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? Check it out here.
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 your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Have a wonderful summer. Experience dirt between your toes, sunlight on your faces, and wisdom in your minds.
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. Its best lines on the subject–“the high price of living too long with a single dream”; “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”; “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”–have an almost scriptural quality, resonating far beyond their immediate context.
It’s also a particularly trenchant study of male desire, male illusion. Although the female characters in Gatsby don’t exactly come out looking well, there’s something ferocious about the way the book skewers men. What is Gatsby’s house but a failed mating display, one of the most extravagant in literature? Is there a harsher portrait of waning virility than Tom Buchanan: insecure bully and womanizer, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax”? Meanwhile George Wilson is a hysterical cuckold, and even Nick cuts a slightly Prufrockian figure, looking forward at thirty to “a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
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 book, A Problem From Hell, the United States has consistently tiptoed around using what President Bill Clinton called “the G-word,” wary of taking the responsibility of stopping it. Clinton should know: He was slow to deal with the catastrophe in Rwanda, and though he did ultimately support military action to stop the killings in Bosnia, it was not before the Serbs had committed genocidal crimes. The record is clear: The Genocide Convention hasn’t stopped killers from massacring their victims. Genocide prevention remains a goal, not a reality.
We’ll be debating the Affordable Care Act for the final. Three questions:
Is the Affordable Care Act constitutional?
Will the Affordable Care Act reduce health care costs?
Will the Affordable Care Act improve health care in the United States?
