Month: October 2011
-
Curiosity
In Curiosity Is Critical to Academic Performance, curiosity was measured as a strong factor like conscientiousness and intelligence for academic success. Capacity and speed acquiring information, staying on task, and motivation to work with information are all good things. At the end of article, I found this interesting. Employers may also want to take note: a…
-
The origins of pleasure
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is. One interesting thing is…
-
Broken
At 30:00 Steve Jobs talks about how innovation came about because people wanted something for themselves to use that was actually good. Maybe this is the takeaway message for dealing with any technology, especially in education. If <name your institution’s LMS> sucks, then look around and cobble together something actually good. Or failing that make your…
-
TED Talk: Finding planets around other stars
How do we find planets — even habitable planets — around other stars? By looking for tiny dimming as a planet passes in front of its sun, TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz and the Kepler mission have found some 1,200 potential new planetary systems. With new techniques, they may even find ones with the right conditions…
-
Vibration-Induced Drop Atomization
Something really cool from Georgia Tech. … a small liquid drop is placed on a thin metal diaphragm that is forced to vibrate by an attached piezoelectric transducer. The vibration induces capillary waves on the free surface of the drop that, upon attaining the critical conditions, begin to eject small droplets from the wave crests.…
-
Schrödinger’s Politician
Here is good explanation for Schrödinger’s Cat. I’ll continue below the video. If the embedded video does not work, then go to Schrödinger’s Cat on Youtube. So the cat exists in two states both dead or alive until something forces the universe to choose one. It seems like many political decisions follow something like this.…
-
Privacy and Technology
Isaac Asimov has an interesting pre-World-Wide Web quote, “The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.” Janov Pelorat in Foundation’s Edge (1982). Think about the word “civilization”. The root, civil, means to treat others well. In one ideal world, everyone would treat everyone else well for no reason. In hunter-gather…
-
Happy Birth of the Báb
There is a good article on the Birth of the Báb. (On surprisingly the Huffington Post) This is a photo of the Shine of the Báb I took during my Pilgrimage to Haifa in 2010.
-
TED Talk: How to spot a liar
Almost forgot about my How to tell when your boss is lying post. This attracted me to this TED Talk: “Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink of the wall.” On any given day we’re lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle…