Dec 25

This sparks a few thoughts for me.

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This sparks a few thoughts for me.

1. You know those fairy tales where it looks like you’re in a beautiful palace full of richly dressed people eating delicacies, and when you put the ointment on your eyes you see that it’s a hovel full of people dressed in rags eating slops?

2. You could live a full, and social, life, travel widely, have all sorts of adventures, without ever leaving your small, cheap apartment. Which, depending how you want to play it, could be a cover for a deteriorating dystopia (see also idea #1) or a celebration of the virtual riches of a future life. It might be interesting to write a story that plays out both ways at once.

3. Might this technology slow, even reverse, the several-thousand-year-old trend for the population to drain into cities and stay there, just as urban dwellers are becoming the majority? After all, if you can have everything that a city dweller has without leaving your small town, without the inconveniences of city living, why move?

4. Kabuki drones. This is an idea I’ve had for a while: little spiderlike drones that pick physical things up and bring them to you, and that are filtered out of your virtual perception, so that from your point of view the objects just come to your hand when you want them, as if by magic.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Reality 2.0: A Way to Upgrade Your Perception of Reality http://suhub.co/2CZyaMl

Dec 21

Learning skills in which you do things with your hands goes a lot better if you actually do things with your hands.

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Learning skills in which you do things with your hands goes a lot better if you actually do things with your hands. VR could make it safe and cheap.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Power to Give Anyone, Anywhere the Skills They Need Is Within Reach http://suhub.co/2p45Ypr

Dec 21

This makes sense to me.

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This makes sense to me. Not only does a dynamic, innovative economy involve a lot of disruption which requires supporting people as they transition out of jobs that are disappearing into new ones that are coming into existence, but being an entrepreneur is risky. If you weren’t already independently wealthy, would you take the risk of losing your home and your healthcare with no backup? A few people would, but a lot wouldn’t, and that’s potential innovation that everyone is missing out on.

Originally shared by Deborah Teramis Christian

“[A]s numerous Republican lawmakers have made clear, tax reform is only the first part of a broader effort to begin dismantling key components of the social safety net. And yet. . . the old doctrine that the safety net is always and everywhere antithetical to growth is beginning to be reassessed. Dawning instead, as we have observed elsewhere, is a recognition that a high-tech economy fueled by disruptive innovation actually requires a stronger safety net, if only to maintain the public’s tolerance for its inherent dislocations.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/12/19/gouging-the-safety-net-is-increasingly-untimely/
Dec 20

There may be a flaw in all magic, but there aren’t many flaws in this book.

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There may be a flaw in all magic, but there aren’t many flaws in this book. Characters, pacing, worldbuilding and copy editing are all excellent, and it’s pretty close to my own Gryphon Clerks books in its setup. If you enjoy those, you may well enjoy this.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2217651174

Dec 20

“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions.

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“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions. More importantly, it seems to me that artificially inflating the importance of the few female authors that might have existed would falsify the historical record. After all, the whole point of the feminist critique is that female voices were suppressed. This suppression is important to talk about, but you can’t rely on the suppressed voices in order to do so.”

I…

The…

Ehhh.

Read the whole article. It does have some interesting, and difficult-to-resolve, points about academic freedom, but especially in light of the quoted statement I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the professor just doesn’t get it.

Originally shared by Laura Gibbs

When I read articles like this, it makes me very glad that I have opted instead for building courses in which the students choose the reading, and it is my job to find a truly wide variety of readings that I can make available to them. The students then choose, and the students learn from their own choices as well as from seeing the choices made by the students with whom they are interacting through their blogs and projects, etc. This top-down approach (by professor and/or by committee) does not appeal to me at all. As for the attitude of the professor, every time I have challenged myself to improve my range of reading choices by going out and looking for more, I have often surprised myself by the great things I found by looking. It sounds to me like he is not looking very hard…

https://ino.to/9UXnLWs