Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Alan Kay
November 18, 2010
Alan Kay came to ITP yesterday and thoroughly blew my mind. Here’s some notes I took:
- Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Niel Postman
- Marshall McLuhan: people generally only have the ability to think about the present in terms of the past
- The Global Village
- “I can’t see anything, until I believe it “- McLuhan
- The simplest form of creativity is vandalism
- The Dissapearance of Childhood, by Niel Postman
- Principia Mathematica, by Newton
- The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth Eisenstein
- Douglas Engelbart
- What’s NEW about the computer? Forget the NEWS
- The Architecture Machine, by Nicholas Negroponte
- Universal Human traits, anthropology work by Thomas Powers
- Things that make money are technological amplifiers for these universal traits.
- Francis Bacon‘s Four Idols
- Greek vowels 800BC
- Slow Deep Thinking
- Common Sense; The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine
- John C. Lilly (talking to Dolphins and the sensory deprivation tank)
- Science is about dealing with our ghosts
- Raising children is to create artifially civil versions of human beings
- “Our natural state is unsanity” – someone
- “I don’t know who created water, but it wasn’t a fish” – McLuhan
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes
- Seymour Papert
- Knowledge trumps IQ, Henry Ford vs Da Vinci; then there’s Outlook, which trumps knowledge in the case of Newton
- IQ is the horse power, knowledge is the dream and outlook allows us to transcend our time
- Make a computer that can dream
- Tim Leary, “find the others”
- He went to BK Tech
- “HANG IN THERE”