Posts – page 46 of 74

Bret Victor questions the effectiveness of educators that do not actively participate in the subjects they teach in his essay Some Thoughts on Teaching.

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?

Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

via Hans Pieper

I’m not a big sports enthusiast, but I’ve always been more interested in professional sports. I was never sure why I had that preference, but Taylor Branch’s article, The Shame of College Sports expresses why I prefer pro.

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

— –Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via

Author Jonah Lehrer reports on Geoffrey West’s attempt to understand how cities work.

[C]ities are valuale because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.

— JAMES TARANTO, Better Late Than Never - WSJ.com

via holykaw

Do This

This is old but still useful. The New York Times has a personal finance check list with tons of useful links, calculators, videos, and other tools and media.

Taking time out to put your personal finances in gear can reap both immediate and long-term benefits, from cashing gift cards to reallocating investments. This checklist can help you formulate a strategy, providing tips, the time needed to achieve them, and links to additional resources. For each category, Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist, offers his insights on video. You can customize your list by removing items to suit your strategy, and then print a personalized list of the items you plan on tackling today.

We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! ‘The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!’ groans some solitary thinker. ‘Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,’ replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride.

— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As James Joyce said, “In the particular lies the universal.” (via Op-Ed: In The Particular Lies The Universal :: Articles :: The 99 Percent)

A good graphic designer understands how to arrange information on the page so the reader can ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions. When the software designer defines the visual representation of her program, when she describes the pictures that the user will interpret, she is doing graphic design, whether she realizes this or not.

— Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

It is better than “thinking about.” It is better than “started.” It is better than “perfect.”

“Done is better than perfect,” but that doesn’t mean that to never look back at what you did. Finish something and push it out the door, show it to the world.

Tab Juice, a social e-commerce platform, has an interesting infographic on some of the psychological influences that go on in the minds of online shoppers.

When you combine the power of the mind and the force of social shopping, you have a mighty confabulation of social rules and subconscious needs. Together, these things play into the psychology of social commerce. Psychologists have defined six universal heuristics or learning methods that have been seen in shoppers and are now being seen in social commerce.

Branding is easier than it appears (via xkcd: Brand Identity)

Don’t use math. (via Dilbert comic strip for 12/19/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.)

Rands has a handy flow chart for solving your own or other people’s computer problems.

You can also download a larger version.

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority. Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something. An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.