Here’s what’s going on in Syria and why America should not intervene
Here’s what’s going on in Syria and why America should not intervene
Interesting.
This is actually really interesting.
Project Loon by Google
Build your own Lego microscope
LegoScope is a DIY microscope made out of legos, lenses and a few custom-made pieces. The UCSF grad students behind the project spoke with Synapse about the ways in which LegoScope can demystify microscopy and science education:How can LegoScope help students learn?
Reid Williams: It’s not what you’re teaching, but how are you teaching. What’s really interesting for us, and what we’ve heard from teachers, is that there’s an advantage in a very hands-on, process-oriented fashion. The underlying need that we’re working towards is learning something by putting together a tool rather than watching someone lecture.
If you are teaching the fifth to eighth grades, LegoScope can help incorporate a more intuitive feel for optics, or just for building and systems-thinking in general. Students would take away more than microscopy and optics, but also the more intangible aspects, like an intuitive understanding of how light behaves. It can be a very powerful exercise.
Harrison Liu: A microscope is seen almost like a “black box,” yet we can take it apart and see how it works with LegoScope. When you build something, then you can take ownership of it, you really learn it well. You have to learn what each part does. It’s different from normal teaching.
(via scinerds)
Just a reminder that Maurice Sendak was incredible. He’s also today’s google doodle.
(via apsies)
All of the evidence found in this timeline can also be found in the Summary of Evidence we submitted to the court in Jewel v. NSA. It is intended to recall all the credible accounts and information of the NSA’s domestic spying program found in the media, congressional testimony, books, and court actions.
A complete timeline of NSA surveillance in the United States
Edward Snowden
NSA Whistleblower, hero, citizen, human.
Talking Funny feat. Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Jervais, Chris Rock and Louis C.K.
I don’t have anything to hide. I’m a normal guy: work, sleep, shenanigans, work and back to the cycle all over again. That’s me everyday.
But I do like my privacy. I don’t like my niece’s pictures to be saved on a server somewhere just because I commented ‘boom’ on one of her pictures. I don’t like the government keep track of how many anti-drone status updates I made, neither how many times I post a quote by what would be considered a subversive figure, nor a phone call with my friend in Florida- both of us lighting up alarm bells because our last names are Mohammad.
I don’t like people spying on me. I especially don’t like people spying on me when I have done nothing wrong, waiting for the slightest hint of submission before they warrant my records to pour through my digital life on the basis of some flimsy suspicion.
What I don’t like at all is companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google etc. that make money off my time spent on their sites, that advertise to me constantly, that inundate me with updates and features and all sorts of stuff to make me dumber by the day, sharing my electronic records with a third party.
I don’t like that a foreign government, one that I have never paid a single cent of taxes to, whose land I have barely ever stepped on, whose institutions I have never tangled with, and which I have never given any reason to cause concern, spies on me because it considers the rights of its citizens of higher value than mine.
It is of no solace to me that America is spying on foreigners only. I am one of those foreigners, and I am pissed.
I don’t like being spied on. I don’t like being tracked. I don’t like being told that its ok, when everything that I have been told since the time I was born states that its not ok.
Where is America’s respect for everyone else’s human rights? Perhaps if for the past 50 years America had kept out of everyone else’s business and not been an imperialist pain in the ass, perhaps then no one would be attaching it today, and perhaps then it would not have to adopt an even more pervasive form of imperialism by spying not on nations, or movements, or institutions, but average run-of-the-mill people- people like you and I.
I don’t like waking up one morning to learn that for the past 4 years my rights have been violated day and night. And that this violation has occurred with the agreement of companies who I give business to.
Suddenly, the internet is a very dangerous place to hang out, not just for criminals, not just for child pornographers or those planning insidious acts of terror or otherwise, but also for normal people like you and I. I don’t like that either.
This is A Call To Action
by students at the University of Werstern Ontario
Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, recently argued in the New York Times that we ought not to claim that literature improves us as people, because there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy” or other great books.
Actually, there is such evidence. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. This link persisted even after the researchers factored in the possibility that more empathetic individuals might choose to read more novels. A 2010 study by Mar found a similar result in young children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their “theory of mind,” or mental model of other people’s intentions.
(Source: azspot)
