Have You Met Margaret Hamilton? Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself

MARGARET HAMILTON WASN’T supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

That's how the profile, in Wired by Robert McMillan, begins. Go read the whole thing. Hamilton deserves to be better known. 

Casey Gerald: Don’t Wait for Permission

After graduating from Yale, Casey Gerald and his friends wondered what would happen if, instead of “marching off in pinstripe suits to slave away in a cubicle,” they set out to the heart of America to put their MBAs to work helping entrepreneurs. The result is MBAs Across America, whose message is simple but vital: There’s a new way of changing the world, and each of us has a part to play. In this 99u talk, Gerald shares his story and gives us the three aspects of this “New Playbook of Change.”

Attitude is a skill

Seth Godin: 

If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill.

And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it.

Everything is a Remix Remastered

I'm a fan of Kirby Ferguson and have shared his work before. Here is a remastered version of his series Everything is a Remix, that is worth revisiting. 

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life

It’s no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind.

Dr. Sacks, who died on Sunday at 82, was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life — the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination.

That's how Michiko Kakutani's examination of Oliver Sack's life begins in today's The New York Times. Sacks was the very embodiment of smarter creativity.