I’ve been to a few of the Seminars about Long-term Thinking, sponsored by the Long Now Foundation. They’re hit and miss. Sometimes they’re really interesting, sometimes they’re kind of boring. This week’s speaker was James Carse, author of a book called Finite and Infinite Games. I’m not sure where I’d heard of Carse (although reviewing […]
More thoughts on gifted education
I’ve rambled about education before, particularly with regards to gifted education. But I’ve never been bashful about repeating myself. So here we go again. Here’s a thought experiment that a friend posited a couple weeks ago. From a purely academic point of view, how long would it take a smart kid, working at their own […]
Sync, by Steven Strogatz
Amazon link I’ve been wanting to read this since first hearing about it. I took a class from Strogatz when I was at MIT, and he was a great lecturer that was way too smart so I figured his book would be interesting and well written. I was reminded of Strogatz’s book recently when I […]
Performing Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass
Oh, I forgot to mention it, but the chorus performed Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass last week, and now I’ve updated my chorus page to reflect that.
New business idea
I was talking with a friend earlier this week about good ads. In particular, we were reminiscing about the original Coors Lite ad with the twins. The one with the lyrics “I… love… playing two-hand touch, eating way too much, rooting for my team…” It was a really good ad. I’d love to see it […]
Predicting 2008
A friend of mine commented that Jeb Bush was a strange emissary to send to southeast Asia to oversee disaster relief. My friend also wondered why Colin Powell was along, given that he left the administration recently. My immediate thought was that the Republicans were giving Jeb a higher profile statesmanlike image to boost his […]
More links
You know the drill. I find some pages that amuse me. I yammer on about them. Many-to-Many had a couple interesting responses from Clay Shirky and danah boyd to this post about Wikipedia. I particularly liked this point by danah: My concern – and that of many of my colleagues – is that students are […]
Creationism
I don’t know why I let it get to me. But the arguments of creationists just aggravate me so much whenever I see them that I feel compelled to post about it. This morning’s aggravation was a result of coming across a link to a pointed criticism of an article by Phyllis Schlafly, where she […]
Back in Oakland
I flew back last night. Took BART home from the Oakland airport, which took way longer than it should have. We touched down at 6:01pm. I didn’t get my checked bag until 6:37pm. As I was waiting for my bag, I saw the AirBART bus go by. It turns out there was only one bus […]
Information Carnivore followup
As usual, Beemer had an interesting response to my last post. I was going to respond on LiveJournal, but decided to use my privileged position on the blog itself. Bwa ha ha ha. More people read it this way. Yeah. Not that readership matters. Because I’m more interested in the discussion. But if more people […]
