The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: personal

Stuff about me (Bernard HP Gilroy), instead of or in addition to stuff about education.

  • Days of miracle and wonder, indeed

    For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song).  In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030.  Although they are expected to construct a likely technological path from today’s state-of-the-art to that future product, they aren’t expected to actually build their device because, after all, it’s supposed to be 20 years away.

    In one of the early years, a team chose as its device a free-standing holographic display a la the chess scene on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.  They presumed it would involve some sort of fast-spinning mirror.

    Today, I came across this — a SIGGRAPH paper and video demonstrating a free-standing three-dimensional display utilizing a fast-spinning mirror.  It’s about 20 years early.

    I guess I have to revise my project rubric.  😛

  • I might just be succumbing to the lure of reliving my misspent youth…

    … but this looks awesome.

  • Seconded…

    This piece from the Atlantic captures my feeling pretty close to exactly, re: the recent Rand Paul flap on the Civil Rights Act and his alleged “courage”.  In particular, the conclusion:

    Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that he would have had the “courage to march with Martin Luther King.” This is a common strain of courage. It chiefly shines through in men born 50 years too late. Presently among the crowd, they are distinguished at that decisive moment when queried about wars they won’t have to fight, in times they will never live. These men populate our history books. They are all on the wrong side.

    Devastating.

  • Too true…

    This captures my experience grading entirely…

    PhD comics:

    2010_0521_grading rubric

  • Brilliant remix of the Dark Knight Trailer…

    … using footage from — amazingly! — the Toy Story franchise!

    via Ezra Klein

  • Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.

  • Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook.  It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense.  These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over on privacy, so I treat it like a big virtual billboard+skywriting.

  • Deep pondering

    Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)?  Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being the “party of fiscal responsibility” (in that the RNC apparently can’t say how such an egregious expenditure slipped past their checks)?

    One for the ages, I suppose.  But I suspect the media will drop the story after today (to the limited extent they carried it at all), because it’s the RNC and not the DNC…

  • Republican Party to disband, according to RNC Chair Michael Steele

    I mean, what else might he have meant when he said:

    We will not hand our children a poorer, weaker America than the one we inherited.

    After eight years of surplus-to-deficit magic, unfunded giveaways, two wars (one of which was of choice), and a demolished financial system, followed by a year marshaling the troops to say No to every attempt to recover from the damage inflicted by those eight years, the best contribution the Republicans could make to America’s greatness would be to go away…

  • My favorite internet spirits

    The coolest Muppets ever.