I’ve been following Chris’ advice, and reading the judgement in the Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District case. It’s fantastic, and far funnier than it has a right to be. There’s something I need a hand with, though. Here’s the background, from the John Jones’ judgement:
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At nearly all our childhood tables, we were fed the following non sequitur: “eat your greens! there are children in Africa who are starving!”. In Africa, at least, the lesson is a little more accurate “eat up! there are children in India who are dying of hunger!”. In the gruesome arithmetic of famine-related deaths, there are indeed more in India than Africa. Which makes today’s news all the more chilling.
As ever, Wikipedia has the good stuff when it comes to breaking news about techie innovation. Machinima is the net’s newest fad (though by the time you read this, it will no doubt have been overtaken, and rendered obsolete, by several others). Still, if it produces thought-provoking representations, such as this one, of the recent Parisian uprisings, then it deserves a full and long life on the web.
It’s assessment time in the South African academy. To understand how the hard work of supervision, learning, teaching, writing, reading, research, administration, public service, peer support and review are all combined into an assessment of your net worth, you need two things: a system of logic, and a standardised calculus on which to apply it. The logic is summarised well by Jorge Borges in his discussion of mathematics on Tlön. Keep Reading »
The new English textbook for XI graders in Pakistan contains a meditation on leadership. The Pakistani Government’s National Book Foundation said the order of the first letters in each line was entirely coincidental. Read here. Another fine story from the Forum of Inqiliabi Leftists.
I’m reminded by Hogarth, writing in today’s South African Sunday Times that in the 1970s, when the CIA wanted to spread propaganda, they’d plant a story in the foreign press. The U.S. media would then pick it up, et voila! News. It worked well with the (as far as we know, utterly baseless) story that Cuban soldiers were raping women in Angola, which was picked up by the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post.
Here’s some follow up to last week’s Fucker Stole My Camera post. It’s a sorry story, involving a lot of very frustrating telephone calls. Lucky for you, dear reader, I made notes on every one, and wrote a transcript of a long exchange at a police station. I was wondering how to present this, but the direct transcripts themselves do ample justice to this tale of constabulary absurdism.
Got the camera back today, at attempt #5. It’s hard to imagine a den of officiousdom than Sydenham police station. Lots of tubby men with moustaches sitting at desks, backed up with their little police martial arts statuettes and models of armoured personnel carriers. (Actually, it was worse under apartheid. One of the Cape Town police stations had in it the sign “If we wanted your opinion, we’d have beaten it out of you.”)
It was an ordinary mugging. The bastard had a gun, a swagger, a gang and didn’t seem to want to me to take his photo when he was roughing someone up. So he came up to me and told me to hand over the camera. Timid as I am, and not wanting much further trouble, I handed it over. There were witnesses.
I’ve been meaning to update the blogroll and overall layout of this page for a very long time. It’s going to have to wait just that little bit longer, unfortunately, but in the meantime, have a butchers at Dionysus Stoned’s fine blog. Ignore the fact that, for no good reason, many of the posts claim to be vacant. DS is on a photo-posting binge at the moment, and he has found some hum dingers.
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