Tag: History


  • We built monuments to display our pride of winning or mourn our loss. They represent what we considered the great things about our society in the past as lessons for the present and future. In that light, defacing a historical marker such as both of Emmett Till’s shows the opposition that honoring the person is…

  • The tumult in Iran is huge news of late. As a Baha’i, news of the persecution of Baha’s in Iran has stepped up because of the Internet. Stories crossed the ocean through email. News agencies almost never picked up these stories. As fast as the Iran government could shut down CNN and NYT and BBC…

  • Little Changes

    Flipping channels, I ran across Deep Impact during a speech given by the president (played by Morgan Freeman). The black president didn’t amaze me. Hollywood figured out how to portray them a decade before the US figured out how to elect one. What amazed me is that with all the really cool forward looking technology…

  • Found an interesting comment on an article the state of Georgia observing the Confederate Memorial Day…. The truth of history means very little to those who are dead set against learning anything from it. No matter what the history books used in our public school system say, most will never believe anything other than their…

  • Read 10,000 pages of science, economics, health, history, or policy books. For 2008, it was read 25 books. This year, I thought to change it page-based as the previous one shied me away from larger books. Two 350 page books vs one 700 page book shouldn’t be a concern. See Reading for last and this years’…

  • Mashable has an interesting article about why Twitter persists despite frequent performance issues: “Less is more. Simplicity is power.” By providing little more than an API, upon which numerous others have built tools, it doesn’t so directly compete with other services. I wonder if perhaps this is the right approach for a learning system? One…

  • Chris Hambly is asking for thoughts and reflections on Blackboard. I deal with Blackboard nearly daily. We have one of the largest implementations of Vista. A choice to migrate to something else would affect around 180,000 people. So that choice will be very carefully maide. Of course, the longer we stay, the larger we grow…

  • An Even Better Reason to Celebrate has a nice longer version of this quote from a NYT OpEd piece on tomorrow being the bicentennial for the ablution of slave trade to the United States. WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of…

  • An Even Better Reason to Celebrate has a nice longer version of this quote from a NYT OpEd piece on tomorrow being the bicentennial for the ablution of slave trade to the United States. WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of…