Weeknote 19+20/2024
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ”End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH” and the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
- Terry Pratchett
Read MoreWeeknote 17+18/2024
“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things...”
- Daniel C Dennett
Read MoreWeeknote 16/2024
“Space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one’s absence. And indeed I couldn’t deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole – especially when returning from a long voyage – to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.”
- Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress
Read MoreSlow Learning
Like so much in our lives today, learning has been accelerated and commodified to try and offer instant results at low costs. We can take short-form classes on YouTube, SkillShare, Udemy, and dozens of other platforms. We can sign up for real-life classes and workshops. We can self-teach or join online communities. All of them offer quick skills at low prices. Inevitably some of that will be snake oil, people on the grift looking to extract money from those who want, or need, to learn new skills, improve their education, or expand their knowledge. Some of it, though, is high-quality, thoughtful, and impactful learning content. Telling which is which may be the trick, there.
Read MoreWeeknote 15/2024
“In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”
- William James
Read MoreOne Star Reviews
Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.
Read MoreWeeknote 14/2024
“We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.”
- Neil Postman
Read MoreGenerative AI is the new Kalashnikov
In the discussion around generative AI a lot of the debate has focused around this same binary - truth and falsehood. Many are worried that the ability of generative AI tools to produce images, audio, video, and text may be used, or is already being used, to produce lies. Fake images, fake video, fake audio. That these powerful AI systems are a means of obscuring the truth or outright lying. We need, then, to clarify just what a lie might be, and why there is something more worrying hiding in plain sight.
Read MoreWeeknote 13/2024
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own buttocks.
- Michel de Montaigne
Read MoreWeeknote 12/2024
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
- Douglas Adams
Read MoreThe Spice Must Flow: Power, Politics, and the Struggle for Arrakis
Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.
Read MoreWeeknote 11/2024
Work accounts for a poem of genius about as much as plumbing accounts for the fountains of Rome.
- Mark Doty
Read MoreIt's manipulation all the way down: AI images and the epistemology of the real
If bad actors decide to release an AI-generated or computer-manipulated video or images of Joe Biden doing something that would sink his chances at a second presidential term then the world’s attention will fall upon them and every pixel will be minutely dissected by the best in the field. If images circulate purporting to show microbes in the soil of Mars, they will be examined forensically by the world’s experts. In both cases, I suspect the truth will out. But what happens when it’s not the headline-grabbing images that are manipulated, invented, or created by AI? We’re taking in hundreds, even thousands of images a day - the vast majority of which we’re giving no second thought to. It’s here that we’re most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.
Read More"As Little Design as Possible" - Dieter Rams and Learning Experience Design
I’ve long advocated that, whatever field or discipline you work in, you should always be looking at what is happening elsewhere. That might be in neighbouring industries or practices, but it might also be in fields that are very distant from your own. As a learning experience designer, I’m keenly interested in the work of designers in a whole range of industries - game design, architecture, graphic design and, of course, product design. I’m looking at what’s happening in these different disciplines to see if there is anything exciting, interesting, or innovative that I might find use for in my work as a designer. What, then, might a learning experience designer, take from Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Design?
Read MoreWeeknote 10/2024
In his viva voce examination for "Divvers" [Divinity] at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was required to translate from the Greek version of the New Testament, which was one of the set books. The passage chosen was from the story of the Passion. Wilde began to translate, easily and accurately. The examiners were satisfied, and told him, that this was enough. Wilde ignored them and continued to translate. After another attempt, the examiners at last succeeded in stopping him and told him that they were satisfied with his translation.
"Oh, do let me go on," said Wilde "I want to see how it ends."
Read MoreNow is Now - Wim Wenders 'Perfect Days'
There is a scene about 90 minutes into Wim Wenders' enchanting film Perfect Days where our protagonist, Hirayama, is cycling over a bridge in Tokyo with his niece Niko. As the two of them cycle back and forth, weaving across the bridge in the sunset they call out, back and forth to each other, “Next time is next time, and now is now.” In a film that says very little explicitly, this seems like a pretty clear mission statement.
Read MoreInput - Process - Output
There is a big funnel.
A huge, great, hungry thing.
Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.
At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.
The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.
Read MoreWeeknote 09/2024
The birds have flown away
A cloud floats idly by.
We never tire of looking at each other,
The mountain and I.
- Li Bai
Read MoreWeeknote 07+08/2024
“Two truths (no lies):
Once you are moderately happy, it’s very hard to get any happier.
Everybody secretly believes they can be the exception to this rule.”
- Adam Mastroianni
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