I’ve blogged before of the brain-drain theory of what’s wrong with American schools, but here’s a different analysis by John Gatto in his Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech from 1990: kids have no time to be themselves.
Voet Cranf has a neat color tool. Click on one of the colored squares, and then on the plus sign that appears in the lower right corner of the square. Then slide the sliders! Or read the directions and find out what all the other controls do.
I’m an Emacs girl myself, but many mac users prefer BBEdit, now up to BBEdit 8.0. Daring Fireball explains the appeal of BBEdit.
Quicksilver is up to β29.
DivX is up to 5.2.
Bookpedia is up to version 1.1.3. If you’d rather not pay for software, there’s a free program that does the same thing (cataloging books), more or less: Books for MacOS X.
If you’ve read The Tipping Point, then you’ve heard that the upper limit to human social networks is about 150 people. The name behind the number is Robin Dunbar, author of Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Razib discusses it in a recent GNXP post. The comments on that post led me to this Life with Alacrity post on the Dunbar number.
I was surprised that the Metro was still reporting about Bush’s National Guard service yesterday without mentioning that the recent memos were patent forgeries. Here are all the gory details from the typesetting perspective, and here’s a fun interview with Dan Rather’s ego on the matter. (Thanks to Classical Values for the title and the second Rathergate link.)
Pippin of the day: a soldier of Gondor
I’ve been reading mostly short fiction lately, but I got around to a couple of novels. Timescape by Gregory Benford seemed like a good idea at the time—a story about scientists from two different eras. In 1962, a Jewish researcher deals with strange perturbations in his experimental data while trying to understand his native Californian girlfriend. In 1998 (the book was written in 1980) a team of British physicists tries to extract grant money from a world government more concerned about imminent environmental collapse than hypothetical tachyons.
Except for the killer plankton, that’s about the sum total of the science in Timescape. The rest of the novel alternates between Our Hippie Hero’s relationship problems and the sexual escapades of a future Brit bureaucrat. In fact, the main pastime of scientists and their (stay-at-home) wives in 1998 seems to be adultery. The one female scientist I recall was a lesbian. Toss in the Armageddon by Plankton and the predictive power of Timescape approaches zero—not very reassuring in a time-travel novel (of sorts). I’m not sure whether this is a mainstream novel dressed up with tachyons, or a sci-fi novella with 300 pages of characterization tacked on. Either way, you get the picture.
Dan Simmons’ Ilium was the only Hugo nominee I hadn’t read, and now I’ve remedied the situation. Although Nicholas Whyte and Locus rated it first, I was disappointed by the lack of an ending. Paladin of Souls is also part of a series, but a freestanding part. I see now why it won over this book. Ilium left me hanging at the foot of Mt. Olympus.
It was a wild ride, though. Ilium follows the adventures of three sets of characters: several intelligent robots from Jupiter’s moons, a scholar resurrected by the Greek gods to check the progress of the Trojan war against the account in the Iliad, and a group of young eloi—useless, decadent humans—living on Earth. The robots eventually join up with a set of humans, but the other two plots never come together. It’s like reading two entirely separate novels shuffled together into one 575 page volume, and only one of them has anything like an ending.
Here’s another review along the same lines. It’s a fun read and hard to put down, but I wouldn’t recommend starting Ilium until you have your hands on the sequel.
[Update:] I forgot to mention my big nitpick of Ilium. The following are facts related to reproduction on the future Earth:
These facts contradict each other in several ways. The two characters cannot be full cousins if no one has any siblings. They could be half-siblings on the father’s side or the half-cousin descendants of such half-siblings, but they would not know it because paternity is not tracked.
Also, the population cannot be fixed at any number, either the original 1,000,000 or the later estimate, because the rate of reproduction (one child per woman) is far below the replacement rate. The number of fertile women would be halved in every generation. That the population is in geometric decline fits the plot of the novel, but the characters don’t seem to realize it. They may be clueless eloi, but that kind of population loss would be hard to miss after several generations.
As the Apple Turns reports on a truly frightening nuclear scenario. I think it’s time to bring back the backyard bomb-shelter fad.
Slashdot can advise you on sheltering in style from that mysterious mushroom cloud over North Korea.
There’s a convention in London today to celebrate 9/11: “The Choice is in Your Hands: Either You’re with the Muslims or with the Infidels.” Thanks to Classical Values for the link.
I heard about the new, faster DNS propagation at Slashdot, and I’m trying it out right now with another domain. (It applies to .com and .net, but not .org, apparently.) Just in the time I’ve been typing this entry, the new DNS info propagated far enough for me to see it at dnsreport, but it hasn’t reached my mac yet. I suspect my ISP is caching the DNS somewhere.
It’s not me caching, since I found this handy blog entry about flushing your DNS cache on OSX (lookupd -flushcache). Yet for the moment, I’m still using the DNS trick I blogged about a few weeks ago.
A while back someone was telling me how she just couldn’t understand how people believe in God. Ok, you may be thinking, she was an atheist. The proper statement of atheism, though, is, “I don’t believe in God,” not, “I don’t get why you believe in God.” The former is a belief; the latter is a failure of imagination.
When people speak as if their failures of imagination have independent significance, we call that the argument from ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantium. The argumentum ad ignorantium is the assertion that a statement is false because it has not been proven true. A related fallacy is the argument from lack of imagination—I’d call it the argument from dullness—the assertion that a statement is false because the speaker cannot imagine it being true.
Often the argument is implied, and only the ignorance is professed. Willful ignorance is a common rhetorical tool. For example, abjorn professes ignorance when it comes to Republican popularity:
I just don’t get it. I don’t. … I don’t get how Newt Gingrich can think that little “Purple Heart bandages” are funny. I don’t understand how Ted Poe can continue the disgusting Republican tradition of slandering the French without anyone considering this to be a completely dishonorable act that is unbefitting a public figure.
It’s not restricted to politics by any means; Naomi Chana doesn’t understand why other people aren’t as interested as she is in the history of the Hebrew liturgy:
There is also a lamentable lack of historical curiosity on the part of the average Jewish liturgical participant… I find very few synagogue-goers (and remember, this is already an interested subset of the Jewish population) who want to know which parts of the service are rabbinic and which medieval, or which parts of the Aleinu got edited out when… I have trouble understanding this level of apathy; I can only put it down to really, really lousy Jewish education.
These aren’t the best examples, just the most recent ones I spotted in my RSS reading. I find it fascinating that people will profess ignorance (or misunderstanding) of something as common as Republican beliefs or layman disinterest in deconstructing the liturgy. People are interested in what interests them; there’s no accounting for taste. Other people’s beliefs are never a mystery to me; I may not agree, but if I’m confused people will explain. There’s not much opportunity for misunderstanding politics when people are ranting about it 24/7 on both sides.
I assume the professors of ignorance are just misusing the word “understand” to mean something deeper—say, “empathize.”
