This has been bugging me ever since I’ve heard a podcast of Vinod Khosla at Web 2.0 conference a couple of days ago, who touched on a theme that seems to crop up in Slovenia every now and then. He said something along the lines of there’s less need for teaching facts to children today, because they can find them online. Instead they should learn how to think critically and how to sort through information.

No arguement from me about the thinking and sorting part. They are skills definitely needed today more than ever, which seem to be sorely lacking in many, if not most people. Improving them can only be better for them and society as a whole.

I disagree strongly about the need to teach facts though. Current approach to teach them may be wrong, but if anything, we know too few and not too many of them.

First problem is that you need to know something to be able to ask a question at all. If I take the title question as an example, there are three keywords in it: dutch, painter and diplomat. Dropping any of them would probably lead to a different result and likely never to the same one.

The less we know, less questions we can dare to ask. Without facts, there’ll be less we’ll be able to imagine. Ideas are not something that comes from a thin air. They are offspring of the things we already know. They may be a descendant of a previous idea, but if we trace it back far enough we’ll sooner or later find an ancestor which will be a fact.

We might also know enough to get by in our every day life, but in a society where creativity is growing in importance, it’s probably not enough. Knowledge is the soil on which creativity grows. Richer the soil, richer its crop.

What we know doesn’t only limit to what we can aspire, it also defines who we already are. It’s easy to think of knowledge as something that can be separated into useful and useless. Useful being any piece of knowledge that we get to directly apply at least now and then (like basic arithmetics or driving a car) or clairvoyantly know we’ll need some day and useless being everything else. It’s easy and it’s wrong.

We were molded by whole of it, not just with the parts we happen to like or use. We can’t desire what we don’t know and it’s easier to fear unknown. What we know is largely who we are.

I’ve spent most of my life learning as much as I can about as many subjects as possible; about some of them even very deeply. But I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling being an ignoramus. Acknowledging the limits of personal knowledge and wisdom isn’t an absolution from its pursuit. And it should never be one.

P.S: The answer to the question in this post title is Peter Paul Rubens. I’d like to know enough to tell if he’s the only one.

I was playing with a neat script that reads CSS properties of a given element, but there’s a problem. Fetching background color of an element doesn’t work in Safari, if it was inherited instead of explicitly set in CSS.

Does anyone know how to reliably get that information?

A light bulb in our hall died a while ago and it has taken me ages to unscrew it. To my defense, this is not your normal light bulb and the procedure involved a variety of tools, a ladder, few missteps and a couple of moments of fear. You tend to become a bit of a chicken as you get older.

So today we were shopping for a replacement. Not the best day in year to do so, but since we were already out and near the store, it just made sense to fetch it. Experience has certainly been educational.

We visited a store close to our home near the center of Ljubljana, which has been hit hard by newer stores that opened in suburbs. Easier parking, bigger choice and at least competitive if not cheaper prices do that to you and it’s doubtful, if you can survive something like this in the long run. It seems to me the only possible competitive advantage left is having a superior customer experience.

However it’s hard to imagine that this would mean getting a shop assistant to print out a receipt that you need to carry to the only cash register in the store where you’re served by an unbelievably rude clerk who loudly lets everyone know that she’ll be gone in ten minutes if there’s her replacement or not.

I can’t see myself going back again. But I was reminded of a problem observed many times before. Company problems lead to demoralized workers, which lead to work done poorly and that to even more problems for the company. It’s a vicious self-destructing cycle that is not easy to break and just as hard times can’t be completely avoided.

But you’ll be gone if your customers suffer too much and it’s absolutely amazing that so often they still don’t get much more than a lip service. It’s about meeting their needs and nothing else. Good customer experience is the cheapest advertisement there is. It’s also the most effective one.

Now I only need to replace the light bulb.