The r4isstatic Scrapbook is a tumblelog.

“Crowdfunding frees us up to feel it’s OK to pursue our own passions. Too often in life, you have a great idea and you really feel good or excited about it and you never do anything with it because you think ‘I’m not the type of person who’ll follow through, no-one’s going to care, it’s too impractical, I have to do xyz.’ Having a place where you can at least try and you can say ‘I put this out in the world’ and see how people react, I think that is very powerful.”

“…what crowdfunding does is it allows more people to try – and it gives people the freedom to choose what art and what businesses they want to see become a reality without having any gatekeepers decide for them.”

The reason a chemistry text isn’t more fun is because it doesn’t teach you skills: it teaches you concepts. Concepts are further divorced from the pragmatism of reality than the skills that are forcibly acquired in the pursuit of goals. The appropriate analogy would instead be that you learn more from an hour in a chemistry lab than you do from a game; in such a case, I think you would agree that this is questionable: both have relatively equal educational potential, given appropriate conditions.

Just like the Civilization games include encyclopedias that give you reference cards to help you play, the chemistry lab gives you a textbook to enlighten you as to the concepts which you can expand into skills.

The law of constant composition, for example, is a concept. It is not a skill. You do not DO anything with the law of composition (other than fractions, which is a skill): you merely know it. Successfully mixing a reagent, on the other hand, is a skill.

Chemistry texts are boring because you are utilizing active skills (how to read, how to memorize) in order to acquire concepts that you may feel have a low perceived value, in large part because the skills they form the foundation for also have low perceived value. Someone excited about chemistry, on the other hand, will devour the text with gusto, because the perceived value of the concepts is high, as the skills that build upon them are have high perceived value.

Children see the world differently and aren’t going to be satisfied with you telling them that ‘it just works that way honey’. That applies just as much to the children of the media world as it does literal children. It’s not the direct attacks that broadcasters should worry about. It’s not about Google wanting to steal your content and put their own adverts by it. It’s about companies not only redefining what broadcasters do, but redefining what content is in the same open-minded flick of the wrist. About taking the entire question, the worries, the concept of entertainment itself, and turning it on its head.

EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly…

Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.

(Source: http)

I decree that history shall be rewritten. This time without any punctuation so that it is just one sentence linked together by the phrase “And then what happened was…

…all media that mix ads with other programming are a form of ‘paid learning’.

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn’t magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

It’s like there are two views of the world - the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name - until you can point at it in greenspace - it simply doesn’t exist…

Now I know that the creation of universal and world-unique identifiers for things must seem one of the most tedious concepts or projects known to man. But I believe that it’s fundamental to our technological development - and particularly our ability to take our ever-increasing computing power and increasingly interconnected appliances and merge them seemlessly with the environment around us. The greenspace of the Matrix needs to merge with the physical - they need to become indistinguishable. Until we can point at, until we can pick up, until we can handle, we will never be able to use these concepts around us effectively.