qotd

Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy
knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroys
information, and religion destroys spirituallity.

- Michael Ellner

qotd

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different!
Kurt Vonnegut

QOTDs

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
- William Faulkner

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

QOTD

They make a desolation and call it peace.
Tacitus

QOTD

Maths - boring? Or killed by the education system? Maybe this will make it clearer:

All this fussing and primping about which “topics” should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

A mathematician's lament - Paul Lockhart (2002)

QOTD

From Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone:


Most schools encourage children to be unimaginative. The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their teachers. (p 76)

We see the artist as a wild and aberrant figure. Maybe our artists are the people who have been constitutionally unable to conform to the demands of the teachers. Pavlov found that there were some dogs that he couldn’t ‘brainwash’ until he’d castrated them, and starved them for three weeks. If teachers could do that to us, then maybe they’d achieve Plato’s dream of a republic in which there are no artists left at all.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more’respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many ‘well adjusted’ adults are bitter, uncreative frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that’s what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. (p 78)

We have an idea that art is self-expression – which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s... Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is. (pp 78-9)

At school... I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal.

The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal. (pp 82-3)

An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts... Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. (p 88)

Nothing much for me to add, and there are endlessly quotable bits in this book, but here is another one that jumps out:

People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I see what you mean.’ (p 100)

QOTD

Mark Steyn on Warmergate:

How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:

“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.