To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder?
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Excerpt:
“The potential of more people learning to code (I mean: script) is not that they change their careers and become developers. It’s about amplifying your current work with tools you build just for you. Less rote work, done more quickly, with more time spent solving creative problems and inventing new things.”
(via dbreunig)
(Source: codinghorror.com, via dbreunig)
definitive or delightful or interesting
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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-digital-editor-2013/273763/
Good, concise set of criteria for journalism
Pixar’s biggest competitive advantage now is its ability to use this math-driven technology not to make better shapes but to tell better stories.
Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near-term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.
As a mathematician, I had done nothing special, nothing unusual. It was an obvious first step when someone versed in mathematical thinking approaches a new problem. Identify the key parameters and formulate formal definitions of them. But it was not at all an obvious thing for anyone else on the project.
In many cases, the real value of being a mathematical thinker, both to the individual and to society, lies in the things the individual does automatically, without conscious thought or effort. The things they take for granted – because they have become part of who they are.
Mathematical thinking is a whole way of looking at things, of stripping them down to their numerical, structural, or logical essentials, and of analyzing the underlying patterns.
Kevin Kelly: How technology evolves (by TEDtalksDirector)
Reminds me of McLuhan’s, “we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
He mentions cultural as a way for ideas to survive, plus Dawkins and the selfish gene.
TOC 2013: Douglas Rushkoff, “Present Shock” (by O’Reilly Media)
