle your fair sensibilities 😰  My readers are the best, and I care for each one of you 🏆  And I kid you not 🙌

Blogger: There is no essay,
What?! So what do we do, simply amuse ourselves with sachet? 

Reader: You had a volley of ideas going there, I mean a barrage
Dare I ask if all that was merely a mirage? 

Reader: Lest our collective psyche be forever scarred,
Are you suggesting that our entry to further enlightenment is barred? 

Blogger: Whoa, dear Reader, don’t you be deterred,
Or let you hopes fly away, or worse, be forever interred

Blogger: There is hope, there surely is, so carry on, please read on,
And do recall your blogger’s thoughts on the Vonnegut crayon
~ Akram Ahmad (blogger, software craftsman, technologist, artist, or something)

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven)

Wait a second, I was a poet and I didn’t even know it? 🎭

Anyhow… Hmm… A rather bleak picture painted above by Poe, wouldn’t you say, Joe? Maybe he had watched the classic, dystopian movie The Matrix one time too many 🙈  That would explain, wouldn’t you say, Jane?

Anyhow, poor, petulant, plaintive, and sometimes pugnacious Poe is what you got above. And I got nothing more to add to that. Nothing 🚧

And if there’s no essay, this time around on our blog, let’s find out what we instead do have…

Ah, There Is This Collage 😂

Without further adieu, we’ll now embark on a guided tour of the architectural corridors of, um, the Programming Digression galleries of art 🎃

For a slightly different kind of tour—at least an inkling of a tour that your blogger took, nearly two decades ago, of a real (as in bricks-and-mortar) art gallery that is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC—I can point you in the direction of an essay elsewhere 🎨 In particular, when you visit that essay, look for a section toward the top of that essay 🎯 immediately after a framed pic of yet another pair of framed paintings, in fact; talk about self-referential recursion having come unhinged and run amok. Hey, oh hey, are we going metacircular here? 🎈

Meanwhile, we begin the tour of our very own gallery of art: Each piece of art in the gallery features a pic—taken of course by your tour guide, yours truly—followed by a vignette each of a book of which I was reminded as I read the pages of Plato And The Nerd with the heady feeling that you get, alas, only on the first reading after you chance upon a book of such an extraordinarily high caliber; that headiness, the giddiness, wears off with each successive reading as one realizes, as it were, that one had known this all along, in one’s core, in one’s bones 💀  Recall, if you wish, the sentiments expressed on this blog earlier, about my desert-island books… ⛱

For an account of why, and how, the pics have as their backdrop a menagerie of wild animals, our fabled beasts 🐻 🐍 🐊 🐞 🐝 🐙 🐢 🐹 🐸, allow me—your trusty guide for the gallery tour of course—to point you in the direction of a section (it’s entitled “A Word To The Wise, Sticky Notes Shall Arise”) that appeared earlier in this very essay, flagged in fact by a cutesy, triangular marker which looks like this one here: 🚩

1. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O’Reilly Media) by Paul Graham

I was reminded of the message in the pages of Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O’Reilly Media) by Paul Graham by how Plato And The Nerd takes on ideas that are at least as weighty—and probably far more consequential—as those in Hackers & Painters.

The author of Hackers & Painters, Paul is one of the profoundest thinkers alive, and this is his profoundest book. He is, first and foremost in my mind anyway, a Lisp hacker extraordinaire, then a noted essayist, and then finally of course the resident impresario at Y Combinator 🚀

At any rate, check out this passage from Chapter 2 in Hackers and Painters where Paul reminisces about how

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work—that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge. 

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. 

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better (italics mine).

The meme and theme—corresponding to the passage above—which resonated with me as I read the pages of Plato and the Nerd is best illustrated by an example from the latter:

The title of this book comes from the wonderful book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Taleb, 2010), who titled a section of the prologue Plato and the Nerd… 

But more fundamentally, the title puts into opposition the notion that knowledge, and hence technology, consists of Platonic Ideals that exist independent of humans and is discovered by humans, and an opposing notion that humans create rather than discover knowledge and technology. The nerd in the title is a creative force, subjective and even quirky, and not an objective miner of preexisting truths. 

I hope that through this book, I can change the public discourse so young people are more inclined to consider a career in engineering, and not just because of the job prospects. I am convinced that engineering is fundamentally a creative discipline, and the technical drudgery that prejudices many people is no more drudgery than found in any other creative discipline. Yes, hard work is required, but as a reward for that hard work, you can change the world (italics mine).

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the next vignette in our collage of a gallery 🎁

2. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead Books) by Steven Johnson

So I was reminded of the message in the pages of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead Books) by Steven Johnson by how Plato And The Nerd introduces the eminently reasonable idea of how “…technology is coevolving with humans, augmenting our own cognitive and physical capabilities, all the while enabling us to nurture, evolve, and propagate the technology.” (italics mine).

I sensed that Edward has taken the whole notion of the evolution of ideas—as delineated in the pages of Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From—to the next logical step in its inevitable progression and addressed it rather nicely in Plato And The Nerd. So the meme and theme that resonated with me as I read the pages of Plato and the Nerd is best illustrated by an example which goes like this:

3. If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic (Columbia University Press) by Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White

I was reminded of the message in the pages of If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic (Columbia University Press) by Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White by how Plato And The Nerd gently introduces—nay, deftly slips in—the idea that “Intuitionistic logic is a rather draconian solution to this problem.” 😇

The major takeaway I got from If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic was that it ignites our curiosity and imagination in inviting us to follow the evolution of logic and the practice of clear thinking; that’s where engineering comes in and takes science to its fruition 🌱 🌿 🌽

I liked how Edward has taken the gist of following the evolution of logic and the practice of clear thinking—as delineated in the pages of If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic—to the next logical step in its inevitable progression and addressed it rather nicely in Plato And The Nerd. So the meme and theme that resonated with me as I read the pages of Plato and the Nerd is best illustrated by an example which goes like this:

It is hard to point to any scientific discovery that led to the iPhone, in the sense that every scientific discovery it depends on was already in widespread use in other products. Nevertheless, it is easy to find evidence that popular culture assumes that this linear model of innovation is in fact how things work. For example, About.com, an advertising-funded website centered around articles on a huge variety of subjects, collects reader commentary. On the question of “Engineer vs Scientist – What’s the Difference?” some of the reader answers are: 

• Scientists are the ones who create the theories, engineers are the ones who implement them. They compliment [sic] each other…
• Science is a lot of high level theory and engineering is implementation and optimization.
• Engineers deal with math, efficiency and optimization while Scientist [sic] deal with “what is possible.”
• Engineers trained [sic] for Using tools, where Scientists are trained for Making them.

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the next vignette in our collage of a gallery 🎁

4. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W. W. Norton & Company) by Daniel C. Dennett

So I was reminded of the message in the pages of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W. W. Norton & Company) by Daniel C. Dennett by how Plato And The Nerd takes on ideas that are at least as weighty—and probably far more consequential—as those in Hackers & Painters.

Dennett’s book is richly dense in metaphor and analogies, quite often thought-provoking. He is wide-ranging in unfolding the narrative, and linguistically clever. In other words, this book is vintage Dennett.

The central artifice that Dennett has used for fathoming intelligence and minds is the notion of memes ala Richard Dawkins. Dennett takes a deep dive into the co-evolution of genes and culture through memes, arguing that this very co-evolution is what makes the human mind unique.

I would say that Edward has taken the whole notion of the evolution of intelligence and minds—as delineated in the pages of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds—to the next logical step in its relentless progression and addressed it exceptionally well in Plato And The Nerd. So the meme and theme that resonated with me as I read its pages is perhaps best illustrated by an example which goes like this:

There is no question in my mind that humans are coevolving with computers. If computers and software form organisms, then they depend on us for their procreation. We provide the husbandry and serve as midwives. In exchange, we depend on them to manage our systems of finance, commerce, and transportation. More interesting, the machines make the humans more effective at the husbandry that spreads the software species… Compilers translate human-readable code into machine-readable bits… And software innovations fuel the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where the software survives and evolves only if the company survives and evolves, and vice versa (italics mine).

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the next vignette in our collage of a gallery 🎁

5. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Penguin Books) by David Deutsch

I was reminded of the message in the pages of The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (Penguin Books) by David Deutsch by how Plato And The Nerd takes on ideas and explores the deep connections between the themes behind those ideas. Without a shred of doubt, The Beginning of Infinity explores and neatly outlines deep connections between the laws of nature, the human condition, knowledge, and the possibility for progress. No wonder it got rave reviews, such as the following:

“Brilliant and exhilarating . . . Deutsch is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege to spend time in his head.”
~ The New York Times Book Review 

Plato recognized that the ideal truths of Forms could not be fully known by humans. But because they cannot be fully known by humans, isn’t it more practical to view what we do know about nature as human-constructed models or what Deutsch calls good explanations? This would be more humble, tacitly acknowledging that even our most fervently held beliefs about nature are subject to improvement. I’m not saying that there are no truths, but just that we should always be required to question them.

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the next vignette in our collage of a gallery 🎁

6. Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega (Atlantic Books) by Gregory Chaitin

So I was reminded of the message in the pages of Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega (Atlantic Books) by Gregory Chaitin by how Plato And The Nerd takes on the idea of the impossible becoming possible. Chaitin’s startling discovery, the Omega number, is a remarkably complex representation of unknowability in mathematics. His investigations shed light on what can ever really be known about the universe. Period. Interesting stuff!

I would say that Edward has taken that selfsame notion—as delineated in the pages of Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega—to the next logical step in its inevitable progression and addressed it rather nicely in Plato And The Nerd. So the meme and theme that resonated with me as I read its pages is best illustrated by an example which goes like this:

Gregory Chaitin, an Argentine-American mathematician who worked at IBM in New York and at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, developed a beautiful example of such a number, one that he called “Omega,” or Ω. Ω is a number between zero and one whose binary representation can be used to solve Turing’s halting problem for a particular binary encoding of Turing machines. Specifically, if we know the first N bits of the binary representation of Ω, then we can determine for all valid programs of length up to N bits whether they halt. Because this question is known to be undecidable, no computer program can give us any arbitrary bit of the binary representation of Ω… Semantics is an association between a set of syntactic objects, such as bit sequences, and a set of concepts. Numbers are concepts, so one possible semantic interpretation of a sequence of bits is as a binary number (italics mine).

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the next vignette in our collage of a gallery 🎁

Don’t Be Too Surprised When Sticky Notes Do Arise 😮

Recall what we had read earlier—in the section entitled “A Word To The Wise, Sticky Notes Shall Arise”—about how we have a warm welcome for our new readers in the Programming Digressions reading community? Well, we’ve now come full circle, and are ready to discover some apocryphally allegorical sticky notes tucked away in the swathe of a menagerie of wild animals, our fabled  beasts 🐻 🐍 🐊 🐞 🐝 🐙 🐢 🐹 🐸

“…then it began…” Do you know that feeling? Can you point to a single moment in your life and say: “…then it began…”? Was there a single event that changed the course of your life and eventually led you to pick up this book and start reading this foreword? 

I was in sixth grade when it happened to me. I was interested in science and space and all things technical. My mother found a plastic computer in a catalog and ordered it for me. It was called Digi-Comp I. Forty years later that little plastic computer holds a place of honor on my bookshelf. It was the catalyst that sparked my enduring passion for software. It gave me my first inkling of how joyful it is to write programs that solve problems for people. It was just three plastic S-R flip-flops and six plastic and-gates, but it was enough—it served. Then… for me… it began… But the joy I felt… (italics mine)

~ Michael Feathers (Robert Martin in his Foreword to Working Effectively with Legacy Code — Pearson Education)

7. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic books) by Douglas R. Hofstadter

I was reminded of the message in the pages of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic books) by Douglas R. Hofstadter by how Plato And The Nerd spins a tale—weaves a web—as did Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. And what a marvelous tale there is in the telling and gelling of the themes that run free and unite into a coherent whole between the two covers of Edward’s Plato And The Nerd.

Let me put it this way: Anything profounder could only transcend into the realm of the spiritual and your blogger might be found singing something along the lines of

I’m over my head,
But it sure feels nice,
I’m over my head,
But it sure feels nice.
~ Fleetwood Mac (Lyrics from Over My Head)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, of course, needs no introduction. In fact, you’ll find plenty of reference to it through the length and breadth of the vistas covered right here on this blog community we know as Programming Digressions. It’s truly a wonderful exploration—with Hofstadter digressing willingly at the drop of a hat to weaving a bunch of themes into a unified fugue—of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science (meaning, reduction, recursion, etc.), and I encourage you to check it out.

I won’t explain how Gödel proved his theorem, although it’s an interesting subject. I’ve already risked losing too many readers. If you are interested in understanding this more deeply, I recommend Franzén (2005), which is informal and accessible. A more rigorous overview can be found in Raatikainen (2015). A delightful and witty exposition of the topic can be found in Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (Hofstadter, 1979), which won a Pulitzer Prize. 

Instead of giving you more detail on Gödel’s theorems, I would like to consider their implications for modeling and software. In Gödel’s formal languages, the set of all mathematical statements and the set of all proofs are countable sets, just like the set of all computer programs. Moreover, a “proof” in a formal language is a sequence of transformations of sentences, where each transformation is governed by a set of inference rules. This is conceptually close to what a computer does when it executes a program. In a computer, the sentences in the formal language are ultimately just sequences of bits, and the inference rules are the instructions in an instruction set architecture (italics mine).

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

8. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (Simon & Schuster) by Marvin Minsky

So I was reminded of the message in the pages of The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (Simon & Schuster) by Marvin Minsky by how Plato And The Nerd takes on a diverse set of ideas and explores them with delicious relish 🍧

Consider for example how Chapter 5—entitled “LEVELS OF MENTAL ACTIVITIES”—begins with this intriguing quote:

“We are evidently unique among species in our symbolic ability, and we are certainly unique in our modest ability to control the conditions of our existence by using these symbols. Our ability to represent and simulate reality implies that we can approximate the order of existence and … gives us a sense of mastery over our experience.”

~ Heinz Pagels, in The Dreams of Reason

Minsky goes on to explore the theme with great relish. Correspondingly, the meme and theme—corresponding to the passage above—which resonated with me as I read the pages of Plato and the Nerd is best illustrated by an example from the latter:

…Computers can, for example, sometimes prove theorems and symbolically solve mathematical equations involving real numbers. However, software is fundamentally limited to a countable world, and it is limited to processes that are algorithmic, following step-by-step procedures. If the physical world is not so limited, then there are machines that can perform functions that software cannot. I believe it is extremely unlikely that the physical world is so limited; thus, despite the amazing things we can do with software, we can’t do everything, and even what we can do with software often requires a partnership with humans to give it any semantic meaning. Computers are not universal machines (italics mine).

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

Moving on now to the final vignette—all good things sure come to an end—in our collage of a gallery 🎁

9.  The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (The MIT Press) by Noson S. Yanofsky

In this final vignette—at least for the second installment of this series of essays on Plato And The Nerd—I was reminded of the message in the pages of The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (The MIT Press) by Noson S. Yanofsky by how Plato And The Nerd delves into the rubric of the unknown knowns with the relish of a child who feels compelled to dive into a big pile of painstakingly raked leaves in a typical backyard framed in the soft colors of the autumn season 🎃

The wherewithal of the other book I mentioned above—The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us—is succinctly captured in the following online review of that book:

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.

But first… Hey, where did our charming beasts of the jungle all go? 😧 Hey, where’s the menagerie of wild animals, our fabled  beasts? Remember, their mug shots look like this?: 🐻  🐍  🐊 🐞 🐝 🐙 🐢 🐹 🐸

Heaven forbid, did a meteor strike, flattening them all out of existence, leaving behind nothing more than blood and concrete?  I mean, all I see in the pic above is my copy of The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (The MIT Press) by Noson S. Yanofsky—bedecked in an ebony dust jacket that’s rather lovely and all the fashion—basking in sunshine outside the Gates Dell Complex (GDC) on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin 🎓  The GDC, of course, is home to the computer science department.

All that is fine and well—I mean the not-exactly-crimson-suffused-concrete and all—but where are our beasties?! 😭

Let’s calm down, you all, and hope for the best…

Meanwhile, the meme and theme—corresponding to the succinct online review of The Outer Limits of Reason that we glanced at a breath away—which resonated with me as I read the pages of Plato and the Nerd is best illustrated by the following signpost that marks the outset of Chapter 2 (which is entitled “Inventing Laws of Nature”) where the authors has an intriguing signpost for the reader by way of a riveting synopsis. Thus, in introducing Chapter 2 of Plato and the Nerd, Edward notes that this is a chapter

· · · in which I argue that models are invented, not discovered; that engineers and scientists use models in complementary, almost opposite ways; that all models are wrong, but some are useful; and that the use of models can slow as well as advance technological progress by establishing a backdrop of unknown knowns, by forcing increased specialization, and by requiring humans to assimilate new paradigms.

~Edward Ashford Lee (Plato and the Nerd) 🔭 👓

With that, your tour guide for the fabled Programming Digressions gallery announces that we’re bringing our gallery tour to a graceful end 🚧

So please remember to stop reading now 🚷

This friendly reminder is, of course, along the lines of what we came across earlier in this essay (in the context of an especially entertaining issue of the magazine Harvard Lampoon that I recalled reading during my graduate school days at Texas A&M University). Okay, okay, so I genuinely was diligently studying, researching, programming away in the computing labs in College Station (Texas) but—much as I noted there—I didn’t let getting one kind of education (in the engineering and the sciences) interfere with getting the other kind of education (in, um, culture and the humanities) 👻

Tell you what, while the tour proper drew to a close, there’s actually some stuff that follows… Never mind, carry right on, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, you may proceed now… 👞 👡

You can sketch, smudge, and draft bits of code in JavaScript, while pushing and twisting the language in the direction that best suits your particular style.
~ Michael Fogus Functional JavaScript (O’Reilly Media) – From the Foreword by Jeremy Ashkenas 

Here, and much as I said in the first installment of this series of essays on Plato and the Nerd—in the context of when I was listening to a song by Knopfler—it occurred to me that you simply can’t comprehend the splendor of Knopfler’s voice without actually listening to it 🎧  Likewise, you simply won’t be able to comprehend the splendor of the tone of Plato and the Nerd without actually reading it 📖