02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
De-Romanticizing Voting
Ugh. In actual outcomes, voting isn't an expression of your heart, your soul, or even your emotion. The result of a vote isn't "the right thing" or "the thing I love" or "the cure for social ills" or "the perfect solution." It's not a mechanism of protest or a chance to be dramatic, and it's not a "gesture" or a stand -- that's what demonstrations, letter writing, and petition campaigns are for. A vote is a functional choice for the preferable viable outcome, an act that adds 1 to a tally th...21 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Animal Instinct and Child Birth
What, then, is the difference between human and other animals? Are their bodies made differently? As a matter of fact they are remarkably similar. Cat and dog bodies are used in premedical anatomy studies due to the similarity of structures with identical name and function. Is it that they just can't experience pain? Following a natural-childbirth newspaper article, an indignant letter to the editor asserted cats can have kittens without pain because they cannot feel pain as human beings do...Humans don't have instincts when it comes to childbirth, but they can train for it.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Bernie Cosell on Java
Java didn't feel right. My old reflexes hit me. Java struck me as too authoritarian. Thats one of the reasons why I mentioned that Perl felt so good, because it's got the safety and the checks but it is so damn multidimensioned that the artist part of me has a lot of free board to express things early and to think about the right way do things. I have some freedom. When I first messed with Java—^this was /vhen it was little baby language, of course—I said, "Oh, this is just another one of ...Folksonomies: programming coding
Folksonomies: programming coding
Describing his first impressions of it as authoritarian and designed for not-so-good programmers.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Unverified Things We Believe
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we c...Folksonomies: science pseudo-science
Folksonomies: science pseudo-science
There are things we believe, such as pedagogical theories, that are far more damaging than new age ideas.