tingilinde

battery tenders

Battery-electric train conversions?  Perhaps they'll make sense in the near future.

 

 

on teaching and trust

Historian David  Blight on putting trust in teachers.

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If Republican politicians and the parents they have disingenuously inflamed need a target for their fears, let them blame the American historians, like me, who spend months of their lives helping teachers build better bases of knowledge about real history. The finest historians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—far too many to name—have been teaching teachers in classrooms and on field trips bursting with knowledge, sizzling conversations, astonishing documents, and most of all, a hard-earned, even joyous mutual trust.

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an alternate acronym

DART   Dinosaurs Achieve Revenge Tardily 

(well.. if tardily was a word)

 

kids and the internet

A cautionary video from The New York Times. 

 

the snowiest us cities

over about thirty years.

 

 

the self-driving bike

About five years ago Google made an April Fool's piece on a self driving bike.  The next day they posted a video on how it was done.  

 

on mazes

One of those curious New Yorker pieces.

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Fisher didn’t yet have official stationery, or even a typewriter, so he submitted his proposal as a handwritten letter. His design was circular: a brick path, set in a lawn, that formed seven concentric rings winding toward a sundial in the center. At first glance, it seemed to replicate the traditional Christian pavement labyrinth, the most famous example of which is found in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. Medieval labyrinths of this kind aren’t puzzles; there is only a single path, arranged in a snaking pattern of concentric folds, and to process along it to the center is to participate in a physical allegory of the soul’s progress through life and toward salvation. But at Greys Court a maze walker—or aspirant, to use the technical term—encounters a junction within seconds and has to make a choice. Fisher cunningly combined the appearance of the old Christian labyrinth with the function of the puzzle maze, whose solution, taking its cue from Runcie’s metaphor, involves turning away from the center initially, to journey around the entire periphery.

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the epidemiology of misinformation

Philip Ball from over a year and a half ago.

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The biggest mistake would be to imagine that there are simply a few malicious or ignorant agents concocting lies or fantasies and feeding them to the unsuspecting public. Political scientists Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University in South Carolina have traced the idea of a Chinese bioweapon to a message from an anonymous conservative American woman. But it seems that this “theory,” like many others, was received by the Russian state disinformation apparatus, repackaged and fed back into the ecosystem. “Foreign actors aren’t the biggest danger,” Linvill and Warren wrote in the Washington Post. “We Americans are.”

Mis- as distinct from dis-information arises spontaneously and propagates in an information ecosystem where sources and channels of transmission are hard to identify and almost impossible to suppress. Yes, the ecosystem contains lonely trolls and bored conspiracy theorists on laptops in their bedrooms, as well as organised alt-right extremists and anti-vaxxers selling merchandise, and Elon Musk parading bizarre Silicon Valley fantasies. But it also embraces Mumsnet and the local school parents association. It is all of us, retweeting comments and links that pique our interest and flatter our preconceptions and prejudices without bothering to check them out.

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is watching the 1984 ghostbusters killing people?

A lesson from a statistician.

 

 

an amazing ceo

David Epstein on Francess Hesselbein.

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I’m kind of in love with a 106-year-old.

The sort of friend-love in which being around her makes me want to be better and do better things. As I’ll explain below, her influence recently led me to join the board of an early childhood care and education center. But first: please meet Frances Hesselbein, who turned 106 earlier this month, (and who still goes into the office in Manhattan to run the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute).

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