Steve Ersinghaus

Chris Jordan has some amazing visualizations of amounts here.
The details matter.

In King Lear it’s important that Edmund tells us what he’s up to. He speaks this in scene 2:
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I 335
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of [...]

Collective nouns for animals are interesting. For example, tigers ambush and rhinos bust things up, therefore, we have an ambush of tigers or a crash of rhinos. We have lots of bird feeders, thus we have drays of squirrels in the yard, dray referring the nests they build, although I’m not quite sure of the [...]

In this response Neha tells me about the quarter-life crisis, which I know only from John Meyer. I also know of Abby Wilner’s work on the issue.
We talk about liminality, spatial and temporal transition a lot (and yet never enough). But new spaces and transitions do not constitute “reality.” When we ask the question, [...]

How do catastrophes, natural disasters, and other major shifts, such as climate change, that affect human movement, thinking, and survival change planning, building, and the administering of collective necessity and the commonweal. Human civ’s spread is a part of this contextual question. Why did villages grow? Why would domestication happen?

Neha is writing again on her weblog. Nice to see.
But how about some debate on the issue she raises here and treated throughout this post:
It’s been a year since I’ve graduated, and for an entire plethora of reasons, my plans to head to grad school as a freshly scrubbed graduate ended up buried deep, [...]

I can dig this.

In a comment thread, JJ Cohen of In the Middle writes:
Massive projects require the leap beyond the horizon of your own death. They have to be a message to someone who comes after, and very often to someone who comes LONG after. That person isn’t “us” — as you say, how could the builders have [...]

Yes it’s oft quoted but I think still delightful, from Beston and his “The Outermost House.” It’s for Rina, whom I’m glad to hear is doing well:
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature [...]

Rick Green in this column scratches his head at the recent Julie Amero case, where new media meets law
The state of Connecticut spent two years investigating before it won a speedy conviction of Julie Amero - the infamous Norwich porn teacher - this January.
But it was never as tidy as the Norwich Public Schools, the [...]

I think it’s a good thing to ask questions about what a thing can teach, about process and method, but these sorts of critique are growing tiresome.
PARIS (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life’s origins are understood and Christians [...]

Matthew Polly is kind enough to leave a note on this post. He is the author of American Shaolin.
I’ve always been a fan of the literature of the hero’s journey and Mr. Polly’s book falls into this category. But it reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks back with my fiction [...]

Alec Couros leaves me a nice note and asserts this:
We must help students to understand what is worth reading, how to find the relevant voices in the huge raving river of information, and then be able to engage in conversations with what they have learned, and who they have learned from.
I agree that a great [...]

I don’t know much about this but it would seem that bounded space perceived as infinite on a cross section ( the top of a table) could be figured as having points that are all even numbered and positive. Right? That is, every instant you cut in half would turn out to be 2, 4, [...]

Okay, so it’s damned hot, even now at about 9 on a Monday. Yet it’s been a little cool here at the weblog. The kitchen remodel has, of course, expanded to include the removal of two floors underneath the existing laminate, and some rethinking because of hidden pipes in the wall where I was going [...]