“An education in which skills, narrow intellect, and information have no connection with insight, imagination, feeling, beauty, conscience, and wonder and that systematically evades all engagement with the great, central issues and problems of human life, is a wasteland.”

[quoting David Bohm] “…insight is not restricted to great scientific discoveries or to artistic creations, but rather it is of critical importance in everything we do, especially in the affairs of ordinary life.”

“…chronological snobbery and temporal provincialism that so constrict the modern mind set.”

[and this especially on the academically 'gifted'] “Those who display the requisite intellectual skills are singled out as special for their proficiency in the use of an aspect of mind that has no intrinsic relationship to the art of living well as persons…Most have been ill equipped by their education to live well as persons, to find delight in friendship and love, in the joys of sound and touch and color…”

"In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame. I spoke about Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, something at the heart of Brain Pickings and of increasing importance as we face our present information reality. The talk is now available online — full (approximate) transcript below, enhanced with images and links to all materials referenced in the talk."

"This is what I want to talk about today, networked knowledge, like dot-connecting of the florilegium, and combinatorial creativity, which is the essence of what Picasso and Paula Scher describe. The idea that in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles."

"How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it IS done in a second — it’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience, and every movie, and every thing in my life that’s in my head.” —Paula Scher

"Anagnorisis ( /ˌænəɡˈnɒrɨsɨs/; Ancient Greek: ἀναγνώρισις) is a moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery. Anagnorisis originally meant recognition in its Greek context, not only of a person but also of what that person stood for. It was the hero's sudden awareness of a real situation, the realisation of things as they stood, and finally, the hero's insight into a relationship with an often antagonistic character in Aristotelian tragedy."

"But I do feel that many people who take shots at products (some they don't even pay for) are overly critical of them with no goal of providing their readers or friends with a constructive perspective.<br />
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Worse is when the people doing the complaining also make software or web sites or iPhone applications themselves. As visible leaders of the web, I think there are a lot of folks who could do a favor to younger, less experienced people by setting an example of critiquing to raise up rather than critiquing to tear down.<br />
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If you're a well known web or app developer who complains a lot on Twitter about other people's projects, I am very likely talking about you. You and I both know that there are many reasons why something works a certain way or why something in the backend would affect the way something works on the front-end."<br />
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[via: http://kottke.org/11/04/how-to-complain-about-software ]

"This, plus a schedule, forms the totality of my syllabus this term.<br />
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1. Give it your best. Work hard. Be respectful. Show up on time. Be physically & mentally present. Anything less than your best is a waste of your time, mine, & that of your classmates.<br />
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2. Show the work every day. Tight feedback loops allow for an iterative process…<br />
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3. Question everything, propose answers. Everything is an investigation. There are no nevers…<br />
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4. Momentum matters. Creativity is equal parts momentum, insight, and craft. We will move fast to build stamina. Art is long, life is short.<br />
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5. Don’t wait for permission. Go off and try it.<br />
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6. Every classroom is a lab. Investigate. Experiment. Report back to your peers.<br />
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7. Assignments are incomplete until one is competent…<br />
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8. Grades are a false metric…<br />
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9. Getting better. The point of all education is to get better…<br />
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10. Rules are stupid. Be smart. Be respectful. Work hard. Reflect often. Strive for insight. Work to get better."

"For me, writing seems to be a muscle. W/out doing it regularly, I feel I've lost my ability to express cogently complex ideas in interesting ways.

…because I haven't been regularly talking about the ideas that interest me, I've not given myself the time to reduce down those ideas into pithy, understandable statements.

Writing seems to be associated w/ my sense of pattern recognition. I'm missing the structures of abstraction it gives me, & the room for wiggly play I get while I do it.

So I'm trying to start writing regularly again. It's frustrating & a bloody pain. I feel incapable of expressing what I mean to say. There's no glitter to my words, & I have to force them out. I can see everything that's wrong with what I write. I don't like the structure, but improving it doesn't come naturally because I don't know what to do… There are no insights. I can't start or end things. I don't even sound like me. I'm boring. Okay, fine, do it anyway."

"The Poetry of Reality is the fifth installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. It features 12 scientists and science enthusiasts, including Michael Shermer, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Carolyn Porco, and PZ Myers, promoting science through words of wisdom."

"This is exactly why those people who use RSS readers to scan through thousands of feeds, read blog posts from various decentrally connected sources and who engage themselves into assembling multiple unrelated sources of information into one (probing connections between them) have much greater ability to sense and respond to changing conditions in increasingly complex environments than those who read only the major newspapers, watch only the major news networks and don’t put themselves into a difficult situation of being hammered with a lot of stuff at once. Linear, intentional learning was how you learned in the past. Enter nonlinear, visually active way of learning of the future."

"drugs may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity."