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Category Archives: technical issues
WordPress Trackback Tutorial
I have always been a bit intimidated by bloggers’ talk of “Trackback” and “Pingback”, and am still unsure of whether they really do anything that isn’t just as easy to do “by hand”. I recently came across a Tutorial written … Continue reading
Posted in web, WordPress
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Science & Religion again
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, coauthors of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future”, writing in the LA Times, ask “Must science declare a holy war on religion?” Their concern appears to be that Richard Dawkins and other so-called … Continue reading
Posted in religion, science
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Getting Smarter
This article shares some of my own reaction to the “internet is making us dumber” nonsense, as well as commenting on other possible sources of increasing global intelligence.
The SAC Double Negative Option
Howard Knopf doesn’t like The SAC Double Negative Option Celestial Jukebox, but I have to quarrel with a number of his reasons. Many of these have to do with defending the existing media levy schemes which unfairly extract funds from … Continue reading
Posted in arts and culture, canada, copyright, web
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More Mythical Myths
EXCESS COPYRIGHT: More Myths about Myths about File Sharing
Is Mental Causation a Problem?
Stephen Downes points to this review by Sara Worley in NotreDame Philosophical Review of the book ‘Mental Causation’ by Anthony Dardis, and he (Stephen) concludes with this: “The main takeaway? This nice neat picture of ‘A causes B’ is deeply … Continue reading
Posted in psychology
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Born on a Blue Day
Coincidentally I read ‘Born on a Blue day’ just yesterday – i.e. one day before zac at squareCircleZ posted his summary review – (having been led to the order the book after watching a video posted – also at SqCZ … Continue reading
OnLine Editing
Wikis, GoogleDocs, and now Buzzword Documents all provide ways to share the editing of an online document (as do a number of other options).
Mythical Myths about Sustainability
Many of these Top 10 Myths about Sustainability are mythical in the sense that they are just elementary misconceptions that don’t qualify as myths because they are not widely held by intelligent adults, but “Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our … Continue reading
Posted in sustainability, world
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A Quantum Embarrassment to Scientific American
The latest Scientific American lead article Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity is an odd duck. It almost (but never quite) does a fair job of describing some quite challenging aspects of quantum mechanics and its relation … Continue reading
Posted in physics
Tagged causality, hidden variables, locality, quantum mechanics, relativity
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Yes, There *IS* an Elephant in the Room
AlterNet Article by Chris Hedges Rebuttal by Betsy Hartmann
CRTC Net Neutrality Hearings
Telecom Public Notice CRTC 2008-19, is the CRTC’s notice of proceedings and call for comments re forthcoming hearings on ‘Net Neutrality’.
Please Don’t Change That URL!
From BBC – Radio Labs – How we make websites comes this quote: It’s nice if URIs are human readable. It’s also nice if they’re hackable. It’s an absolute prerequisite that they’re persistent. Don’t sacrifice persistence for the sake of … Continue reading
What is 0^0 equal to? – squareCircleZ
This post at squareCircleZ (a very nice enrichment and support website for students and teachers of mathematics) raises the conundrum of how to define 0^0 if all positive x give x^0=1 and 0^x=0.
Open Culture
Open Culture is a website developed by Dan Colman (who moonlights as the director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies program). It focuses on educational video offerings such as the Leonard Susskind Physics Lectures, and includes a page of links to other … Continue reading
David MacKay: Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air
In Sustainable Energy – without the hot air UK physicist David MacKay presents plausible back-of-the-envelope estimates of the scales of action needed under various strategies for reduction of global carbon fuel combustion. The numbers he uses are easily checked and … Continue reading
By The Numbers
This article discusses the latest round of changes in the WNCP Math Curriculum. Somehow, after seeing perhaps half a dozen rounds of this game, the rhetoric of revolutionary change wears a bit thin.
TIMSS 2007 – How are we all doing in math? – squareCircleZ
The part I find most encouraging in Murray Bourne’s discussion of the latest TIMSS 2007 report on mathematics performance around the world is the distribution of gender differences – in particular the fact that the relative performance of females is … Continue reading
Internet Safer Than Thought vs Flickr Perversion
In contrast to this study (which I came to via Stephen Downes)showing that the internet just isn’t the danger to children it is often portrayed to be, we have Alec Couros reporting on Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Blog … Continue reading