I go to this spot some evenings to get away and help my mind decompress and untangle.
It's at the top of a local hill.
A few other people go there too, I suspect for the same reason as they are always peaceful and calm, watching the sea and sun, some chomping on a sandwich or sipping from a thermos.
When I was a child the idea of memorisation and conformance was equal to academic success, and indeed success in life.
Independent thinking, challenge, tinkering, play.. were definitely not.
And yet invention needs the second.
Did this culture come from British colonialism and "Victorian" education designed to create unchallenging servants? Or did it exist previously? I guess it doesn't explain China's previous education values...
I sometimes listen to NN Taleb who is fervently against large institutions because they squish good culture. He suggests people who make progress do so despite their employer (academia, govt, corporate).
He gives many examples of historical inventors and discoverers who were lucky enough to have the time and resources to play and tinker.
For me this ties into the idea of UBI to free people up to follow their own instincts and not spend 100% of their time surviving.
🆕 blog! “It isn't who you know - it's who knows you”
I'm terrible at networking. I forget people's names minutes after meeting them, I never have business cards and lose the ones I'm given, and I can't go five minutes without burbling some nonsense. But I recognise that networking is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to succeed. I've always been told that […]
I’m so glad public libraries already exist. Could you I magine trying to sell the idea of libraries to politicians in 2024?
“You want to build a large public complex on prime real estate that gives away free books & education & community events—paid for by our tax dollars? Are you crazy??”
In the UK we're lucky to have already had the same for healthcare.
Publicly funded healthcare, free at the point of need and use.
If it didn't already exist, there's no way even the "centre left" party today would suggest it, I fear.
It goes to show how much of a victory establishing it was in the previous context of only private health, against eg the opposition of doctors associations.
I'm doing some thinking about whether to learn common #lisp or #scheme and create tutorials for others at the beginning like myself.
The focus would not be on syntax or an encyclopedia of available commands or external libraries. It would be about "thinking" and decomposing problems into algorithms.
So far I like that scheme is tiny, has pretty much one syntax, leaving us undistracted from the problem to solve.
