"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A website by Shanta Rohse on learning, technology and design

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Field Notes

140 Characters Or Less →

On Twitter, character limits, meaning-making, and doing what we have always done. more →
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In the Ants’ Footsteps →

For those who rarely give ants a sec­ond thought, Tim Flan­nery offers imme­di­ate rel­e­vance for any­one inter­ested in the trends now shap­ing our own soci­eties. In his book review of Super­or­gan­ism, he points to the strik­ing par­al­lels between the progress of human evo­lu­tion and the progress of ants some ten mil­lion years earlier:

Begin­ning as sim­ple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cat­tle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of for­eign ants … leav­ing the upbring­ing of their young to oth­ers, and there are even ants that have dis­cov­ered agri­cul­ture .… One can hardly help but admire the intel­li­gence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intel­li­gence of a very par­tic­u­lar kind. Noth­ing in the brain of a worker ant rep­re­sents a blue­print of the social order,Holl­dobler and Wil­son tell us, and there is no over­seer or brain caste that car­ries such a mas­ter plan in its head. Instead, the ants have dis­cov­ered how to cre­ate strength from weak­ness, by pool­ing their indi­vid­u­ally lim­ited capac­i­ties into a col­lec­tive decision-making sys­tem that bears an uncanny resem­blance to our own demo­c­ra­tic processes.

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How To Save New Brain Cells →

There may be some neu­ro­log­i­cal truth to those claims that mem­o­riz­ing lists or daily Sudoku encour­ages men­tal lim­ber­ness. Even more impor­tantly, the results lend some sup­port that peo­ple in early stages of Alzheimers dis­ease may slow their cog­ni­tive decline by keep­ing their minds actively engaged. Tracey J. Shors maps some of the promis­ing ter­ri­tory that con­nects learn­ing, mem­ory and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis (the process by which new neu­rons are generated).

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Just How Slow is Your Perception? →

We are always liv­ing nearly one-half sec­ond in the past. Now, it isn’t sur­pris­ing that there is some delay between an event and our becom­ing aware of it. This is the nor­mal unfold­ing of cause and effect. And this might not be a con­cern if we were just pas­sive spec­ta­tors, watch­ing the world unfold before us like a film. But given that we must also respond to events, neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man won­ders, will you per­ceive the event that kills you?

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The Gospel According the Darwin →

Today marks the 200th birth­day of Charles Dar­win. If evo­lu­tion is the true story of why we all exist, then why is there any doubt to its verac­ity? Richard Dawkins tack­les the “evo­lu­tion is just a the­ory” nar­ra­tive, which implies evo­lu­tion is merely an unfal­si­fied sci­en­tific hypoth­e­sis, with this prac­ti­cal def­i­n­i­tion of truth:

Evo­lu­tion is true in what­ever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the South­ern Hemi­sphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we con­duct our day-to-day con­ver­sa­tions? Or fill in a cen­sus form: “What is your sex?” “The hypoth­e­sis that I am male has not so far been fal­si­fied, but let me just check again”. As Dou­glas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well. Yet the phi­los­o­phy that imposes such scru­ples on sci­ence has no basis for absolv­ing every­day facts from the same cir­cum­lo­cu­tion. It is in this sense that evo­lu­tion is true – pro­vided, of course, that the sci­en­tific evi­dence for it is strong. It is very strong.

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Dress Up Your Blog for Darwin Day
Tech Notes

Dress Up Your Blog for Darwin Day →

Or any day for that matter. How to post special logos for special days with a little (very little) PHP. more →
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Book Notes

Gladwell’s Secrets of Success →

The secret to genius is nurture, not nature. It's a nice theory but . . . more →
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Book Notes

Subverting Our Reverence for Books →

We live in a culture that holds books sacred. Pierre Bayard puts it into perspective. more →
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Book Notes

The Amateur Gourmet: On Learning the Basics →

Do you want to become a better teacher or learner? First, try making a batch of tomato sauce. more →
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The Cost of Fearing Strangers →

So which would scare you more: an Amer­i­can Mus­lim fam­ily you knew noth­ing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would prob­a­bly get this wrong; most of us are ter­ri­ble at risk assess­ment. Stephen J. Dub­ner on why the things we fear the most are sim­ply irra­tional:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger ques­tion than I can answer here (not that I’m capa­ble any­way), but it prob­a­bly has to do with the heuris­tics — the short­cut guesses — our brains use to solve prob­lems, and the fact that these heuris­tics rely on the infor­ma­tion already stored in our mem­o­ries.
And what gets stored away? Anom­alies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dra­matic, so unpre­dictable, and per­haps world-changing, that they imprint them­selves on our mem­o­ries and con us into think­ing of them as typ­i­cal, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extra­or­di­nar­ily rare.

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