November 2010
1 post
Retooling
Seems like I’ve disappeared? Yeah, I’ve taken a break. But I’ll be back. With a vengeance.
Until then, I’m on Twitter.
October 2010
16 posts
A note about Tumblr
For the most part, I’ve really enjoyed using Tumblr for this blog project. However, their queue, which I heavily rely on for daily posting, is the buggiest bit of software I’ve ever used. And I’m a professional software developer.
Occasionally it stops posting when it should. Occasionally it just dumps all the posts into published. For a while it would keep posts that were...
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Bill Gates' favorite teacher →
Apparently there is guy, not far from me, that sits in a closet churning out mini-lectures on all kinds of topics. They’re so good, Bill Gates has been enjoying them with his kids and says it’s amazing. I think what Sal Khan is doing with Khan Academy is pretty great, too.
Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most...
September 2010
22 posts
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Using computers to teach kids →
This is a radio show episode that explores using computers (but really games) to teach kids. The guests on the show are really brilliant people that understand what games are and what education really means, and how they obviously work together (games producing “embodied empathy for complex systems”). The host, however, is a bit skeptical, and honestly a bit annoying.
But can it...
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How Richard Feynman went from stirring jelly to a... →
Later, at university, his roommate returned home one day to find him leaning out of a window on a freezing winter’s day, stirring something in a bowl.
Feynman had suddenly become intrigued by a problem - could jelly set at freezing temperatures if constantly stirred?
It is incidents like this that prompted physicist Freeman Dyson to consider him “half genius, half buffoon”....
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August 2010
33 posts
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Ackoff in Education →
Here is an interesting Ackoff story that I actually transcribed myself in 2007. He talks about how he helped deal with a gang problem in a Philadelphia ghetto by starting a special education program that let them learn whatever they wanted. The results were astounding. Here is a snippet of the story:
Now several things happened in the course. Some of it, and this is just an aside, but about 3 or...
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WatchThis is particularly awesome if you’re familiar with chiptunes or just generally appreciate video game music. It’s actually not related to video games at all, but this guy Norman McLaren basically pioneered a very chiptunes sound in the 1950s by painting on analog film. As a side effect, it also allowed him to visualize the sounds he made.
This a series of 3 videos showing his amazing...
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Russia in color, a century ago →
These photos from 100 years ago are really quite amazing, most obviously for being in color. Seeing color photos from so long ago just doesn’t feel right, especially at such high resolution. It’s probably the closest thing to time travel.
Visualizing the Creative Process →
This guy Danc at Lost Garden write some brilliant stuff. Most of it focuses on game design, but gems like this are pretty universally applicable. This talks about his creative process, which I believe is pretty much the progressive standard. He describes it as “like a snake swallowing a series of tennis balls.”
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The Builders' Manifesto →
This relates a lot to Kevin Kelly’s third leg of science about making as a way of learning about the world. I love the idea of buildership.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell. What leaders “lead” are yesterday’s organizations. But yesterday’s organizations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate...
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WatchHere is another great talk by Chris Hecker on Structure vs Style. It’s an exploration of a pattern in problem solving, particularly for “hard interactive problems” common in games and other interactive systems, of separating structure and style. The primary example used to convey this decomposition is the texture mapped triangle. He goes on to suggest that AI is likely to have a...