Toolbox, Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein said language was a toolbox with lots of different kinds of tools for different purposes."

From Adam's blog.

Games and Education, James Paul Gee

Art - the groundbreaking moments, Florian Heine

"He believed that one does not attain wisdom through listening to stories. He wanted to get to the bottom of things and used experiments, precise observation, description, and exact depictions of nature to this end."

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil

Criticism of positivism

"Scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires."

"The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies."
Werner Heisenberg

More here.

The math and magic of origami, Robert Lang

Grassroots work in the Roma community

"All the Roma professionals who were interviewed had great hand-on experience working with Roma at the grassroots level, and also in international institutions. Most of us had very little or no experience with sugar-coating failures, accepting and supporting poor decisions of senior management, promoting practices that waste huge amounts of money in useless meetings, huge consultancy fees, and irrelevant trainings. In other words… none of us had worked for the European Commission.

What message did I get out of this? That if I want a job as a bureaucrat, the skills that matter are to have low energy, to accept poor decisions made by others around me, to be able to present failures as success, and to have a non-threatening personality. The glass ceiling is concrete solid when it comes to Roma. Roma participation is indeed very important as long as is done from a very safe distance." 

More here.