Surely a controversial take 🙂
(But I tend to agree)
On the ails and aims and means of education
The Art of John Harris
Gorgeous, expansive, cosmic.
That’s how I felt when I first discovered this book. I had seen some of these on the covers of various old sci-fi paperbacks, from long ago.
Monthly Recap: February 2023
Major updates
Trip to Carmel where we stayed in an AirBnB in the woods
- No internet: board games, reading, sleeping early
- Fortunately got back in time before the storm closed the roads
Tara’s school was off for a week, went to a great camp by Peninsula Youth Theater — and put on a short play at the end (“The reluctant dragon”)
Minor updates
- Visited Treasure Island (finally, after over a decade of living here) for a friend’s 40th birthday party
- Slightly better eat/sleep 🤞
- Saw a bunch of snow on the peaks
- Got an annual medical check-up done after a few years’ break (all good)
- Visited Michael’s after many years with Tara — it’s still around and still a “craft-y wonderland”
Watched/read/made/listened
- Gosford Park (re-watched) — discovered the music of Ivor Novello
- Read “Digital Minimalism” (plan to practice some of that this year)
- Tried out a family board game: Dragonwood
- Knives out (re-watched)
- And then there were none (the old version!)
Monthly Curations: February 2023
- Something truly novel for me, “reaching before and beyond spacetime” through deep learning
- A long essay on the war in Ukraine. Goes against the grain but has a thorough overview of a lot that has been overlooked in the coverage over the last year
- Also, some plain talk on the war
- Roam has been getting constant improvements, and it has joined my list of “forever tools”
- A fun (niche) idea, the “Mouse Book Club”
- Remembering the value of public education, a moving talk by Catherine Liu
- In praise of small cameras
- Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls (hard to read)
- The broken state of open-source
- Realized that people have built GPUs within Minecraft
- Even crime organizations are doing tech layoffs (this one needs a comedy sketch)
- Fascinating look at Forth
“Blogging” vs “writing about blogging”
This image (from a great webcomic) brought a smile to my face, and if you’ve procrastinated by blaming your tools, it might for you too.
Visual Thinking
Watching this Youtube video by the excellent Beck Tench.
Cataloguing some of what she mentioned, for reference
People
Books and Mindsets
Cartooning by Ivan Brunetti
Syllabus by Lynda Barry
Zen of Seeing by Frederick Franck
Make A World by Ed Emberley
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Dotfiles & Vim
My “dotfiles” repo is a decade old now, and it has been interesting to see a progression through
.vimrc(ye olde days)init.vim(“modern” vim)init.lua(All-in on Lua with NeoVim)
(is there a moral to this story? perhaps “don’t be surprised at how much practices and tools change over time”, and “try to identify things that don’t change”)
Observe
I had the opportunity to use this excellent tool/service/platform over the last month.
I won’t go into details about features etc (maybe later?) but the part that impressed me was how the core concept of breaking down everything into “resources” and “streams” was reflected at all levels.
It’s one thing to represent logs and metrics and so forth this way. It’s another thing to have it show up in how billing is handled, or diagnosis in response to support questions.
It is an example of a deep, recursive metaphor. I am reminded of “everything being a buffer” in Emacs, or “everything being an object” in Pharo, etc.
This comes up in other domains too — a tradeoff between this sort of uniformity and simplicity of structure, and a more “surface-level simplicity” that hides complexity of structure.
The latter can’t be extended, can’t be accessed or customized, but tends to win out (unfortunately) — so it is rare and pleasing to encounter something that can.
Tools for Thought
If you like “this sort of thing“, you should watch this talk by Mark Bernstein.
It talk isn’t a TED talk, it isn’t on StrangeLoop, but it might be the best overview of this area yet.
Touches on lost tools, lost ideas, some things you thought were recent but aren’t, etc.
Full set of slides here.
If you’re still curious, I’d suggest looking at his homepage, and plug the excellent tool that he’s been building and improving over decades, Tinderbox.
Some screenshots of slides1, to whet your appetite:
- Though, as he points out, given the pitiful computational power of that era, the ideas are much better than the way they appear as demos on old hardware. ↩
Monthly recap (January 2023)
Major updates
New year, new beginnings: joined a bunch of very interesting people doing very interesting work at Luminary Cloud
Minor updates
- Dishwasher, dryer and a toilet all failed on one weekend and all had to be replaced; became a family fun event
- On eating places nearby: bummed to find that Pastis closed down, mentally replaced it with La Boheme nearby. Also, discovered Fabrini’s as an alternative to Hobees
- Cough/cold for a few days
- Doing the Caltrain commute
- A ridiculous amount of rain
- Had a long library trip, and a very enjoyable at Tara’s school
Watched/read/made
- Mitchells and the machines (I loved this — also had a good “technology lesson”)
- Clue (the 1985 movie — surprisingly, Tara liked this too!)
- Avatar (yes, watched it with 3-d in the hall)
- Ivy & Bean (on Netflix … not a fan, the books are way better)
- Wolfwalkers (enjoyable short animated film)
- The Duke (one of those classic humorous/satirical/whimsical movies, highly recommend)
Abacus Noir 