Common phrases in Icelandic, a collection of videos and another cool resource I’ve found getting ready for vacation. Not too long ago, you wouldn’t be able to hear a native speaker until you got there. In the same way, when look on Flickr I can see recent photos in Reykjavik, see what folks are wearing, […]
At The Public School anyone can propose a course, anyone can sign up for courses, and if there’s enough money to fund it, the course is offered (flowchart). How hard is that? Take a look at the current offerings, or if you have expertise, the classes that need teachers. [via lined & unlined]
A worthy bit from The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:
The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other […]
Dave Barry on college:
After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and […]
A wiki with a list of academic blogs divided by field. I love the category for “Professions and Useful Arts.”
Pecha Kucha Night is an informal gathering of presenters who are limited to 20 slides of 20 seconds each. So, theoretically, it’s a forum with less rambling and more variety in the course of an evening. Lots of cities are having them now. Could be cool. The next Atlanta Pecha Kucha will be next Sunday […]
This year’s question from edge.org: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?” Dozens of scientists, researchers, philosophers, writers, and thinkers respond.
While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads […]
I did not know that Wikipedia has a reference desk. Sort of like the super-helpful Ask MetaFilter.
PhD trivia: “Only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10.” That sounds completely insane to me. Granted, I’ve never been in a PhD program, but… wow. Just wow. Some schools are implementing policies to encourage professors to help students complete […]
Lapham’s Quarterly looks like a worthy new periodical. Each volume covers a specific theme and the essays come from a wide range of historical texts. The current issue, “States of War,” draws on Patton, Ruskin, Lenin, Goebbels, bin Laden, Virgil, Tim O’Brien, Whitman, Vonnegut, Tolstoy…
Merriam-Webster’s words of the year, with the lovable “w00t” winning the number one spot.
Holy crap. I just noticed that there’s a LibX plug-in for Emory University libraries. There are a couple hundred other schools that use LibX. From the comfort of my own Firefox toolbar, I can search Emory’s catalog, journals, and databases, as well as Google Scholar and WorldCat. This makes me unreasonably happy.
“Before a game of tournament Scrabble, the tiles being used that game are set out on the board, so that people can make sure that none are missing. One typical way of doing this is to make four 5×5 groups of tiles in the corners of the board… Dan Stock has recently determined that it’s […]
Tonight I heard photographer Alec Soth speak at the High Museum, a guest of this month’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography events. It was incredibly cool. It was a walk through his career so far, his major projects and commissioned work, and what he’s been learning. I took several pages of notes in the Moleskine… and now […]
These Wikipedia essays are tremendous. They’re basically internal memos, where the philosophy and culture is hashed out in the same collective fashion as the primary content. A few that I really like:
Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Coatrack
Humor
Sarcasm is really helpful
Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn’t look like it works on the home page, but that’s pretty cool. Am I the last […]
The Museum of Reading has the entire Bayeux Tapestry online with explanatory notes. And on YouTube there’s a pretty sweet semi-animated version that scrolls across the latter half of the 230-foot tapestry.
Alan Nelson links to a collection of Stephen Hawking’s lectures and colloquia. Cool.
“Last year, at dinner with a spitzer of art-history graduates, I suggested—perhaps that is too polite a word—that art-history, and in fact the rest of the humanities, were useless disciplines. (I was bored!)”
We’ve got a new batch of MacArthur Fellows. I’d never heard of most of the fellows, which is great. But I am familiar with two of them. Stuart Dybek bowled me over with his short story that I’ve probably mentioned a million times, If I Vanished. Dawn Upshaw is a very good soprano. She sang […]
Wikimindmap maps out the subtopics and links in Wikipedia articles. A little slow, but very cool. [via idw]
Someone took fantastic notes from an Edward Tufte seminar last month in Chicago.
There is a ton of recordings from the 2007 Singularity Summit, featuring all the speakers and panels. [via justin, of course]
You can now buy the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List in one motherlode from Amazon.
The other day I hacked a little skit based on Austin’s mini-comic about writing with the Fibonacci sequence. So then I got to thinking about other arbitrary limits. What else could I do, just to get the brain wiggling? Still in math mode, my first thought was to do some writing based on pi. Each […]
Matthew Stibbe suggested some writer’s reference sites. My suggestions: The Online Etymology Dictionary offers a brief history of words. You’ll enjoy it if you’re just reflexively curious like me. And maybe you don’t need to bookmark it, but I like the Plain English Campaign’s A to Z of Alternative Words [pdf].
From Matthew’s list, I like […]
Alright, here’s a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:
20% easy access to both sides of the brain
30% curiosity about pretty much everything
10% drawing and writing treated as equals
15% a wee bit of perfectionism
10% tech savvy
15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance
For those of you just tuning in, I’m talking about how Austin described […]
Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It’ll take some time and trial & error to figure out […]
Mises University is happening this week at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Tune in to the webcasts for some of the best economics learnin’ you’ll find anywhere.
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