» Tuesday, 14 April A.D. 2009
tab cleanup
When I find things that I might want to blog about, I leave a tab open in my web browser to remind me. Cleaning time has come.
A really, really really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other. Worth reading in its entirety. To quote from near the end of the article:
Three laws. Three well-meaning reformers who were genuinely, sincerely incapable of imagining that their changes would wreak such institutional havoc. Three sets of utterly logical and convincing, and wrong arguments about how people would behave after a major change.
So what does this mean? That we shouldn't enact gay marriage because of some sort of social Precautionary Principle
No. I have no such grand advice.
My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it.
The Antikytheea Mechanism Research Project. From the project overview:
More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else? For decades, scientific investigation failed to yield much light and relied more on imagination than the facts. However research over the last half century has begun to reveal its secrets. It dates from around the 1st century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. The Antikythera Mechanism is now understood to be dedicated to astronomical phenomena and operates as a complex mechanical “computer” which tracks the cycles of the Solar System.
David Noble's Battle to Defend the Sacred Space of the Classroom.
Since the splash made by his first distance-education essay, Mr. Noble has published three online sequels expanding the argument. In the latest, published late last year, he provides a history of correspondence schools in the late 1800's and early 1900's. In the essay, which Mr. Noble hopes to expand into a book, he traces several parallels between such efforts and today's distance-education ventures.
Early education-by-mail efforts, he says, were marketed with the same enthusiasm as today's Internet courses. “The chief selling point of education by means of correspondence, the firms maintained, was personalized instruction for busy people,” he writes.
By 1926, Mr. Noble writes, more than 300 private correspondence schools had sprung up. Around the same time, about 73 traditional colleges and universities were running correspondence programs, too.
But, Mr. Noble argues, such individualized instruction turned out to be more expensive than the institutions had anticipated. To cut costs, he says, institutions soon lowered standards for correspondence teachers and expanded their workloads, diminishing the quality of instruction and prompting many students to drop out. The number of such programs eventually fell.
I recently read David Noble's The Religion of Technology, having been prompted by this article to look into his works. The book was quite good and deserves a separate post.
OpenSecrets.org goes OpenData. Should be interesting to see what people come up with as far as visualizations.
GTD Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency. The title is slightly provocative, but worth reading for a deeper look at the man behind GTD. “Allen is remaking the self-help tradition for the information age.” is one of the best bits of the article.
Papers to read for unladen-swallow. unladen-swallow aims to be a compiled, faster implementation of Python (get it?). The list is pretty good, although it could definitely be quite a bit longer.
Deleted from Wikipedia. Not sure if it's been updated recently, but interesting nonetheless.
It's time to kill the idea that newspaper are essential for democracy. Yes, please.
posted by Nate @ 12:38PM