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…
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…
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.…
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.…
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…
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.
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…
Tweetdeck is my primary interaction with Twitter. Managing two Twitter accounts would be annoying via the web (two browsers given Prism is dead). At times I do accidentally post under the wrong one. Though I think the solution to that might be not having two blue profile icons. It is not Tweetdeck’s fault I fail to…
From TED’s About This Talk: Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry. If…