Education

Technology In Education

My long-time (which is a better phrase than “old,” as in, “known since college”) friend Lynne Wainfan is trying to sell her children’s middle school on upgrading their technology. She made a video.

I don’t know about the New York Times comparison, though. Yeah, it may be more info than Jefferson got in his lifetime, but a lot of it’s probably wrong or misleading.

Also, it’s a little exaggerated–I don’t think that half (or even a tiny fraction) of basic physics knowledge and math will go obsolete in two years, and that’s what kids in technical majors in college spend most of their time learning. But the point remains that things are accelerating at a frightening pace, and the educational system is going to have to do things differently, or the future will be very scary. Of course, it may be anyway, for other reasons. But either way, it’s where we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives (yes, I know it’s trite, but it’s true).

Space History

The Myth Of The “Mercury 13”

Jim Oberg debunks it:

In late 1958, as NASA begin defining how to select astronauts, President Eisenhower directed that test pilots be the pool from which candidates were selected. The actual flight experience of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions in hindsight validated that standard. Because of the intimate integration of the pilot in the spacecraft

Space History

The Myth Of The “Mercury 13”

Jim Oberg debunks it:

In late 1958, as NASA begin defining how to select astronauts, President Eisenhower directed that test pilots be the pool from which candidates were selected. The actual flight experience of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions in hindsight validated that standard. Because of the intimate integration of the pilot in the spacecraft

Space History

The Myth Of The “Mercury 13”

Jim Oberg debunks it:

In late 1958, as NASA begin defining how to select astronauts, President Eisenhower directed that test pilots be the pool from which candidates were selected. The actual flight experience of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions in hindsight validated that standard. Because of the intimate integration of the pilot in the spacecraft

War Commentary

Stuck In The Past

Tarek Heggy bemoans the lack of scholarship among Islamic scholars:

I have been engaged in meetings with a number of scholars from the Vatican. I always bemoan and wonder why the Vatican abounds with men of religion with such splendid educational, intellectual and encyclopedic cognitive backgrounds in their various areas of knowledge, while our scholars know nothing about the great fruits of human creativity in many of the different branches of social and human sciences.

At a conference held seven years ago, I saw a scholar who is considered by some as the greatest Muslim jurist and preacher of his time. He was an Egyptian with Qatari nationality who fled from Egypt during the clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamāl Abd al-Nāsir in 1954. At the conference, he used more than one interpreter, and never got involved in discussions about modern streams of thought. On the other hand, the Vatican scholars were using four or five languages in their discussions that covered vast fields of knowledge. I will not hide the fact that I felt ashamed of him that day. He seemed so primitive in his thoughts and approaches. It appeared as if he was a primeval human from the forests of ‘ Borneo Island.’

We need a generation of Muslim religious scholars who have studied other religions, human history, world literature, philosophy, sociology and psychology and can speak a number of languages; the languages of civilization. Until this happens, our Muslim scholars will remain primitive and stay at their level of naivety, shallowness and isolation from the path of civilization and humanity.

But I guess that I shouldn’t point out things like this. It makes me (like Tarek) an Islamaphobe (see comments).

[Update at 9:30 AM EDT]

Christina Hoff Sommers has some thoughts on Muslim women, and the failure of western feminism to take up their cause. Makes perfect sense to me, though. They can’t blame the treatment of Muslim women on dead white European males. Or at least they haven’t come up with a way yet.

Administrative

Apologies To My Readers

I just discovered that Sitemeter has been putting tracking cookies for realmedia.com on my visitors’ machines. There may be some others as well.

I went in, cleared cookies, refreshed Transterrestrial, and the Realmedia cookies showed up again. I’m going to quit using Sitemeter, but I need to do a little research and figure out what to switch to for stats checking. In the meantime, you might want to block cookies from realmedia.com (and the others mentioned in the link, such as specificclick.net) if you don’t want them selling your browsing habits without your permission.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!