Ray Kurzweil on learning: Knowledge is doubling every 13 months by some measures.And knowledge isn’t just a database. Knowledge is a symphony or a jazz band or a poem or a novel or a new scientific insight or an invention.
Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux’s linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words. His results were first published on Abstract, the N.C. State research blog. Want to know how other Americans pronounce words like caramel or pecan? […]
As the school year comes to and end and summer break begins for most of you, the words of “Uncle” Walt Whitman seem especially appropriate: “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote […]
Prompted by the Baz Luhrman film, there has been a great deal of discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lately. Austin Allen at the Big Think offers a defense of the work: Gatsby is not only a dissection of the American Dream but of dreams in general: their terrible necessity, their built-in futility. […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating look at the life of of Raphael Lemkin and his efforts to end genocide after the death of his family at Treblinka: The achievements of Lemkin and Cassin have had little effect on the way governments respond to genocide. As Samantha Power showed scathingly in her 2002 […]