23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Write With Style
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bri... 1 
notes
notes19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Hyperlinks as Conversation
Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin... 1 notes
notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
31 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
The Plural of Thrips
Much the same can be said of the Thrips, those tiny plant insects that haven't so much as a decent singular to their name, one wished to specify an individual Thrips. You may speak many Thrips, or of one Thrips, but never of one Thrip, how strongly you may feel that such a ruling is in restraint of 'our personal liberties. Nor may you employ the word Thripses to mean one or more Thrips, convenient as it might be in a pinch. The New English Dictionary states, with what end in view I don't know... 1 notes
notes21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Faith-Based Empiricism
Before you judge the analogy with theology as being too harsh, conduct the followingexperiment.
Randomly select one of your own publications from a year or two ago
and think about what would be involved in reproducingthe results. How longwould
it take, assumingyou would be able to do it? If you can’t reproduce those results, why
do you believe them? Why should your readers?
Our inability to reproduce results leads to a debilitatingparadox, where we as
reviewers and readers accept highly em...Folksonomies: empiricism reproducibility
Folksonomies: empiricism reproducibility
1 notes
notesSo much important information is left out of journal articles that often the results are not reproducible.
21 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Four Classes of Readers
Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and retum it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. 2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read, and retum it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. 1 notes
notesRobots, laborers, and those who incorporate it.
26 SEP 2013 by ideonexus
Popular Science Shuts Down Comments
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.
[...]
...even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randoml...
2 
2 Comments on articles erode the public's trust in science.
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Teaching Children About Death
In a discussion on my blog regarding teaching kids about death, one of my readers commented that he uses a book called Lifetimes, by Bryan Mellonie. He explained that the book describes the lifetimes of various living things and focuses on the life that happens in between birth and death.
He explained, “I tell my kids that they do continue, not only in the life matter and lineage cycle, but as part of the world/universe per se. ‘The world produced life and us along with it. We are not se... 1 notes
notesVarious strategies for secularists to teach children this fact of life.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Keynes Predicts Unemployment from Automation
We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
He predicts technological progress will outrun the pace for which we can find new uses for labor in 1930.
15 APR 2011 by ideonexus
The Book Wheel
Ramelli's designs were very inventive and often required precise machining that was impossible in his day. Many were successfully manufactured and sold, two or three centuries later. Ramelli designed the "book-wheel" or “reading wheel” to present volumes of text to readers in whatever position they had last placed them.
The “book-wheel,” an alternative version of the revolving bookstand, is a device designed to allow one person to read a variety of heavy books in one location with e... 1 notes
notesNot a direct quote from the text, but a description of what the book wheel was in Ramelli's book.
