education
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Everwhen
Good deal This is cool: IU opens its free generative AI course to anyone worldwide. As always Jamie Smith nails it with No one is listening to Steve Jobs’s advice about the EU Digital ID Wallet. Still the only way Interesting how old posts get new traffic. The biggest this morning on the ProjectVRM blog is to Health Continue reading
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Toes Day
Let the Games Continue I didn’t know what Figma was until I heard that Danila Poyarkov created an alternative called OpenPencil, explained here. This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is: Raise MORE from the dead. MORE was the best writing tool Continue reading
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Harbingery
On bargains even Faust wouldn't make Jamie Smith: Do you really want things to be hyper-personal…including pricing? Plus: ChatGPT gets ads, and it’s as problematic as you’d expect… and much more BTW, Abbey Stemler will speak in our salon series about “The Effects of Surveillance Pricing and How to Stop It” on Thursday, February 19th. It'll Continue reading
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Education 3.0
Education 1.0 was about learning one one-on-one, or one one-on-few. Also by ourselves. This kind of on-site discovery and mentorship gave us stone tools, cave art, clothing, shelter, writing, engineering, construction on every scale, and great artists in every age. Writing was involved, mostly of the scribal kind before the Gutenberg Parenthesis began. After that, Continue reading
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Monday, 7 July 2025
Entrails. This vs. this. Bonus link. Earth is a tiny blue exception to it. Here is why space matters. Bargains. Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. They are [$179 and $249 at Apple](Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. Continue reading
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Friday, July 4th, 2025
A big value-substract for higher ed. Among the crowning distinctions of Indiana University are its international scope and many supported disciplines. (An example.) Now, reports Inside Higher Ed, "Indiana’s public higher education institutions plan to eliminate or consolidate over 400 programs, equaling roughly one-fifth of their degree offerings statewide, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education Continue reading
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Monday
Just some facts. No interpretations. This blog post got nine reads by the end of the day. This photo got about the same. The photo above has had 22,122 views, 421 faves, and 21 comments. And lots more views every day. It may also be the best photo I’ve ever taken from the window of Continue reading
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Lifting the Lid on Government Meetings
Twenty-sixth in the News Commons series. On the left is Tom Evslin, former CTO for Vermont. On the right is the golden dome atop Vermont’s capitol building. Underneath that dome, and in countless spaces in government bodies everywhere are meetings recorded in video. Reviewing or reporting on those meetings is a chore. Unless that is, Continue reading
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Places
Let’s say you want to improve the Wikipedia page for Clayton Indiana with an aerial photograph. Feel free to use the one above. That’s why I shot it, posted it, and licensed it permissively. It’s also why I put a helpful caption under it, and some call-outs in mouse-overs. It’s also why I did the Continue reading
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On using Wikipedia in schools
In Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source, Rachel Cunneen and Mathieu O’Niel nicely unpack their case for the headline. In a online polylogue in response to that piece, I wrote, “You always have a choice: to help or to hurt.” That’s what my mom told me, a zillion years Continue reading
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A simple suggestion for Guilford College
Guilford College made me a pacifist. This wasn’t hard, under the circumstances. My four years there were the last of the 1960s, a stretch when the Vietnam War was already bad, getting worse, and sure to end in defeat for the U.S. Nonviolence was also a guiding principle of the civil rights movement, which was Continue reading
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Be the hawk
On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered:::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was at the top of the bell curve, and they put me in the smart kid Continue reading
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Higher education adrift
In Your favorite cruise ship may never come back: 23 classic vessels that could be laid-up, sold or scrapped, Gene Sloan (aka @ThePointsGuy) named the Carnival Fantasy as one those that might be headed for the heap. Now, sure enough, there it is, in the midst of being torn to bits (HT 7News, above) in Aliağa, Turkey. Other stories in the Continue reading
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The Future of Now
There is latency to everything. Pain, for example. Nerve impulses from pain sensors travel at about two feet per second. That’s why we wait for the pain when we stub a toe. The crack of a bat on a playing field takes half a second before we hear it in the watching crowd. The sunlight we Continue reading
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Zoom’s new privacy policy
Yesterday (March 29), Zoom updated its privacy policy with a major rewrite. The new language is far more clear than what it replaced, and which had caused the concerns I detailed in my previous three posts: Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act, More on Zoom and privacy, and Helping Zoom Those concerns were shared Continue reading
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On cryptocurrencies, blockchain and all that
Take a look at this chart: CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations As Neo said, Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m publishing here so I can find it again. Here goes::: Bitcoin. “A cryptocurrency and a Continue reading
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Let’s give full credit to human ingenuity
In The American Dream, Quantified at Last, David Leonhardt in The New York Times makes a despairing case for a perfect Onion headline: American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up. Like so much else the Times correctly tries to do, the piece issues a wake-up call. It is also typical of the Times’ tendency to Continue reading
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Oil and Water on California’s South Coast
Oil in the water is one of the strange graces of life on Califonia’s South Coast. What we see here is a long slick of oil in the Pacific, drifting across Platform Holly, which taps into the Elwood Oil Field, which is of a piece with the Coal Oil Point Seep Field, all a stone’s throw off Continue reading
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Moron the IQ myth (pun intended)
On Quora an anonymous somebody asked, My IQ is 131. Can I get into MIT? Yeah, it’s easy to call that a dumb question. But it’s the kind of question you get from somebody trapped in a caste system that cries out for a larger perspective, such as this one: Anyway, here’s my answer: You Continue reading