I saw these every day during my morning stretch.
2020-04-12
Scaffolding knowledge
Every information is a piece of an entire knowledge, so instead of treating what we learn as separate fragments, it is more effective to memorize and understand them as a whole.
This is possible because knowledge often repeats in different forms, such as through history or books.
In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.
To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
– Funes the Memorious
2020-04-10
Quick practice sketches of fountains
I drew these based on reference photos taken a while ago around the Adobe San Jose campus.
2020-04-06
Pay for individual articles instead of whole publications
Recently I noticed a few interesting articles that I would like to read but are behind paywalls that asked me to subscribe to the encompassing publications.
Since not all articles of a given publication are of sufficient quality or interests to me, and different readers can have different preferences anyway, I wonder if it would make more sense to pay for individual articles instead of entire publications.
The publishers may be able to charge more per article and yet readers can choose to pay what they need.
The readers, writers and even advertisers can be better aligned, rewarding good individual writers and articles over bad ones.
Unbundling is already happening for music and academic papers, and could be more prevalent for news.
Virtual museum
I visited a few virtual museum exhibitions during the weekend.
The experiences worked better in some types of artworks, such as films, photographs, and paintings, but less so for other types such as sculptures or interactive installations.
I can sit comfortably at home without being constrained by commutes and museum hours.
But I also missed the ambient environment and serendipitous encounters beyond the individual artworks.
2020-04-04
Virtual machines
When I was a grad student at Stanford I thought the idea of virtual machines was entirely crazy. And then came cloud computing.
This CACM article nicely summarized the background story.
2020-04-03
The pandemic world war
When this is all over,
The disease will dissipate,
The economy will recover,
But the world order will be very different.
2020-04-01
Peak Asian American
This is the best time to be an Asian American.
Half a century before, it was better to be an American.
Half a century after, it would better to be an Asian.
2020-03-30
The influence we have
Both this NPR hidden brain podcast on the influence you have and this book on confessions of a sociopath point to the interesting aspects on how we know (and don’t know) about the psychological influences we can have on other people.