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It’s Okay To Be Smart • Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward…
““Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of “i” in one word is too much.”
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was not fond of that new-fangled word “physicist”.Instead, he was an “experimentalist”, a “natural philosopher”, or simply a “scientist”. It seems a modern trend, this need to hyper-specialize both our questions and our means of answering them.”
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Standardized testing: I opted my kids out. The schools freaked out. Now I know why.
“She started out very soft and calm. “Mrs. McElroy,” she said. “We’ve just received word that your daughter isn’t going to take the TCAPs. We are so disappointed. Won’t you change your mind?””
h/t Boing Boing
Standardized testing: I opted my kids out. The schools freaked out. Now I know why. “She started out very sof… http://t.co/Gtad7p3Xaz
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) March 8, 2014
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Writing From Photographs : Digital Literacy
“It’s not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don’t have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together.
Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return.”
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George Washington: Boozehound – Reason.com
“Indeed, we still have available the bar tab from a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.”
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Our Comrade The Electron – Webstock Conference Talk
“World War II saved his life. He was put to work in an institution only the Soviet Union could have invented, a prison filled with the greatest engineers and aerodynamicists in the country.
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@jonbecker @cogdog @GardnerCampbell #thoughtvectors All sorts of good stuff including the theremin https://t.co/TPwnFvBack
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) March 4, 2014
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We don’t really know what we’re doing most of the time.
“These Chinese posters epitomize the Republic’s principals, culture and history, of technological and aesthetic styles. Borrowing heavily from the Soviet Union’s highly refined systems of propaganda dissemination and their artistic styles of socialist realism, they radiate dynamism, good will and optimism. They’re a visual representation of one of the most ambitious public health movements in history but they also speak of gross tampering with delicate ecosystems, of an ignorance of the subtle bonds that hold the world around us together.
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