Oh, come on

"Organizing documents based on their app is akin to organizing notes based on the pencil you used to..."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:41:49 +0200

“Organizing documents based on their app is akin to organizing notes based on the pencil you used to write them.”

- Organizing Documents in iOS by Lukas Mathis

"Really good teachers want to get all the students to be fluent, and they often find ways to do this...."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:34:33 +0200

“Really good teachers want to get all the students to be fluent, and they often find ways to do this. “Regular” teachers often just want to get through the material. Some school systems want to use education to sort the population rather than to educate the whole population.”

- From Alan Kay on ‘The Camel has Two Humps’

Design & Compromise

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:46:46 +0200

Design & Compromise:

[…] a real effect of compromise is that it prevents intact ideas from being tested and falsified. Instead, ideas are blended with their antitheses into policies that are “no one’s idea of what will work,” allowing the perpetual political regurgitation, reinterpretation, and relational stasis that defines the governance of the United States.

"[…] we all search for what can be transacted upon, for attention or esteem or approval or..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:02:46 +0200

“[…] we all search for what can be transacted upon, for attention or esteem or approval or money. We blink into a sunset, search for our phone’s camera, and imagine how the photo will play on the screens where our avatar lives, screens belonging to other selves whom we know only as representations.”

- We have forgotten leisure as “non-activity”

"[…] It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:04:30 +0200

“[…] It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

- Autobiographical Notes, Einstein

"A certain type of writer begins ‘The essence of poetry is’ or ‘All vulgarity may..."

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:14:17 +0200

“A certain type of writer begins ‘The essence of poetry is’ or ‘All vulgarity may be defined as’, and then produces a definition which no one ever though of since the world began, which conforms to no one’s actual usage, and which he himself will probably have forgotten by the end of the month.”

- C. S. Lewis

Firsthand knowledge

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:36:43 +0200

Firsthand knowledge:

[…] The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentators.

"New ideas have the same effect on me as heroin does to an addict. The initial spike is euphoric,..."

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:49:35 +0200

“New ideas have the same effect on me as heroin does to an addict. The initial spike is euphoric, but the comedown is downright debilitating. As the effects wear off and the harsh realities of actually executing and iterating kick in, I move on to the next idea to get my fix.”

- Intervention by Sean King

How Doctors Die

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:47:18 +0200

How Doctors Die:

[…] One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures.

"The ability to write well co-evolves with having stuff that you want to say. Students don’t..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:53:07 +0200

“

The ability to write well co-evolves with having stuff that you want to say. Students don’t get to choose their topics or when to write: they are acting under coercion, and those few who are relatively motivated remain anxious about grades.

Hence student essays are boring, while students’ blogs are (often) interesting.

OFC, if authority figures started reading those blogs and assigning grades to blog entries then the blogs would disappear. If the blogs were subsequently required to re-appear with deadlines etc then they would quickly become boring, just like the essays.

”

- chillyconker’s comment on Hacker News

"Can you trust a teacher who doesn’t use what he teaches? Who has never used what he..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:34:29 +0200

“

Can you trust a teacher who doesn’t use what he teaches? Who has never used what he teaches?

Can you trust a teacher whose only connection to a subject is teaching it?

How can such a teacher possibly know if he’s teaching valuable things, or how well he’s teaching them?

”

- Bret Victor — Some Thoughts on Teaching

"Твердое убеждение в материальной реальности Ада никогда не отвращало средневековых христиан от..."

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:29:41 +0300

“Твердое убеждение в материальной реальности Ада никогда не отвращало средневековых христиан от того, к чему побуждали их амбиции, похоть или алчность. Рак легких, дорожные происшествия и миллионы несчастных и плодящих несчастье алкоголиков - факты, еще более бесспорные, нежели факт существования Инферно во времена Данте. Но все эти факты далеки и несущественны по сравнению с близким, ощущаемым фактом стремления - здесь и сейчас - к освобождению или успокоению, к тому, чтобы выпить и покурить.”

- Олдос Хаксли — Двери восприятия

"When we reduce risk in some areas, we tend to take on more risk in others. For example, a study..."

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:12:12 +0300

“When we reduce risk in some areas, we tend to take on more risk in others. For example, a study showed that automatic braking systems(ABS) did not reduce the number of accidents, because drivers with ABS tended to drive faster and closer to other cars. Another study showed that drivers drove more carefully around non-helmeted cyclists than helmeted ones.”

- Smeed’s Law for Programming

"Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think..."

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:34:39 +0300

“Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they’re right. I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.”

- Scott Adams

"I hate symbolic abstraction, I think it’s a barrier to creativity. So I don’t hate math..."

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:45:31 +0300

“I hate symbolic abstraction, I think it’s a barrier to creativity. So I don’t hate math per se; I hate its current representations. Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? It’s incredibly, ridiculously difficult. That’s why, before the 14th century, everyone thought that multiplication was an incredibly difficult concept, and only for the mathematical elite. Then arabic numerals came along, with their nice place values, and we discovered that even seven-year-olds can handle multiplication just fine. There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication — the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface.”

- Fast Company article quoting Bret Victor

David Foster Wallace about staying conscious and alive

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:22:00 +0300

David Foster Wallace about staying conscious and alive:

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

[…] “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

"[…] except in very rare circumstances the idea of special learning places where nothing but..."

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:46:22 +0300

“[…] except in very rare circumstances the idea of special learning places where nothing but learning happens no longer seems to me to make any sense at all. The proper place and best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is the place where until very recently almost all children learned it—in the world itself, in the mainstream of adult life. If we put in every community, as we should (perhaps in former school buildings), resource and activity centers, citizens’ clubs, full of spaces for many kinds of things to happen— libraries, music rooms, theaters, sports facilities, workshops, meeting rooms- -these should be open to and used by young and old together. We made a terrible mistake when (with the best of intentions) we separated children from adults and learning from the rest of life, and one of our most urgent tasks is to take down the barriers we have put between them and let them come back together.”

- John Holt — How Children Fail

"The idea of doing the dividing mentally rather than with white rods did not stick in the minds of..."

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:47:12 +0300

“The idea of doing the dividing mentally rather than with white rods did not stick in the minds of these children because it was my idea, not theirs; there was no place for it in their minds; it did not meet any felt intellectual need. We must not fool ourselves, as for years I fooled myself, into thinking that guiding children to answers by carefully chosen leading questions is in any important respect different from just telling them the answers in the first place. Children who have been led up to answers by teachers’ questions are later helpless unless they can remember the questions, or ask themselves similar questions, and this is exactly what they cannot do. The only answer that really sticks in a child’s mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself.”

- John Holt — How Children Fail

"The children are willing to accept all kinds of mathematical shorthand if I tell them that I am too..."

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 23:53:48 +0300

“

The children are willing to accept all kinds of mathematical shorthand if I tell them that I am too lazy to write out things the long way. In the first place, this is true. In the second place, it gives them a chance to make fun of my laziness, and to feel (which is also true) that in accepting my shorthand they are doing me a kind of favor. They do not like to be told that a certain symbol “means” something. This seems arbitrary and mysterious. But if you express a relationship or an operation in terms with which they are familiar, they will soon be perfectly willing to let you use some kind of shorthand to express it. Thus we can go from “Two whites are as long as one red” to “2 whites = 1 red” to “2 X w = r.”

After all, men invented mathematical symbols to save the trouble of writing things out the long way, so what I am doing in class is both logically and historically correct. No symbol “means” anything until we decide and agree to let it mean something; so why not let children feel that they are in on this decision?

[…] Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.

”

- John Holt — How Children Fail

"My conjecture became that the world’s biggest problem isn’t poverty or disease or any oft-stated..."

Mon, 30 May 2011 15:41:21 +0300

“My conjecture became that the world’s biggest problem isn’t poverty or disease or any oft-stated major problem, but that we don’t have enough people engaged in trying to solve these problems.”

- Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project « Steve Blank (via igrigorik)