A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question: As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course.… Continue reading Ethics in Science Fiction
Category: Books
Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it… Continue reading Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science… Continue reading Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it’s a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton’s “Great Discoveries” series (which inexplicably lacks a web page– get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing… Continue reading A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here’s an opportunity to prove it… A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute,… Continue reading Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Books, Books, Books
Via Tom, a big long list of books with which to showcase either my broad cultural background or pathetic cultural ignorance. As Tom’s original source notes, the claim that most Americans have only read six of these is kind of hard to credit, given that I was assigned more than six of them by the… Continue reading Books, Books, Books
Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]
Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly… Continue reading Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]
Saying “Sheet Head” Is Uncool
Tobias Buckell brought the whole sordid racist rejection letter episode to my attention a couple of days ago. This has apparently decided to become the “Violet Blue” episode for this week, and today, Toby dredges through the sewers of the Asimov’s forums to find a few real gems of sexist and racist filth. I hadn’t… Continue reading Saying “Sheet Head” Is Uncool
Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I’ve been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, I… Continue reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
Free Books!
Kate and I are giving away books. Not all of them, mind, and they’re not totally free– you need to pay shipping– but a couple hundred duplicate/ disliked/ never-going-to-get-read books are being discarded. If you would like any of them, there are simple instructions on Kate’s LiveJournal. Don’t worry that this will leave us bereft,… Continue reading Free Books!