"Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like."

Clay Shirky

"A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

George Orwell (via nevver)

(via allvelvetmornings)

"Make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games."

Robert Falcon Scott

"Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which is all the more dangerous and at times effective, as he talks himself into believing them himself … Has no sense of morality, thoroughly selfish. Some people find him extremely disagreeable, others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous … He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language."

Eric Hobsbawm

"But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise."

Theodore Roosevelt

"We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100."

Valve Employee Handbook

"Nobody knows what anyone’s building until it’s built."

David Simon

"Whatever else people living in different Americas might believe, whatever the disconnect has become, all of us want the same thing when someone beats an old man and a young girl."

David Simon

"Machine learning is closer to design than coding."

Joe Reisinger

"When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create."

_Why the Lucky Stiff

"The conversations on Facebook are more like a Thanksgiving dinner speech […] Your girlfriend, your college friends, your ex-girlfriends, your wish-she-was-my-girlfriend, your new co-workers, boss, future bosses, roommates, professors, high school teachers… They’re all sitting at this table, too. What could you possibly say?"

Bryan Roy

"Government and business elites in certain poor/developing/troubled countries should explicitly tell their most talented youth to go abroad. Indeed, help them to do this–pay for it, even. As part of this, forge with them a new social contract. Have them sign a document stating their expectation to return after 5-10 years. When they return, they can share what they’ve learned abroad and infuse their native culture with the attitudes gleaned from the cultures in which they spent their 20′s. Plus, chances are they’ll be even more patriotic upon return. Spending time abroad can remind you how Moroccan, or American, or Greek you really are. You realize how many of your habits are cultural; you feel more affinity for your native culture."

Ben Casnocha

"[..] the studios themselves are likely to do better in a direct distribution model where they reach a broader market at lower effective prices to the end customer. This is what happens in digital distribution. Prices come down, markets expand, customers see lower prices and broader availability. Producers do better."

Fred Wilson, interesting mostly in light of the below post.

"[…] for the most part the lobbyist do not know and indeed are not particularly interested in what is in the best interest of their clients. Further, this seems to stem from the fact that the clients are not particularly interested in what is in their best interests. What they are very interested in is whether legislation is pro them or anti them. However, if you begin to talk about the economy as a complex system full of unintended consequences where anti legislation could be in their best interests their eyes glaze over."

Karl Smith via Robin Hanson, and to me the definitive read on the whole PIPA/SOPA bailamme.

To see Rimini and think that Fellini grew up there, to see Portorož and think that Žižek grew up there.