Image via Wikipedia I remember as a kid, my parents restricting television and video game use because they would both make me stupid and violent. They worked too hard, so I had plenty unsupervised time to violate the rules. Plus no force would make me do homework. The past half decade has seen a resurgence…
The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child by Thom Hartmann My review rating: 5 of 5 stars Reading the DSM-IV about ADHD sounded to me more like the behavior over a typical boy than a mental illness. Thom theorizes a gene came about which allowed our ancestors to survive an intense…
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley My review rating: 5 of 5 stars Darwin’s theory of natural selection opened a can of worms. Matt Ridley adds to the support for the case by attempting to explain: Why sexual and not asexual reproduction? Why males and females? Why do…
One of the books I am reading, Gut Feelings, made a statement: Transparency and trust are two sides of the same coin. without much elaboration. To place the statement in context, Gerd Gigerenzer was writing about moral systems. Specifically, how the Ten Commandments was so effective because it they are so simple. The American tax…
The previous post regarding the FBI checking on whether a photographer was Middle Eastern reminded me…. The Civil Rights Movement occurred before I was born. However, my parents were afflicted by blatantly racist laws which continued for decades. State anti-miscegenation law [1] at the time prohibited White females from marrying outside of their race. Since…
Before we react to the lower amount of reading, what exactly is the problem we seek to solve? Is the problem declining student reading scores? We need to improve reading comprehension. Students may need to learn how to read more effectively so increasing the quantity may not help that much. Is the problem half of…
An Even Better Reason to Celebrate has a nice longer version of this quote from a NYT OpEd piece on tomorrow being the bicentennial for the ablution of slave trade to the United States. WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of…
I didn’t have any interest in this book (or the His Dark Materials trilogy books of which TGC is the first book) or the movie. Then I heard about Vatican objection to the movie despite the references to the Church being removed. This kind of objection made me curious. Does being an atheist make Phillip…
Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved daily according to Luis von Ahn (on Wired Science on PBS). His technology project reCAPTHCA will use unknown words in these challenges for solving the unknown words in OCR digitalizing books to solve these words in an a quasi-automated sort of way. I wonder though. Even if reCAPTCHA a)…