education

Quoted: 【答えることのできない問いには答えなくてよいのです。

Fun reading from The Boston Globe website.

Quoted: (...) The first thing to know is that the mind isn't a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn't real - tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations.

MIT trend in teaching CS toward more practical classes - like this one in building an Android application.

The content is worth reading but the writing (by a University of Illinois grad student) is absolutely first-rate. It's so good, that I started re-reading the article, just to look for errors!

From the webzine: The Ethicurean

Quoted: (...) I truly believe that humane slaughter is important and possible, but, as I have been learning, here’s the truth about any slaughter: it is both morally difficult and really gross. (...) With a public unwilling to acknowledge the living nature of their food source, the meat industry has been free to institute practices that no compassionate person can countenance.

Very cool story about a Terp great. Liz, you'll have to forward it to Penelope ; )

Quoted: Later, looking at the collection, he said: “Not often, but on occasion I feel guilty. I have all this because I run real fast and I tackle people. I recognize why I’ve been able to do this. It’s not all because of me or my family or my teammates or my coaches. It’s more because of the faces on the walls in my basement.”

Recommended on-line Pylons training resource.

Quoted: Welcome to the Pylons Book website where you can read all the chapters of the recently published Definitive Guide to Pylons, an open source book written by James Gardner and published by Apress.

The book covers the Pylons 0.9.7 release and is available for free to read here online.

Quoted: ヒデこと、中田英寿（32）が、自身の日記に人々のモラルについて語ったことで、話題となっている。

Quoted: 『高校に出前授業に出かけた研究者がため息まじりに話してくれた。
「科学技術が役に立っていると思う人？」と生徒に聞いたら、しばらくして半分ぐらい手が挙がった。「科学技術が環境を壊していると思う人？」と聞いたら、間髪入れず全員の手が挙がったという。「若者は科学技術より環境を大切に思っているんですね」

Now a book of the same title.

Quoted:As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Quoted: We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate ... we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place