This feeling is a large portion of the criteria I use for choosing places to work, and otherwise spend my time.

The joy of working in a university... [is] about being in the company of people who are smarter than I am... I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don’t want to rank any higher than about tenth. Being in the company of people who outshine me intellectually doesn’t just challenge and improve me, it gives me pleasure... Befuddlement is nature’s way of telling you that you are learning. You ought to find your university buzzing with ideas that seem intriguing but not (yet) quite within your grasp. If you have all necessary prerequisites and understand everything you hear each week, you cheated yourself. You didn’t pick a good enough college. --Geoffrey Pullum

Now for the random things.

There is, apparently, an Edward Tufte / Richard Feynman LaTeX package. Yes, you too can typeset documents like the masters!

I've been meaning to try a number of open source drawing programs - the kind that let you turn your tablet computer or tablet input device into a sketchpad, complete with fake charcoal, pencils, watercolors, and the like. I've had these tabs open for weeks, but never got around to trying them, so let me list them here in the hopes the public declaration of interest will further lower my activation energy on this.