Hackers & Painters

Appendix A. Notes

Chapter 1

1. Alberti, Leon Battista, The Use and Abuse of Books, translated by Renée Watkins, Waveland Press, 1999.

2. So how do you fix schools? The key to the answer may be college. When you go to (a good) college, most of the problems I describe get fixed. So the solution may come from asking, how do you make life for teenage nerds more like college life?

   Home-schooling offers an immediate solution, but it probably isn’t the optimal one. Why don’t parents home-school their kids all the way through college? Because college offers opportunities home-schooling can’t duplicate? So could high school if it were done right.

Chapter 2

1. Johnson wrote in the preface to his Shakespeare:

   “He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topick of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perished; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity nor gratify malignity, but are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained....”

2. The worst thing photography did to painting may ...