Finding your own way, Keith Stevens

Fresh after abandoning academia and siding with the "something about evil" corporations, Keith Stevens gives an interview about his choices in career and life.

"It’s easy to do something you don’t love and create excuses for why you’re doing it, life situations and what not, but if you find that inner drive, you’ll find a way to make the thing you love into something you can live off of."

"In graduate school, and my other research positions, it was sometimes really hard to get the simplest tasks done. So even if I had a really great idea, it might have been close to impossible to turn the idea into a reality."

"Sitting back and doing nothing is great when you’re sick or after a long day of doing something productive, but it’s not what I want to do full time."

Toolbox, Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein said language was a toolbox with lots of different kinds of tools for different purposes."

From Adam's blog.

Games and Education, James Paul Gee

Art - the groundbreaking moments, Florian Heine

"He believed that one does not attain wisdom through listening to stories. He wanted to get to the bottom of things and used experiments, precise observation, description, and exact depictions of nature to this end."

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil

Criticism of positivism

"Scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires."

"The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies."
Werner Heisenberg

More here.

The math and magic of origami, Robert Lang