Welcome to Eikonoklastes, a blog by Michael Hartl. As you may have guessed from the warning in the banner, eikonoklastes is the Greek root of the word iconoclast; you won’t therefore be surprised to learn that a principal theme of this blog is to question conventional wisdom. Strangely, this simple act of questioning seems inevitably to produce a profusion of controversial ideas—things you can’t say, as essayist Paul Graham puts it—for it seems, upon close inspection, that conventional wisdom is often wrong. And people don’t like hearing it.

In his essay, Graham (wisely) doesn’t say many things you can’t say (one exception being the notion that physicists are smarter than professors of French literature—an example close to my own heart). On this blog I plan to say some of the things you can’t say—tactfully, with circumspect language and all due discretion—but I will say them nonetheless.

Not everything will be controversial; I have significant interests in computer programming and technology, for example, which should prove intriguing but not inflammatory. But I’ve got a lot of ideas rattling around inside my head which are unfettered by what “everyone” thinks or knows, and I want to get them out. This blog is the place I’m putting them.

Notes:

• I’d like to thank Bill Lazar for giving me the kick in the butt I needed to start this blog. I registered eikonoklastes.org years ago for this very purpose, but it was Bill’s prodding that finally put me over the edge. If you disagree violently with anything I post, blame Bill.

• Eikonoklastes is R-rated. If you might be offended by the occasional “fuck”, you’d best be leaving now. Newsweek writes “f---”; The Economist writes “fuck”. I read The Economist.

• My punctilious nature has, among other things, led to a predilection for beautiful typesetting. Though still lacking the visual appeal of the written page, the web can look pretty—my favorite aesthetic touch is the em dash, exhibited for your amusement in this very sentence. I’ll also use proper en dashes, as I have from 1996–present, and curly (but not Microsoft “smart”) quotes. This means that a simple “cut and paste” operation won’t work on posts from this blog—which will only be a problem if anybody ever reads it.