For those of us of a certain age, Saturday mornings would frequently find us enjoying Peabody's Improbable History, the television cartoon adventures of Sherman and Mr. Peabody using their WABAC machine to travel back in time to fix events that didn't originally go the way later history said they should, then ending the show with a bad pun.
Dispite a professional physics education that warped my brain at an early age and makes me still think that it would be highly improbable that we could build a useful Mr. Peabody or Orson Well's style time machine, but enormously interesting to do so, I still want one.
Angelus Silesius, the seventeenth-century philosopher and poet, thought that the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers:
Time is of your own making; its clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought time too stops dead.
and as a boomer approaching alter kocker status who would rather not get any older, I'd really like that too, but I want a time machine to be able to go back and change my personal history even more.
My first stop in my time machine travels into the past would be to a London merchant bank in the early 1980's, where I would convince a pair of newly minted MBA's named Klein and Getty that the future was in the sequestration and reduction of atmospheric carbon to pre-industrialized levels, not stock photography.
My second stop would be my college dormitory room the night of the 5th of June, 1966. I would try and convince my younger self to dramatically broaden the horizons of my eduction in the selections of college classes I would register for starting the next morning, adding more art, music, literature, and worst of all, business.
Sadly, neither of those two stops and changes in my personal Feynman multiverse worldline are likely to be possible for me, but at least I can start today to try and change those same areas of my life for the future.
In college, I took one "marketing" course, because I could not fit anything else into my schedual at that time that I wanted to take, and because the marketing course was the only vaguely interesting one that I could find that had the right number of "hours" and met during times that did not conflict with my other courses and work. I tried to take a number of courses in the J-School and in Art, but I was repeated thrown out by the professors because I was a "hard science" major, and "didn't fit" and "there wasn't enough space for their majors".
Since then, I've been heavily enrolled in the "college of self-enlightenment" (AKA: "school of hard knocks") and have worked dilligently on filling in the gaping holes in my knowledge and experiance. Reading has been a big part of that self education: the morning NY Times, Washington Post, and the WSJ to figure out what is going on in the world, and books, lots and lots of books.
The following are some books I own, have read, and think highly of. There is a heavy emphasis on business and strategy and less so on images, "photography", and photographic or computer technology, but some of that as well. The links to Amazon make it easy to buy them to read, and just coincidentally, makes a small fraction of the sale price that would otherwise go into somebody else's pocket go into Picade's coffers to support our photographer's. I recommend them whole heartedly to help fill in the holes in your enlightenment. When we build out the rest of the website, there will be a resource section that will list these and a lot more including the "image" books, but for the moment, this ought to help you get started.
Oh, BTW, the PUNishment: <GGGGG>
Michael Beasley