'commonplaces' Category
Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a [...]Christmas Greeting
We’ve got a house full of family from out of town, and in. Good times. It’s dark, but not too cold to get out and play. Sun comes up around 11:00 and dips out of sight a little before 3:00. Lots of time for sleeping and talking, punctuated by bursts of outdoor activity. We all [...]
Why we are here
Ms. Whatsit reflects on an “aimless shameless walkabout” wondering where her blog fits in the larger context and whether she is “doing it right.” I responded that we should celebrate puposeless blogging, and in that spirit I have something more to say.
From James Farmer’s link to Fray: The Quarterly of True Stories, I found a [...]Tumblr
Tom Hoffman shared this post about tumblr 3.0 the other day. The review of the feature set it offers was enticing enough to get me to set up an account.
It was actually so simple that I had a new blog running before I realized it. I haven’t taken advantage of all the features yet. [...]Iterations Toward Irrelevance
Wondering about how we lose touch with what everyone else seems to be talking about. At some point I stopped caring about popular music, for example. I listen to it on the radio now when the kids are in the car. But I don’t care about it like they do. I stopped paying attention to [...]
The Big Picture
From the Earth Observatory News Room:
The Arctic Ocean’s shift from perennial to seasonal ice is preconditioning the sea ice cover there for more efficient melting and further ice reductions each summer. The shift to seasonal ice decreases the reflectivity of Earth’s surface and allows more solar energy to be absorbed in the ice-ocean system.
The Earth [...]
Homework for Pirates
Yesterday one of my students had some gold coins with mysterious markings on them, and I asked him where they came from. I don’t know, he said. I told him they looked like something you’d find in a pirate’s chest.
He said, “I have a shirt that says, ‘Pirates took my homework’. And that’s kind of [...]Setting the Dial on Rationality
Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story [...]
Protecting Child Genius
Dennis Kucinich:
The government has a major responsibility. After all, an educated populous is core, central to democracy. Charlie, as you walk up the stairs of the Capitol on your way into the House of Representatives, way over the top of that entrance to the House is a statue of a woman whose arm is outstretched, [...]My Sicko Turn
I saw Sicko mostly because of this article:
… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete [...]
