Via Cee, a few articles filled with good stuff from Kurt Vonnegut. The first one's an adaptation of a lecture he made at the Mark Twain House... Some noteworthy quotes:
"conservatives," as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy. "
"They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice. "
"What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us?"
"Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs."
"We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government. "
The second piece is a series of
questions and answers from Vonnegut. It's equally amusing.
A follow up to Part 1 where I talked about hacking (coding) as an art form. In the post, I got lazy and didn't bother digging up another important piece that had relevance, so here it is...
Richard Gabriel, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, proposes that universities should offer Master of Fine Arts in Sortware. Here's a short excerpt from the introduction:
Many degree programs for Computer Science and Software Engineering work by shovelling information into the student along with presenting opportunities for developing critical thinking. Despite the tone of this description, I believe it?s a valid way to teach certain students certain things, to prepare them in a particular way for their work or research careers. In the writing arts there are similar approaches in the forms of Master of Arts and PhD degree programs. But both in software as in writing, there are people whose work is ?doing the thing??writing and designing programs?and such people do this work every day. They hope to be good at it and to be able to improve over time. They have pride in what they do and are satisfied or not with each project they do. To them what they do feels more than craft, includes engineering and science, but still feels like more. This proposal is aimed at educating those people.
There's also a great
interview with Gabriel.
