Learning

“What do 450 web nerds do when they’re trapped in a hotel ballroom listening to someone who’s insulting their intelligence? They get out their laptops and smartphones and start tweeting.” Keynote ruckus at HighEdWeb (sillybean.net)

Conversation—real conversation—is possible only between people who share a world-view at the deepest level Given that shared world-view, all sorts of topics may then be broached, all sorts of disagreements risked, without putting an end to the conversation and to the relationship. The superficiality of conversation in our time has to do with the absence…

Just did my first natural-language query on Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha: “population of maine versus vermont”

Driveway moment. Listen to audio. Story about Freeport, Maine at the end. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown were descendants of Pullman porters — that distinctive and distinguished figure from yesteryear — the uniformed African-American train worker, who forged his way into the middle class. As part of this…

An obscure Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into ‘the living unity of a single tissue’ containing our collective thoughts and…

“Steiger and his colleagues created [ProPublica] a newsroom with more than two dozen journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winners from the Los Angeles Times and a foreign correspondent from The Washington Post. Their stories are appearing in news outlets big and small — on CBS’s 60 Minutes and New York’s primary public radio station, WNYC.” A…

“Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college.” The Tell-All Campus Tour – NYTimes.com

“This is the first audio archive of Chinese music ever existed on the Internet.” The Internet Chinese Music Archive

“In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about” TED | Talks | James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia (video)

Google Maps mashup. “Click on the individual markers for site specific information. The map can also be zoomed in/out, scrolled around, or switched to satellite image.” Map of the World Heritage Sites