Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” is a really good movie. It’s easy to overlook: It’s a period piece, leisurely paced, and the titular protagonist is feckless at best. The more I look at it, however, the more I like it. For one thing, it’s very funny. (“Parts, anyway”, as the cowboy from “The Big Lebowski” might say.)

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Ultimately, who you are is determined not by what you might do, or what you’d like to do, or what you would do in some hypothetical; it’s determined by what you do in the situations life actually throws your way. The chief reward of doing the right thing – and the only reward that can’t be taken away – is what doing the right thing tells you about who you are.

When you want to find out something about a subject, you’re generally in search of exactly one of the two different types of resources:

• Explanations, which describe the subject for an audience that is assumed to be unfamiliar with the topic
• References, which describe the subject in dense (and often cryptic) detail, and assume an audience with some expertise in the topic

Using the wrong type of resource will be an exercise in frustration. Even more frustrating will be to deal with a resource that straddles the two types badly. The most common example of this is the explanation that trails off into a reference because its author grew tired of explaining (which is quite difficult) and opted to infodump instead. (Wikipedia, I’m looking at you.)