Somehow Sam Koski smuggled wisdom into my high school head in a way that has shaped my thinking ever since. I think he teaches at Doral Academy now, but, back in the day, he made the math and computer departments at Miami Springs Senior High elite. I can’t overstate his excellence.

There were so many lessons. One was an emphasis on understanding. The goal is to derive technique from understanding. Technique without understanding is just memorization. And, in my opinion, you’d be better served memorizing poetry.

Another lesson was that there’s more than one pointer to a referent. A quadratic equation and a parabola can point to the same referent. And Mr. Koski demanded that we be able to see the parabola when we saw the equation, and the equation when we saw the parabola. And if we moved the parabola, that we visualized the shift in the corresponding equation. That we recognize that there’s different ways of saying the same thing. or, relatedly, that there’s different paths for solving a given problem – and you should consider which route you want to take.

In the early days of Amplifier, I was responsible for both the operations and the financial sides of things. (John Scarborough and Macon Stokes would later wear these two hats more capably and in far more complicated cirumstances.) For everything we did, there was an operational representation of the thing and a financial respresentation of the thing. (There was also a digital representation, but this was mostly Jud’s domain then.) There was a mooring effect to be tethered operationally to the finances, and financially to the operations. Starting in 2003, I had less to do with operations, and more than I could do in the finances. This was an unsteady place for me.