A round-up of some of the intriguing, insightful, and/or thought-provoking things I read over the last week. Julia Slige, What Programming Languages Are Used Most on Weekends? (February 7, 2017) A good first pass over a new dataset is a...
A round-up of some of the intriguing, insightful, and/or thought-provoking things I read over the last week. Sheila Weller. How Author Timothy Tyson Found the Woman at the Center of the Emmett Till Case. On a steamy hot September day in 1955, in...
Traditions are often thought of as connective, a way of carrying the past into the present. But their character as rituals makes them very powerful demarcations, too. If they connect you and your ancestors, traditions can also be a reminder that...
Were you to ask, I think a lot of learning and education professionals would tell you that they’re at war with entropy. They’d probably call it “forgetting,” or “failed knowledge transfer,” or the like, but the word would indicate the same thing:...
A few weeks ago, Adam Kotsko hypothesized a connection between privilege and austerity that relies on the grounding idea that a privilege is a possession rather than a feature - “something extra” that can be lost or taken away. By that...
I have always loved the word "spalling," ever since I first heard it in my youth. It's the word for the process by which a large chunk of stone, concrete, ice, or some other solid material breaks down, shedding smaller fragments along fault lines...
It's a well-established truth that the easiest way to get attention is to get in the way. Crashing the seamless background against which our lives play out will do it. If you're lucky, you get incorporated into the foreground for a little while....
That door was always different somehow. I think it started with the doorknob. Different lock than all the other doors on the house, different style of hardware. And they treated it differently, since it was the only one that would lock them out...
One time I was traveling for business, and I decided to list the separate data streams that the company that I currently work for could use for our operations and strategy. Final count was about fifteen, everything from what the servers show to...
Maybe you'll be surprised to hear it, but one can end up in the same position with both a poem and a career: simultaneously overwhelmed and unmoved. I've seen university students stymied by John Keats and Ode on a Grecian Urn. I've seen adult...