i must invent my own systems
I finished East of Eden last week, and today The East of Eden Letters. Steinbeck wrote East of Eden from January to November 1951, long-hand, wearing down innumerable pencils. He wrote in a bound book, only committing the novel to every other page. On the facing pages he wrote a daily letter to his editor, […]
For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a […]
I’m mid-career and I’ve just realised I have never received any mentoring on how to manage my workload, on how to explicitly recognise when I’ve taken on too much and how to proactively regulate the things I’m committed to. I have had conversations which touch on this, but the focus has tended to be productivity […]
Of course they do, and of course they don’t. This originally published 2016-10-07 by Springer-Nature at their “Science of Learning ” research community. By re-publishing here I assert my rights as author and release the text under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like […]
INTERVIEWER: I think of the pushback against free speech by people critiquing what they see as institutional racism and deep social inequalities of power. This is the argument that free speech favors those with the biggest platform and most cultural capital. Is that one of the bigger arguments against free speech? That it’s not free […]
Just one quote from This Is a Philosopher on Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu, Wired, Mar 7, 2023: “Early in my new life as a late-blooming pothead, one thing that struck me was just what a crummy deal we in the West had been given, whereby all mind-altering substances had been prohibited and stigmatized, except for […]
Inspired by @Edent I am trying to making this blog part of the fediverse – meaning posts would be viewable on mastodon etc and you could follow it like you follow @tomstafford@mastodon.online. To do this is installed the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which should have worked out of the box, but – possibly because the […]
A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will […]
“But aren’t we guilty of being insultingly disparaging if we refer to chess as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, poised between one and the other like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique synthesis of all opposites; ancient and yet always new, mechanical in its structure yet animated only […]
Originally published 2022-12-23 at https://medium.com/@tomstafford/twitter-is-now-the-bad-friend-679a0e1d92df I joined in 2009, I’ve tweeted 30,200 times, I loved the good times I spent on twitter, but those days are gone. Yes, I joined mastodon. I was inspired by Brian Nosek’s collective action experiment from the end of October. Enough of the people posting content I like moved to […]