Flotsam & Jetsam
Paul Graham and Y Combinator are looking to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV:
The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
(via Daring Fireball)
If both Paul Graham and Horace Dediu think there’s something here, that’s probably a pretty good sign that there’s something here.
Nat Torkington lays the smack down on the Obama administration’s bullshit challenge to the tech community (see also Tim O’Reilly’s posts: 1, 2, 3).
(via Daring Fireball)
Ken Murray:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.
(via Kottke)
Gene Callahan:
And just who is going to be willing to spend the time to take this course? Is it worth taking it to run in the locker room the one or two times a season when your daughter is dawdling? Of course not. But you know what sort of person would be happy to spend the time taking such a course, in order to gain access to locker rooms where adolescents are naked? Think about it.
Gary Gutting:
Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.
