2008 May « Primitive root mod p

Weapons of Mass Distraction 25 May, 2008

Filed under: /dev/random — Nikolas Karalis @ 3:02 pm

The last few days a huge stupid-storming called Eurovision (lame music contest) stormed over Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily let the TV suck their brains…

This is my tribute to them…

… So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads…

From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, by Clay Shirky.

Doors in the Wall 5 May, 2008

Filed under: /dev/random — Nikolas Karalis @ 4:13 pm

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

…

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore
fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed
adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity,
their own or anyone else’s.

…

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

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Greek Summer Schools and Seminars 4 May, 2008

Filed under: Science — Nikolas Karalis @ 8:31 pm

Last Edited : 26 June 2008

Here is a list of the summer schools organized in Greece this summer and a few interesting seminars in the next months. As you can see, this is a (scientifically) hot summer in Greece!