June 9, 2011
"My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing… Those programmers with a “spark” are programmers who have an innate talent for the language. Or they are people who have read and read and read code. Or both. We teach programming wrong. We teach it the way Japanese teachers have been teaching English. We teach about programming and expect that students will spontaneously learn to write from this collection of facts."

wrook, in an insightful /. comment. HT… erm, someone in my twitter feed. Sorry.

June 1, 2010
"Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret."

William Gibson, breaking it down.

5:00pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Ztfxbyd05Ta
Filed under: scifi philosophy 
March 10, 2010
"[a philosophy course] is one of very few courses in which retaining information will be less important than exercising higher order cognition, facing up to questions to which the answers are not known with certainty by anyone."

— Harry, writing at Crooked Timber. Also explaining why I added the major.

8:33am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZtfxbyQAaYD
Filed under: philosophy