What, Why & How do we Know ?
They (and the biting cold wind) keep the red flags flying
in Tiananmen Square
It’s that man again, overlooking those entering the Forbidden City
No stealing the photons now,
Red is not the only colour,
Does the guard on the bridge know he’s 6 inches off centre ?
Yes, that’s a submarine on the HuangPo.
This 10x lifesize statue of Mao overlooks the main square here in Fuzhou.
Linked to Nova Spivak’s blog “Minding The Planet” once or twice before, but intrigued to find here that Peter Drucker was his grandfather ?
Web 2.0 IS Google, says Cringley. 300+ portable and strategically located container-sized data processing centres are the key. [via Euan Semple]
Fascinating novelty item [via Rivets] of a week’s worth of activity through locks on the Panama canal compressed into 11 minutes of time-lapse video.
Must be something about the sequence of locks and holding pools, but there are long inefficient sequences with all boats going in the same direction, lock’s repeatedly filling with no up-bound ships, locks emptying without down-bound ships.
I’ve been raving about Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality world view, and mentioned that he didn’t play as strongly as expected on his quantum information work.
I see he was just last week awarded a prize by The Edge for his pioneering work in quantum computing.
Wow, after just rediscovering how much there was behind management guru Peter Drucker, I hear he died last Friday 18th November 2006, just short of his 96th birthday.
Strange on the Wednesday two days before, my boss just used a Drucker quote I’d given him in a management presentation in the conference I was at.
[Recent Drucker posts]
[Assorted tributes]
[Tom Peters’ piece]
Browsing The Edge (see previous post) I see this article by Canadian paleontologist and broadcaster Scott Sampson. He sees cross-discipline eco-focussed education projects as shifting the evolution debate from history on geological timescales to here and now relevance, and creating a better informed population in the process. As a pan-Darwinist, I’d have to agree.[My last post on this only this morning.] Sampson says …
Fortunately, there is movement afoot within both science and science education to bridge the eco-evolutionary gap. Increasingly, scientists are seeking out cross-disciplinary collaborations. Ecologists are expanding their scope to embrace regional and deep time effects on ecosystems, while evolutionists increasingly are considering the role of ecosystem dynamics on evolutionary patterns and processes. Research on topics such as complex adaptive systems is uniting once disparate disciplines in a search for common explanations and even natural laws. In parallel fashion, radical new approaches to education are challenging traditional notions of learning. For example, the ecoliteracy movement has argued persuasively that designing curricula around key ecological concepts and outdoor activities has great potential to connect children with the natural world and foster the growth of a more informed citizenry. But this is just the beginning.
Good to see the shift from bashing the creationists, and Dawkins-style defence of Darwinism against them, to simply better science education.
