Dear old Hans Rosling can always be depended upon to teach while making the lesson interesting and fun. I am confident that one day everyone will realize what an amazing machine the world wide web is and how it can be the answer to our educational problems. But for now, sit back, and watch this amazing man do what he does best — lift the veil of ignorance and reveal a little bit of what lies beneath. And most of all, remind us to mind the gap. The video is …

Go check out the videos shortlisted for playing at YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum. What’s that?

The web is amazing. It is the largest smorgasbord of stuff for the brain ever imaginable. I have to admit that I spend inordinate amounts of time just learning stuff from surfing the web. It is worth reminding ourselves that the world has changed qualitatively. Used to be that information was a scarce resource. That was then. This is now. Now you have a virtually limitless supply of great information. Now the truly scarce resource is time. Anyway, go take a look at . . .

If you love words the way I do, you’d love this.

As a comment on YouTube puts it, “What a fantastic work of art and horology.”

You never thought of the web reflecting the morality that permeates human behavior, did you? I did not. I just read a fine article on the topic. The article title by David Weinberger, “The Morality of Links“, is a tad disturbing to me because it smacks of anthropomorphism but the article is a delight to read. The article is from a collection in the book, “The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age“, Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, editors.
Weinberger starts off with the simple declaration “Links are good” and …

Ever wonder what it takes to make it possible for you to visit gazillions of websites? I suppose we wonder only when there is a disturbance in the web, as it happened a few days ago when five undersea fiberoptic cables mysteriously snapped and some parts of Middle East and India were affected. So I did a little futzing around the web and found a pretty good write up on one cable system — the FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Across the Globe. The report is really really long and really …

The Hubble Deep Field and the Most Important Image Ever Taken by Humanity.

Watch it and wonder. Wonder how insignificant our concerns are, how parochial our interests, how utterly immaterial even our greatest conflicts are. Watch it and wonder how ignorant the so-called sacred scriptures of humanity are. The visible universe is 78 billion light-years across. Our galaxy is huge — with about 5 billion stars, one of which is our sun. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Oh wonderful new world of the web, that has such people like E. O. Wilson in it!

E O Wilson got his wish. “As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we’re still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we’re still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and …

BBC’s David Attenborough shows us what an amazing artist the lyre bird is. The clip beings with David asking in a whispered voice, “What bird in the world has the most elaborate, the most complex, the most beautiful song in the world? My guess there must be lots of contenders but this bird must be one of them, the superb lyre bird . . . ” Go watch the three minute clip.

glumbert.com

Brand Blanshard was only 92 years old when he delivered Boston University’s 111th Commencement in 1984. Titled “The Habit of Reason.” I came across this magnificent piece here. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon it and so should you since you are reading this. Appropriately the piece is thoughtful since he urges the students to think.
The piece resonates deeply with my own feelings about the goals of education. He says, “Life is a succession of big and little crises, and one main aim of education is to …

Two items today from this amazing web. First, a simple rant telling monotheists that they should stop being delusional. Nothing fancy but a lot of fun. Next, a great conversation with Susan Blackmore at the Point of Inquiry. “In this far-ranging discussion with D.J. Grothe, Susan Blackmore talks about her research into the paranormal and near death experiences and why she left that field of study, memetics and religion as a meme, free will and the question of moral responsibility, consciousness and the illusory nature of the self, and …

A Global Display of Terrorism and Other Suspicious Events.
[Hat tip: S Kalyanaraman]

Want to weave a rainbow? Here’s your chance.

Check out this site. Click on the little square after the site has finished loading. Like that instruction on the shampoo bottle, repeat. Isn’t the web an amazing place? Why? Because the world is full of inventive, amazing talent and it allows people to showcase their ingenuity, and because we get to share in the joy of discovering those nifty ideas.

The world of technology is magical. There are not enough hours in the day to even begin to scratch the surface of what amazing things that exist today, leave alone what is going to come down the technology cornucopia which is beyond imagination. You do get brief glimpses of tomorrow, occasionally. For instance, check out this Crazy Multi-input Touch Screen video clip. (Wait, don’t click on the link before you read the entire entry.)

At the risk of being branded a Luddite, I maintain that the world wide web is the single most distracting thing ever invented by humans. The internet is immensely useful for practical matters of course but aside from its utilitarian functions, it is also capable of providing a device for pure play. It can be, in the hands of an appropriately interested and educated human, a virtually (sic) inexhaustible source of joy, the intellectual equivalent of Kubla Khan’s “miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.” …