- The rise and rise of the cognitive elite – “It seems unfair that footballers, bankers and tycoons earn more money than they know what to do with whereas jobless folk and single parents struggle to pay the rent, notes Mr Saunders. Yet it also seems unfair to take money from those who have worked hard and give it to those who have not, or to take away the profits of those who have risked their life savings to bring a new invention to market in order to help those who have risked nothing.”
- Jaguar E-Type turns 50 – Some designs can stand the test of time. The Jaguar E-Type is one of them.
- iOS Debugging Magic – Some great iOS debugging hints.
Tag: Education
- Pope adviser calls UK a Third World Country, deploys racism, then says atheists are aggressive – “The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended ‘any kind of slight’, and was referring to the UK’s multicultural society.” Well that’s okay, then. (Not.)
- Why parents can’t do maths today – Article on how they teach arithmetic in British schools. I think the interesting thing is that approaches to both long division and multiplication are now more heuristics than algorithms.
- Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn’t the end of literacy after all…
- Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – “Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble.”
- Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – “The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it.”
- Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn’t intelligence. If that’s the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
- Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I’d very much appreciate it.
- Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – “What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true.” That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.
- The League of Moveable Type – Most free or open source fonts I’ve seen have been pretty poor but these guys seem to have the right idea.
- Government plans travel database – “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?”
- Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace – Fascinating ten minute video on what Pixar look for in candidates, summarised as Depth, Breadth, Communication and Collaboration. Given those criteria I’m guessing they’re very selective!
- Behind the Scenes at the Bay Bridge Construction Site – I saw the construction going on a few times last year, but from a distance while driving past. Interesting to see what they’re doing in more detail.
- Hand-wringing About American Culture – Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? – “Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.” The article concentrates on the US but I don’t think it’s limited to North America.
- America – more hassle than it’s worth? – Next week they’ll announce that all travelers need to wear orange overalls, the next that all flights go straight to Guantanamo… and then they’ll announce that it’s all an elaborate joke and that they just wanted to see how far we’d go before complainin