10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Gamification Pattern Building Mechanic
Ms. Forsythe divides her class into four teams (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome). Each team, over the course of the unit, learns about all four artistic cultures but becomes an expert in one. For a 20- to 30-minute exercise in discerning and judging the difference among these artistic cultures, Ms. Forsythe displays a piece of sculpture from each of the four cultures onto a large piece of heavy paper or cardboard and then cuts that image into smaller tiles and tosses all of the pieces to...Folksonomies: education gamification
Folksonomies: education gamification
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notes
notes24 FEB 2015 by ideonexus
Collaborative Fractal Fictional History Building
In Microscope, you build an epic history as you play. Want to play a game that spans the entire Dune series, the Silmarillion, or the rise and fall of Rome in an afternoon? That’s Microscope.
But you don’t play the history from start to finish, marching along in chronological order. Instead, you build your history from the outside in. You start off knowing the big picture, the grand scheme of what happens, then you dive in and explore what happened in between, the how and why that shaped...
1 21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
History in "A Song of Ice and Fire"
In this, the obvious contrast is with the only work of fantasy to compare in terms of ambition and achievement to Martin's own: The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Middle-earth, unlike Westeros, is the creation of a dauntingly learned scholar: his ambition was to fashion from the languages, literature and history of the early middle ages an invented mythology that would nevertheless retain the stamp of the period that had inspired it. Martin's approach is infinitely more slapdash. Just as the ch... 1 notes
notesASOIF contains many references to real history.
11 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Power of the Chinese Ideogram
As everyone knows, the Chinese do not have letters, as we do, but symbols for whole words. This has, of course, many inconveniences: it means that, in learning to write, there are an immense number of different signs to be learnt, not only 26 as with us; that there is no such thing as alphabetical order, so that dictionaries, files, catalogues, etc., are difficult to arrange and linotype is impossible; that foreign words, such as proper names and scientific terms, cannot be written down by so...
1 Phonetic alphabets change over time as the sounds of the language drift, by decoupling the sounds of the language from the alphabet, the Chinese have produced a written language that can survive thousands of years.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
What Happened to the Roman Apartment Buildings?
It is both a sad and a happy fact of engineering history that disasters have been powerful instruments of change. Designers learn from failure. Industrial society did not invent grand works of engineering, and it was not the first to know design failure. What it did do was develop powerful techniques for learning from the experience of past disasters. It is extremely rare today for an apartment house in North America, Europe, or Japan to fall down. Ancient Rome had large apartment buildings t...Folksonomies: engineering
Folksonomies: engineering
1 notes
notesUnlike the structures that survived to today, they must have all collapsed under poor engineering.
18 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Galileo's Renunciation
I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before your Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors of the universal Christian republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed, and now believe, and with the help of God will in future believe, every article which the Holy Catholic an... 1 notes
notesText of what the church forced him to sign or die.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Genetic Drift of Languages
Just as some species are more similar than others and are placed in the same family, so there are also families of languages. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and many European languages and dialects such as Romansch, Galician, Occitan and Catalan are all pretty similar to each other; together they're called 'Romance' languages. The name actually comes from their common origin in Latin, the language of Rome, not from any association with romance, but let's use an expression of love as nr ... 1 notes
notesLanguages evolve and have a family tree like species in evolution.
18 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Science of the Ancient Goddesses and Women Heroes
The most important of all the goddesses of antiquity was Isis, the Mother Goddess of the early Egyptians. Women retained a prominent place in Egyptian civilisation longer than in neighbouring Neolithic societies and Isis was often represented as promoting equality for all people. Perhaps this was why Isis cults were particularly attractive to women, commoners and slaves. These cults flourished in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean well into the Christian era.
The attributes of Isis and th... 1 notes
notesSome examples of science in ancient goddesses and female heroes.
30 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Atheist and Religious Origins of Secular Humanism
Atheism and freethought trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on rational inquiry and curiosity about the workings of nature. Other sources included early Chinese Confucianism, ancient Indian materialists, and Roman Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Submerged during the Dark Ages, freethought re-emerged in the Renaissance. With the Enlightenment, rationalist and empiricist thinkers laid foundations for the modern scientific outlook. Utilitarians emancipated morality... 1 notes
notesA list of the shoulders on which secular humanism is built philosophically and spiritually.
23 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
1973 Humanist Manifesto II - Introduction
The next century can be and should be the humanistic century. Dramatic scientific, technological, and ever-accelerating social and political changes crowd our awareness. We have virtually conquered the planet, explored the moon, overcome the natural limits of travel and communication; we stand at the dawn of a new age, ready to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit other planets. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, exten...A revised Humanist Manifesto, considered necessary in response to World War II and Nazism. Isaac Asimov was among the signers.
