I didn’t know the World Almanac publishes a monthly newsletter. Cool.
Category: learning
Whose art is it? Interesting essay in Newsweek about museum acquisition and returning artworks to their countries of origin:
Why should objects from ancient civilizations go back to modern nations that didn’t exist when the art was created? Yes, the law “must be obeyed,” he said, but antiquities “are the patrimony of all mankind.” In other words, who really owns the past?
A medieval bestiary with some good links to old manuscript illustrations, engravings, woodcuts, etc.
Ira Glass, host of the NPR show This American Life, talks about storytelling in 4 short films.
“We ended up at one point lying on the snow, looking up at the sky and talking about the food chain and how the sun indirectly supplies energy for our bodies. It was pretty idyllic all around.” I love it. That’s the mix of blissful goofing off + learning that I loved when I was a kid. Playing, learning, creating, it’s all the same. I hope I’ll get to share that one day with kids of my own. Sledding, photosynthesis, snowball fight, maybe a little praxeology with the afternoon snack…
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids:
Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and studentsÄô Äúshorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.Äù DweckÄôs research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concernÄîthey are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrates this…
How to break in a new book. While McAuliflower had cookbooks in mind, this is also really helpful for speed reading when you want to minimize fussing with pages. [via not martha, again]
Comics with problems. A small collection of public service comics that deal with topics like AIDs, diabetes, drug abuse, etc.
Dalai Lama (dot) Emory (dot) edu. Awesome. The Dalai Lama is going to be a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University. He’ll be doing some lectures and stuff later on this year. This is kind of huge, so big thanks to all those at Emory who worked their ass off to make this happen. (thanks, Rebekah)
Exploring the question: Is philosophy progressive?
The playground of the future may feature “‘play workers’ to help guide fantasy play”Äìcuz kids need help with that sort of thing, apparently. Back in my day, we had to make it all up by ourselves (uphill, in the snow, etc). [via andrea harner]
What I Did On Martin Luther King Day
Last night I got to check out the opening of the Martin Luther King Papers exhibit at the Atlanta History Center. The places was pretty much packed, which was great to see. We arrived at around 1:30 in the afternoon, and our time-ticket wasn’t until 5:15!
Anyway, we came back after lunch. On display they had hundreds and hundreds of original documents from his life as well as some great photos by Flip Schulke and others. What really struck me, and what I really liked about the exhibit, was the focus on his intellectual biography.
Martin Luther King is occasionally reduced to a nice little rhetorical soundbite or posterboy for a specific political movement. That’s not inaccurate, per se, but incomplete. The exhibit showed a pretty impressive history of introspection and inquiry. There were original copies from dozens of his sermons, notes from his many speeches, books from his personal library with marginal annotations, his huge files of index cards for future reference. It makes you remember that he was not just a politico, but a thinker who wrestled with Big Ideas and tried to live them as well. There’s really too much to take in on one visit. At least bring some comfortable shoes to stand and read and read and read. So go check it out. It’s here in Atlanta until May, and a collection of this size probably won’t ever happen again.
I think Andrea Harner speaks for many of us on the GRE/ LSAT/ MCAT torture ride: “Took the diagnostic test on Saturday and am certain when the teacher passes back my test this Saturday she’ll be looking around the room for a retarded person to hand it to.”
We’re moving beyond the pie chart now: here’s a periodic table of visualization methods.
Richard Dawkins makes the scientific argument for keeping Saddam Hussein alive. “His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.” It’s an interesting thought. While there is a lot of good social science work analyzing tyranny, for the psychological angle “the sample size is small.”
An interview with Steven Johnson.
I came out of college in the late ’80s amid the science wars. Literary theorists were deconstructing the scientists, and scientists were making fun of the literary theorists. There was no realm where you’d come into a classroom and say, “This complexity theory might be useful in thinking about the kind of urban system Dickens is describing.” If you talked about science, it was entirely to show how it was Eurocentric or something.
I always felt like that was a total waste of time. There were obviously insights that both domains could productively share. A lot of what I’ve been trying to do since then is figure out what those connections could be, and figure out a way to work them into the books.
[via… Steven Johnson]
A couple additions to my growing series of links about understanding large-scale concepts. Here’s a timeline of evolution from the beginning of Life up to Now. The image of the timeline is 135 feet long, and homo sapiens showed up right at around last pixel. And via infosthetics, a video comparing the planets, the Sun, and a number of other stars.
The first five links in my scalar collection were about the scale of the atom, the Earth’s population, the stars in the sky, showing 570 million years in 1 hour, and visualizing enormous numbers. Oh, as a bonus there’s also the one I linked a while back where you can learn about existing in 10 dimensions.
I just learned about Open Culture yesterday. Their mission, as they describe it:
To explore the best of contemporary intellectual life.
To connect users with free, high-quality online media — podcasts, videos, online courses, etc. — that makes learning dynamic, convenient and fun.
To keep users apprised of new cultural developments and resources worth their limited time.
Looks like a lot of good brainy media there.
Mark Larson 
