Friday, July 02, 2004

(Potentially relevant link)

Study of 'sexual misconduct' (everything from inappropriate jokes to rape) in US public schools. One of the sub-headlines on CNN.com is 'Abusers often males'. They then go on to say, 'Among those offenders, 57 percent are male and 43 percent are female.' That's right, 57% are male. OMG! Shocking! Clearly men must be much more prone to sexual misconduct than women.

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

This semester, Harvard is offering an anthropology course titled 'Humans, Aliens, and Future Home Worlds: An Anthropologist Looks at Science Fiction'. The course description: Science fiction is an entertaining, but also thought provoking, medium that examines attitudes, mores, ideals, and desires concerning culture and society. Through our analysis of largely American sci-fi novels, movies, and television series, we explore these major themes: exploration and contact with 'the alien'; earth invasions, interstellar battles, and other galactic military adventures; the culture and community of space travelers; robots, androids, and other near-humans; and the sci-fi fandom phenomenon.
Around 1988 (and as recently as 1997), Rutgers had a course titled 'the Philosophy of Science Fiction', as did the City College of New York. Course description: An analysis of some of the central questions of philosophy as they are represented in science fiction (and occasionally, science fact). Selections from science fiction works will range over topics such as space and time, infinity and eternity, identity, knowledge of other minds; artificial intelligence; moral dilemmas and technology; the meaning of life. (W) 3 hr./wk.; 3 cr.
Another school (Clemson, and perhaps others) had a 'History of the Future' course.
My anthropology-and-philosophy-doublemajor brother would've loved this. He took a Scifi English course once, but ECU doesn't have these cooler courses.
(Source)

Monday, January 26, 2004

One person on a site I use has 'assembled physics notes' for all high-school students 'despite being only thirteen'. Here's one nice gem:
What does E=MC^2 mean?

Energy=Matter traveling at the (speed of light Squared)

or even more simply.

if matter was to trasvel at the speed of light squared
which can be calculated like this
186000 Km/h * 186000 Km/h=34596000000 Km/h
it would turn into energy

Sunday, January 25, 2004

On one gaming site I'm on, someone made a small contest. He made a list of over 1,000 primes and offered a prize for the first to find the only non-prime on the list.
The first number on the list was one.

I've been teaching myself php. Simple, though sessions had me stymied for a bit. I think they're probably working fairly well now, but I haven't actually tested the code.
Yes indeedy, I have learnt nothing from ten years of coding. Surely it will work right off the bat?

In the old country, we had a saying: no news is good news. So every day, they would print a newspaper, and it would be completely blank. Except at the top it would say in big black letters, 'NO NEWS'.

Whenever I recall this quote, I think of Danial Pinkwater's Borgel, but it doesn't seem to be from that book. Perhaps the Chicken Man said it at one point? Someone please tell me! UPDATE in 2020: Turns out it's from The Big Kerplop by Bertrand R. Brinley.