The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]
by jxmorris12 on 7/23/2026, 12:58:02 PM
https://faculty.lsu.edu/kharms/files/flexner_1939.pdf
Comments
by:
7/27/2026, 1:47:05 AM
by: niraj-agarwal
"The mere fact that they bring satisfaction to an individual soul bent upon its own purification and elevation is all the justification that they need."
7/27/2026, 2:50:09 AM
by: oliculipolicula
This is by the founder about IAS (aka <i>(Turing's) [*Bazaar-]Cathedral</i>) founding between war & depression, while it was still at 20 Nassau St<p>Further Quaker background by Freeman Dyson's son George who wrote that book having grown up there<p><a href="https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2009/george-dyson-tavern-and-meeting-house" rel="nofollow">https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2009/george-dyson-tavern-and-meeti...</a><p>*IAS was an open-maxxed Bell Labs<p><a href="https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/700.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/700.php</a><p>><i>Dyson misses the point somewhat about virtual machines and cloud computing, which are much more about relocatable and rescalable computing — rather than having to house and maintain computers to handle the peak computational load, we can run software remotely as a service, and purchase resources on an as-needed basis; the providers of these services can reroute and reallocate resources in real-time without any intervention by or impact on their customers. There’s something here in Dyson’s statement alluding to parallel processing...</i><p>Paradoxes for outwitting the uni-context..
7/25/2026, 3:05:24 AM