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My amateur red blend. It's not great. It's decent. The internet is better. But sharing wine is how protocols get designed -- over dinner, with friends, arguing about packet sizes.

The book I co-wrote with Brian Kernighan. 272 pages. Every C programmer alive has read it. Clear, concise, no padding. The entire language specification fits in your back pocket. Borrow it, read it, write hello world, return it.

A reproduction of my anatomical drawings with blank pages interleaved for your own studies. I dissected 30 corpses to understand how the body works. You can study from the drawings instead. Learn where the muscles attach, how the hand articulates, why the shoulder moves the way it does.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

🇮🇹 🌐 🇫🇷

A box of precision brass gears, cams, shafts, and springs. The same components I designed for the Analytical Engine. Build a clock, a music box, or a mechanical calculator. Or redesign them three times and never finish. Either way, the gears are beautiful.

Learn to decompose problems into repeatable steps. We start with simple sequences, add loops, add conditionals, and build up to something that could compute Bernoulli numbers -- the algorithm I wrote in 1843. Paper and pencil only. No computers. The machine is not the point. The pattern is the point.

A set of Jacquard punch cards and a demonstration reader. These are the ancestors of computer programs -- patterns encoded in holes. The loom doesn't think. It follows the card. The card is the algorithm. Babbage borrowed the idea. I wrote the first algorithm for it.

Learn the fundamentals of code-breaking. Caesar ciphers, substitution ciphers, frequency analysis, and the principles behind Enigma. No math degree required -- just patience and the willingness to think backwards.

Small tin sheets, oil paints, fine brushes. Everything for painting retablos -- the small votive paintings I collected and was inspired by. Paint your miracle, your gratitude, your survival. The format is tiny. The feeling is enormous.

Forget flattering yourself. Paint what's real. The scars, the joy, the fury, the love. We work in oil or acrylic on small canvases. I'll teach you about color symbolism from Mexican folk art -- what red means, what blue means, why I put monkeys and parrots in my paintings. Bring a mirror. Bring honesty.

I don't teach technique. I teach seeing. We go outside, we look at the sky, and I show you that it's not blue -- it's cobalt and ultramarine and violet and green, swirling. The color is the feeling. The brushstroke is the heartbeat. If your painting looks like a photograph, you're not painting -- you're copying.

French box easel, oil paints (18 colors including chrome yellow -- my obsession), brushes, turpentine, linseed oil, and 6 pre-stretched canvases. Everything you need to paint outdoors the way the Impressionists did. Go to a wheat field. Set up. Paint what you feel, not what you see.

Learn to play my sonatas. Moonlight, Pathetique, Appassionata, Waldstein, Hammerklavier. We start with the ones you can handle and work up to the ones that break you. The Hammerklavier has destroyed better pianists than you. That's what makes it worth trying.