Hapgood

We scoff at the ancestor worship of other cultures, and consider divine right and kingship and all that stuff to be anti-American. So can someone explain to me why we will endure any kind of nuttery if it is tied to something one of our Founding Fathers once said? Case in point — at the Continue reading

Just a short follow up to the last post — when we talk about efficiency or productivity in education, I know that eyes roll and someone usually starts composing a rant about how kids aren’t items on an assembly line and the point isn’t to push out twice as many in half the time. This Continue reading

I couldn’t get at the Chronicle article “College Administrations Are Too Bloated? Compared With What?” from home (no login here),  so I read the paper it looks like it may have been based on instead. It’s well worth a look — it articulates what I think many of us knew but could not express — Continue reading

Please discard from your pitch: Tom Friedman world-is-flatism Kurzweilian Singularities Prenskyan Digital Nativism Dot-commer “Marginal cost of zero” talk And please replace it all with this simple observation by Tom Hoffman: I don’t understand why “computers can make it easier to do the difficult, sophisticated things we’ve been trying to do for years” is a Continue reading

There’s a great post over at Zeroday — a project to have a mob of us ask, politely, via twitter, what the artists cited in the Sony v. Tenebaum decision think of it. In other words, there are 17 bands or so Joel Tenenbaum was cited for downloading. The plan is to get a comment Continue reading

“Teens don’t tweet” is trending on twitter right now, I imagine in response to this Nielsen report. My thought on this is that there are an awful lot of activities that are useful to adults but not to teens, and vice versa. If we’d get over the insane notion that the cultural wave we are Continue reading

As many of you know, my dad, Art Caulfield, died two weeks ago, at the age of 66, from anaplastic thyroid cancer. In a way it was due to a long illness — the anaplastic form of this cancer was new, but he had battled thyroid cancer before, both in his 30s and about eight Continue reading

Leigh Blackall’s recent post is well worth a read, but a tangential matter in it struck me. It references the 2004 video EPIC 2014. It’s a video that has been floating around for four years or so, and is still shown, I believe, at gatherings of newspaper people when they get the vapors, as a Continue reading

It seems really impolite to disagree with someone on the source of their own fame, and more than a little presumptuous. Probably a bit foolish as well. But the recent story in the Chronicle can’t be allowed to go unanswered. The story so far: in Chris Anderson’s Free, there is a pull–out box which says Continue reading