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Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity, and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well). I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Regret was the most obvious counterfactual emotion, but frustration and envy shared regret’s essential trait. “The emotions of unrealized possibility,” Danny called them, in a letter to Amos. These emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity, Danny wrote, was a product of two variables: “the desirability of the alternative” and “the possibility of the alternative.” Experiences that led to regret and frustration were not always easy to undo. Frustrated people needed to undo some feature of their environment, while regretful people needed to undo their own actions. “The basic rules of undoing, however, apply alike to frustration and regret,” he wrote. “They require a more or less plausible path leading to the alternative state.” Envy was different. Envy did not require a person to exert the slightest effort to imagine a path to the alternative state. “The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.” Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination.
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
The self-effacing Upton may therefore be given principal credit for interpreting Edison’s ideas and translating them into mathematical form. It was Edison, nevertheless, who had the ideas. Upton was frequently surprised by the accuracy of Edison’s “guesses” and never considered that he himself was given insufficient credit for his work. A careful student of contemporary electrical science, he seems to have been conversant with, and to have guided himself by, some of the important critical writing of Dr. John Hopkinson, of England, on the structure of the Siemens dynamo. As Upton admits, the design of the Edison-Upton dynamo, as we may call it, was not essentially different in principle from that of the Siemens. Edison’s main improvements seem to have been in dividing the formerly solid armature cores and the commutator into a far greater number of sections than had been formerly the practice. He also seems to have been the first to use mica in insulating the commutator sections from each other, a very effective method. The new dynamo, though it was said to have incorporated a number of elementary mistakes, contained many admirable features for that period. With its great masses of iron and large, heavy wires, it stood in bold contrast to other dynamos having a more meager ferrous quantity. Its magnets seemed enormous in those pioneering days. When this machine was run at a certain constant speed, the voltage between its two armature brushes was approximately 110 and remained about constant, falling but slightly when increasing amounts of current were taken from the machine. The new dynamo’s bipolar form, owning to its two upright columns, led to its being nicknamed Edison’s “Long-waisted Mary Ann.”315
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