August 31, 2010 – 6:50 pm
Many semesters ago, even prior to the issues brought up in this post, I had one of my first encounters with the laptop and smart device as a tool for critical thinking and information literacy. In Composition II, we’d been talking in class about Connecticut’s brain drain subject and the thought occurred to me that [...]
Something bugging me. It’s been bugging me since 100 Days 2008. But it’s come back since I’ve been reading Hargood and Millard on Narrative and Theme. It’s bugging me in a good way. But here’s the story. Let’s say you watch John Timmons’s video perusals. Of course, a first viewing will produce an interpretation or [...]
Monday is the Solstice. 8:30 or so and dusk can still be seen. Great. This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the [...]
I’m teaching myself how to play the guitar. I have the Idiot’s Guide and a Fender acoustic, whose neck is too small for my left hand but is nonetheless playable. Too small, because at the size of my fingers, it’s tough to play something like A without the index rubbing up against the third string. [...]
Mano Singham’s The New War Between Science and Religion published in CHE is an odd duck. Here’s a portion of the set-up The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the [...]
December 4, 2009 – 12:47 pm
Physorg on the question of computer vision: “Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” says Cox. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out [...]
November 25, 2009 – 10:22 am
Lawrence Johnson on FB has sparked yet another conversation related to education and culture, drawing on an example of textbook company incentives and the seeming de-emphasis of the value of hard work required for excellence in learning: use this tool and student performance will improve. The conversation is proceeding but as I don’t like the [...]
November 22, 2009 – 9:02 pm
The buddha in me is burning.
October 2, 2009 – 2:33 pm
Today Rio won the Olympics bid. The media narrative has taken a variety of positions as a response: 1. Why would Obama risk support? 2. What is the meaning of the right wing response? 3. What does the loss mean in the context of America’s standing in the world? None of this makes much sense [...]
August 14, 2009 – 2:40 pm
I’ve been storing potential course readings to Diigo in a list called Common Issues, as I find that the broad subject categories, such as Environment and Cities, can get confusing in terms of what was actually placed there and whether the intent of the bookmark was for course use or for some other purpose. It [...]
Here’s today’s story plotting by word length in Tinderbox, using this bit of code as a rule: $Pattern=”plot($WordCount)”. Considering length hasn’t been much of an issue, as the internal questions about plot and character have taken precedence. Day to day writing prohibits length, but the upper parameter of length hasn’t been much more than a [...]
My wife sent me this article (perhaps sensing story struggle). In any event, there are some interesting conclusions and contexts: In today’s innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story [...]
Wallach and Allen’s Moral Machines was an interesting read. There are a few principle conclusions: that ethics questions must be considered in tandem with systems, from the ground up; that some framework must be developed to guide the future of AI systems in technical, cultural, legal, and operational contexts, but that the nature of this [...]
I heard a wonderful radio program on NPR yesterday on Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. One of the interviewees was Herbie Hancock (I think). He talked about Miles Davis’ process, specifically on the single session, “first takes,” out of which Kind of Blue was “discovered” in the studio. He talked about how the modes [...]
February 13, 2009 – 7:09 am
From Jesse Abbot: The giant of modern physics Niels Bohr purportedly once quipped that if one isn’t confused by quantum mechanics—sometimes called QM for short—one doesn’t really understand it. One of the world’s leading philosophers of science, Dr. Barry Loewer, is coming to Tunxis on Thursday, February 19th at 7 p.m. to give kind of [...]
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
