"Two centuries ago, Playfair invented statistical graphics and changed the
world. The time is ripe for another designer to invent the fundamental
context-sensitive graphical forms, and change the world again."

"Our pioneers are those who transcend interaction—designers whose creations
anticipate, not obey. The hero of tomorrow is not the next Steve Wozniak, but
the next William Playfair. An artist who redefines how people learn. An artist
who paints with magic ink."

("Non sibi sed bono publico") => "Not for oneself, but for the good of others." (I want be like that when i'm like 45, but right now, my selfish goal is to popularize bret and alan w/ ubuiquitous robotics by 2030)
- Bret Victor 

    I think people have lost confidence in themselves. To a large extent, that's been done by members of my profession. The building has become the province of the architect; it's sort of his plaything. And the architects have worked quite hard to convince users that they don't know anything about architecture... It's even reached the point where people have interior decorators come choose their own wallpaper, for god's sake.

So this lack of confidence, which has been fostered in the population, is a manipulation that has actually been caused partly by the media, but largely by the [architecture] profession. It tremendously endangers the fabric of society, because if people lose confidence in themselves to that degree, then the adaptation of the environment, to common sense and to everyday use, disappears.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852#

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create
http://favstar.fm/users/_why
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams

[Grassmann's theory of linear algebra] was a revolutionary text, too far ahead of its time to be appreciated. Grassmann submitted it as a Ph. D. thesis, but Möbius said he was unable to evaluate it and forwarded it to Ernst Kummer, who rejected it without giving it a careful reading. Over the next 10-odd years, Grassmann wrote a variety of work applying his theory, in the hope that these applications would lead others to take his theory seriously. ...

In 1862, Grassmann published a thoroughly rewritten second edition of A1, hoping to earn belated recognition for his theory of extension, and containing the definitive exposition of his linear algebra. It fared no better than A1, even though A2's manner of exposition anticipates the textbooks of the 20th century.

Disappointed at his inability to be recognized as a mathematician, Grassmann turned to historical linguistics. ... These philological accomplishments were honored during his lifetime.
wikipedia

    fetnamn
    http://www.gorgorat.com/#32

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
    In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you... Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

    Knowing more than your own field is really helpful in [thinking creatively]. I've always thought that one of the reasons the 1960s was so interesting is that nobody was a computer scientist back then. Everybody who came into it came into it with lots of other knowledge and interests. Then they tried to figure what computers were, and the only place they could use for analogies were other areas. So we got some extremely interesting ideas from that.

And of course, the reason being educated is important is simply because you don't have any blue [orthogonal] contexts if you don't have any other kinds of knowledge to think with. Engineering is one of the hardest fields to be creative in, just because it's all about optimizing, and you don't optimize without being very firmly anchored to the context you're in. What we're talking about here is something that is not about optimization, but about rotating the point of view.
https://archive.org/details/XD1941_9_95VannevarBushSymTape10_AlanKay
https://worrydream.com/refs/Kay_1995_-_Powerful_Ideas_Need_Love_Too.html
Now computers can be television-like, book-like, and "like themselves." Today's commercial trends in educational and home markets are to make them as television-like as possible. And the weight of the billions of dollars behind these efforts is likely to be overwhelming. It is sobering to realize that in 1600, 150 years after the invention of the printing press, the top two bestsellers in the British Isles were the Bible and astrology books! Scientific and political ways of thinking were just starting to be invented. The real revolutions take a very long time to appear, because as McLuhan noted, the initial content and values in a new medium is always taken from old media.

Now one thing that is possible with computers and networks, that could get around some of the onslaught of "infobabble," is the possibility of making media on the Internet that is "self teaching." Imagine a child or adult just poking around the Internet for fun and finding something--perhaps about rockets or gene splicing--that looks intriguing. If it were like an article in an encyclopedia, it would have to rely on expository writing (at a level chosen when the author wrote it) to convey the ideas. This will wind up being a miss for most netsurfers, especially given the general low level of reading fluency today. The computer version of this will be able to find out how old and how sophisticated is the surfer and instantly tailor a progression of learning experiences that will have a much higher chance of introducing each user to the "good stuff" that underlies most human knowledge. A very young child would be given different experiences than older ones--and some of the experiences would try to teach the child to read and reason better as a byproduct of their interest. This is a "Montessori" approach to how some media might be organized on the Internet: one's own interests provide the motivation to journey through an environment that is full of learning opportunities disguised as toys.

This new kind of "dynamic media" is possible to make today, but very hard and expensive. Yet it is the kind of investment that a whole country should be able to understand and make. I still don't think it is a real substitute for growing up in a culture that loves learning and thinking. But in such a culture, such new media would allow everyone to go much deeper, in more directions, and experience more ways to think about the world than is possible with the best books today. Without such a culture, such media is likely to be absolutely necessary to stave off the fast approaching next Dark Ages.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riwAXtA8Z4&t=6m54s
    I don't believe there is such a thing as knowledge. What there are are processes inside people's head. Knowledge isn't a substance just because it's a noun.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd04feTzCA8&t=19m33s
    The thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s -- no TV, living on a farm. That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.


    Even very young children can understand and use interactive transformational tools. The first ones are their hands! They can readily extend these experiences to computer objects and making changes to them. They can often imagine what a proposed change will do and not be surprised at the result... They can answer any question whose answer requires the application of just one of these tools. But it is extremely difficult for them to answer any question that requires two or more transformations. Yet they have no problem applying sequences of transformations, exploring "forward." It is for conceiving and achieving even modest goals requiring several changes that they almost completely lack navigation abilities.

It seems that what needs to be learned and taught is now to package up transformations in twos and threes in a manner similar to learning a strategic game like checkers. The vague sense of a "threesome" pointing towards one's goal can be a set up for the more detailed work that is needed to accomplish it.
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
New ideas go through stages of acceptance, both from within and without. From within, the sequence moves from "barely seeing" a pattern several times, then noting it but not perceiving its "cosmic" significance, then using it operationally in several areas, then comes a "grand rotation" in which the pattern becomes the center of a new way of thinking, and finally, it turns into the same kind of inflexible religion that it originally broke away from. From without, as Schopenhauer noted, the new idea is first denounced as the work of the insane, in a few years it is considered obvious and mundane, and finally the original denouncers will claim to have invented it.

Alan Kay: Programming and Scaling
Leonardo could not invent a single engine for any of his vehicles. Maybe the smartest person of his time, but he was born in the wrong time. His IQ could not transcend his time. Henry Ford was nowhere near Leonardo, but he happened to be born in the right century, a century in which people had already done a lot of work in making mechanical things...

Knowledge, in many many cases, trumps IQ. Why? This is because there are certain special people who invent new ways of looking at things. Henry Ford was powerful because Issac Newton changed the way Europe thought about things. One of the wonderful things about the way knowledge works is if you can get a supreme genius to invent calculus, those of us with more normal IQs can learn it. So we're not shut out from what the genius does. We just can't invent calculus by ourselves, but once one of these guys turns things around, the knowledge of the era changes completely.
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
So we've got this present, it comes out of one set of things in the past that we're vaguely aware of, and gives rise to an incremental future. But the truth is that the past is vast. It's enormous! There are billions of people contributing to the past. And every time we think the present is real, we cannot see the rest of the past. So we have to destroy the present.

Once you get rid of it, it's a scary situation, because you said, "I'm not going to have anything based on the past." Of course that's not possible; you're just trying. But sometimes you get a little feeling. And this not an idea; it's just a feeling. It's like an odor of perfume. But the fun thing is that little feeling can actually lead you to look in the past in different places than you normally do, and you can bring those up to that feeling. And once you do that, that feeling starts expanding into a vision, and the vision expands into an actual idea... Some of the most creative people I know actually operate this way. This is where those ideas come from that are not just incremental to the present. They come out of vague, even muscular sensations, that you have to go chasing to find out what they are. If you try to get the idea too early, it can only be in terms of the present.
A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous dissatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth--otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.


https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
    http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442
- alan kay

    "It's funnier slightly wrong."
    This is an important image. My instincts tell me there is major unexplored art territory in the visualization of data.
   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92960
   - Paul Graham

    “We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.”
    ― John McCarthy http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/mcc59/mcc59.pdf

    "Young Man, in matematics, you don't understand things, you just get used to them."
    - Von Neumann

    You taste only seapartes and divides you, so create - why the lucky stiff
    

    "Data is the new medium of choice for telling a story or bringing an idea to life."
    "I’ve always thought the value of a visualization is its ability to change someone’s mind."
    "To me, the best visualizations are often the simplest ones. They’re the ones that tell you the most, with the least amount of visual noise."
    
    "Visualization is more than a way of seeing; it’s a way of thinking."
    The purpose of visualization is insight
    
    "The reality of the design space is more like this... where we have a maze that we need to explore."
    - Mike Bostock
    

    https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201612#26
"
This [book] was very good, quite short, and easy to read, like Einstein's Relativity was easy to read. And you know it works, because his ideas were copied over and over, poorly, eventually into unrecognizability, ineffectiveness, and confusion, the way only the best ideas are.

"

    "Yes, this results in an infinite number of error messages to your javascript console. Don't look at your javascript console and you'll be fine. Trust me on this." - apenwarr
    

        Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."
    

        "But one day… In the future… I dream of a time when all shinobi will cooperate
        with each other… A time when everyone's hearts will be together regardless of
        their countries. That's my… dream of the future." - Hashirama Senju " 

            "It is not wise to judge others based on your own perceptions and by their appearances." - Kishimoto
        

            "proper teaching does not explain things; proper teaching stokes curiosity"
        
            “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
        
            “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
        
            “Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.”
        
            In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.
        
            “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
           
        
            “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
            Where knowledge is free;
            Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
            Where words come out from the depth of truth;
            Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
            Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
            Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
            Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my World awaken.”
        
            - Rabindranath Tagore     https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore
        
        

    The Truth is the Nucleus of the Atom.
    The truth is the bedrock foundation around why something happens.
    The truth is that which has predictive power.
    The truth is cause and effect.


    "But if a man puts his life into a work of Art
    With painstaking detail
    Tears flowing from his eyes
    Devotion flowing from his heart,
    Praise . . .
    Is an Insult.

    When you create something truly otherworldly
    He negotiates himself out of the marketplace.
    For he has created something
    That no man can possibly validate."
    - Kapil Gupta (Siddha Performance)

    “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
    “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

    J. KrishnamurtiJ. Krishnamurti > Quotes


     (?)
    Showing 1-30 of 1,041
    “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
    ― J. Krishnamurti
    tags: conditioning, conformity, society, values1977 likesLike
    “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
    ― J. Krishnamurti
    tags: intelligence, judgement, self1700 likesLike
    “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
    ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
    1189 likesLike
    “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
    “It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
    “One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”
“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
    - Krishnamurti

    "We've had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again — a new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical City on the Hill. Soon that city will be a reality, and we will be crowned its kings, or better than kings: Gods!"

    "The Individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

    "The commodification of ability -- tuition, of course, but, increasingly, genetic treatments, cybernetic protocols, now biomods -- has had the side effect of creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy in all advanced societies. When ability becomes a public resource, what will distinguish people will be what they do with it. Intention. Dedication. Integrity. The qualities we would choose as the bedrock of the social order."


    "Some think [augmentation] is the end of us all, others think it will lead us to paradise."
    "They're just afraid of what they don't understand. That leads to self protection, and defense always leads to offense -- always."


    "The World doesn't care about right or wrong. It's all about power. And right now, none of us have it."

    "I'm not big into books."

    Rebellion, as the Declaration of Independence tells us, is not only our "right" but our "duty" when we have suffered "a long train of abuses and usurpations".


    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deus_Ex:_Invisible_War
    - Deus Ex https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deus_Ex

  "A divided world will not survive the future" - The jailor
  "Art is to games what blood is to a human" - Asmongold

  - World of Warcraft (which i find interesting because it was an attempt to create a perfect world - and it has things that this society lacks. Namely, group quests with semi-random people. Healthy Competition. No scarcity. I personally think asmongold has some of the most accurate and funny social criticism of internet or global culture in the world.)

    So you've come... X, I gave you the ability to choose your own path in life, and
    I hoped the world would allow you to choose a peaceful one. But now it seems
    that you are destined to fight. Because I thought the world might need a new
    champion, I have hidden capsules like this one. If you find and use them you
    will be able to increase your powers beyond anything the world has ever known.
    Step into this capsule and receive an acceleration system to boost your speed.
    Good Luck, X!


    "X" IS THE FIRST OF A NEW GENERATION OF ROBOTS WHICH CONTAIN AN INNOVATIVE NEW
    FEATURE - THE ABILITY TO THINK, FEEL, AND MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS. HOWEVER,
    THIS ABILITY COULD BE VERY DANGEROUS. IF "X" WERE TO BREAK THE FIRST RULE OF
    ROBOTICS, "A ROBOT MUST NEVER HARM A HUMAN BEING", THE RESULTS WOULD BE
    DISASTROUS AND I FEAR THAT NO FORCE ON EARTH COULD STOP HIM.


    "X" POSSESSES GREAT
    RISKS AS WELL AS GREAT POSSIBILITIES. I CAN ONLY HOPE FOR THE BEST.

    X, you shouldn't expect to defeat him, he is designed to be a war machine.
    Remember, you have not reached full power yet. If you use all the abilities you
    were designed with, you should become stronger... You may even become as
    powerful as I am. I'll scout ahead and collect as much information on Sigma's
    fortress as I can.

    I'll meet up with you when you get there...

    Your power is greater than I thought. Maybe you can destroy Sigma.

    See you later! X, I know you can do it!

    "Humans and robots living together in harmony and equality. That was my ultimate wish."

    - Mega Man X

apathy is death - Kreia

    "If You Look Down On People, You Won't Be Able To Recognize Your Own Weaknesses."

    "The Most Inflated Egos Are Often the Most Fragile."

    - Horikoshi

    "Even if the whole world is against you, Kuma will always, always be on your side."

    “ It's not about if I can! I'm doing this because I want to... If I have to die fighting for it, then I die.”

    “Don't forget to smile in any situation. As long as you are alive, there will be better things later, and there will be many.”

    "Youre looking far into the future"
    - Eichiro Oda

- One Piece

    
    Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

- Gibran https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kahlil_Gibran#The_Madman_(1918)

    My boss gave me quite a lecture one day. He said, "Look, here's eight pages you've gone through to describe this thing you want to do and it's still all faint. Bill has just written this proposal, on one page, very concise, clear, describing exactly what he wants to do with his research." The model proposal was very detailed in an intellectual domain that was already all thoroughly beaten out. What he was proposing was a very narrow research question pursuing a tiny sub-domain.
    
    I tried to explain to my boss that I was interested in opening up an entirely new approach for which there is no vocabulary. Later, people used the term "paradigm shift" to describe a fundamental change in assumptions and thinking. If you're really dealing with something in a different paradigm, the vocabulary of almost everything you're trying to say is different. You have to somehow establish the terms as stepping-stones to arrive at what you're trying to say. And people aren't used to it taking that long for you to get the picture to them. That has been the basic problem ever since, when trying to describe the framework Augmentation System and the Bootstrap Strategy.
    http://www.amazon.com/dp/0615308902
    

"Set
your heart ablaze and go beyond your limits!" - Rengoku

The fellow
countrymen of the world make up each part of my body… those of the village
believe in me, and I believe in them… That's what it means to be Hashirama! - Hahirama Senju

    The only purpose of incremental improvement to a status quo is to reveal its flaws. Progress occurs when the status quo is replaced. -
    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

    "It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen."

   - Mahasi Sayadew

    Acquinas

    “We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
    “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
    “I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
    “For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
    “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
    “How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdNAUJWJN08&t=9m22s
    You can't expect somebody to become a biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University biology library and saying, "Just look through it." That will give them nothing. The internet is the same, except magnified enormously. ...

The person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. Cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track, that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and internet, or pencil and paper and books.

    - Noam Chomsky (Deus Ex is my favorite Game, and if Deus Ex was a human, it would be Noam)

    “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

    "You are what you choose to be " - Sorting Hat

    - JK Rowling

    they
    told me they are not like us so they
    must be against us
    their difference
    threatens our sameness it is us versus
    them
    humans are good and demons are bad we
    are just and they are unjust but i was
    an adolescent and did not even think to
    question such simple binaries
    i could not have been more wrong i
    discovered the humans i was sworn to
    protect were in truth the greater
    monsters and if that were so then i had
    to question everything i knew of the
    monsters i'd been fighting my world
    turned inside out the truths i'd held to
    be irrefutable were all inverted
    when i learned that i was going to die i
    knew that i needed to collapse those
    boundaries between us and them
    thus the tunnel
    and then i could come here to die
    i thought if i could see the world
    through their eyes be a stranger in a
    strange land then maybe i could
    understand them better
    and thus understand myself dying by
    demon hands i could then make penance
    for my sins
    but then i saw you yura meshi first
    demonized in a human's body and then
    humanized in a demons you dissolve the
    barriers between us in ways i never
    imagined
    and now i can finally rest
    [Music]
    you're a messy
    you are the justice i could never find
    great changes will come through you
    someday when you're lying in my position
    you'll know a dying man's need for
    closure
    but until then
    thank you - Yu Yu Hakusho

    Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
ira glass

    “Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
    “Imagination governs the world.”
    “The world suffers a lot. Not because the violence of bad people. But because of the silence of the good people.”

    - Napoleon

    "Take the personal out"


    - The studio (katonah yoga)