Brain on fire
Have you had that feeling before, that your brain's on fire? I hope so. Everyone should, from time to time. The first time I can remember feeling it was when I was six, and discovered computers. I've written about this before , briefly: My grandparents left a TRS-80 at our house while going off to travel, and they also left the manual. As a kid I was a precocious little snot, already able to do some reading by the time I was in kindergarten. The computer's manual explained how to program it in BASIC. I picked up the book and started reading it, trying out the examples. Then I started improvising, mixing and matching the pieces, writing entirely new programs. I don't think my grandparents had any idea what they'd set in motion, quite by accident. I was obsessed . I was enamored of this mysterious machine, that could be given instructions in a language vaguely like English but with much stricter rules, and would dutifully execute with absolute faithfulness. When I tr...