The dreaded words of “emergent phenomena” were uttered today in class. Yes, I know that I (and kleinschmidt, sort of) have been beating the subject to death for the past couple of months. Alas, since it’s the first day of the semester I was still awake enough to notice when the professor (i.e. biology-rockstar/Discovery channel (More…)
High Dynamic Range photography, or HDR, is a technique of digitally combining several different exposures of the same scene to increase the color contrast of a photo, sometimes to very realistic, or indeed, surrealistic effect. Here are some choice examples taken by photographer Trey Ratcliff on his blog at Stuck in Customs. (His flickr page (More…)
Well, looks like both boingboing and kleinschmidt beat me to this critique in the NYTimes of Apple’s use of DRM in iTunes, but just thought I’d add a link to this in the Straight Dope on the Fair Use clause, that ubiquitous piece of copyright legislation that some of my friends swear justifies their peddling (More…)
[John Dewey's elementary school] incorporated into the practical business of making lunch: arithmetic (weighing and measuring ingredients, with instruments the children made themselves), chemistry and physics (observing the process of combustion), biology (diet and digestion), geography (exploring the natural environments of the plants and animals), and so on. Cooking became the basis for most of (More…)
Saw I, Robot today. I’ve already read the generally negative reviews, but what the hell, films like these could be entertaining sometimes. Besides, it ended up jogging my thoughts (nothing else to think about while watching it) on a few themes in my posts lately, not the least of which may involve mind-body dualism, bioethics, (More…)