When He Asks Me To Explain Him What Is A Start-up

I caught her human parents defiling my forest. They threw their baby at my feet as they ran away. Instead of eating her, I raised her as my own. Now, my poor, ugly, beautiful daughter is neither human nor wolf. PRINCESS MONONOKE もののけ姫 | Mononoke-hime 1997 • dir. Hayao Miyazaki

“Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.” - W. Churchill

“Frequently knowledge is treated as an end in itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.”

— John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“Private institutions are under systemic and legal obligations to make money quickly to reward their capitalist investors; thus expensive, uncertain long-term research is inevitably harder and harder to justify as quarters tick by with few money-making breakthroughs to show for it. Small wonder, then, that the Internet, the web, the GUI, modern processors, Wi-Fi signaling, fundamental computer languages, and even Google itself arose from the academic or military research settings where steady funding is more or less assured and near-term stock prices don’t drive whether projects get axed. The history is long—Guglielmo Marconi developed radio for the Royal Navy, Berners-Lee the web protocols for CERN. The OSTP notes, “Past DOD research has resulted in revolutionary technological capabilities such as radar, digital computers, wireless mobile communications, lasers, fiber optics, composite materials, the Internet (and other ‘packet switched’ networks), and satellite navigation.””

— Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley

One of all-time greats.

RAFAEL NADAL / CHAMPION / USO ‘17

To be fair, you can replace science with many words.

I love this sign.

There is no such thing as originality. Our thoughts are influenced by other thoughts, our ideas are the sum of different pieces of other ideas.

Originality is just a puzzle arranged in an apparently different way.

Conditioned to be passive consumers, we confuse submission with security, celebrate obedience as virtue, and consent to self-destructive routines of agonizing repression, all because we lack the courage to step outside the prison cells that we affectionately regard as “comfort zones”.