October 7, 2013
Rick Roderick (1949–2002) was an American professor of philosophy, best known for his lectures for The Teaching Company. Roderick was born in Abilene, Texas, son of (by his own description a ‘con-man’ and a ‘beautician.’
He taught at several universities, where he was much revered by many students for a Socratic style combined with a brash and often humorous approach. His breakthrough into wider circles came with his engagement with The Teaching Company where he recorded several memorable lecture series. Rick Roderick died in 2002 from a congestive heart condition.
Posted in Education, Philosophy |
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October 7, 2013
A foam hand, also known as a foam finger, is a sports paraphernalia item worn on the hand to show support for a particular team. The first such hand was originally created by sportsfan Steve Chmelar in 1971, who constructed it from hardware cloth and paper mache for the 1971 Iowa High School Athletic Association Boy’s State Basketball Finals.
In 1978, Geral Fauss created foam fingers to show support for the team at the high school where he taught, to raise funds for the industrial arts club, and as a project that his industrial arts class could produce themselves. His first prototype foam finger was actually made out of plywood and had a painting of a ‘number one’ done in the school’s colors. The success of the hand led Geral Fauss to venture into the sports merchandise business, by making hands to sell at the 1978 Cotton Bowl game, and later by founding Spirit Industries for the large scale manufacturing of foam fingers the following year.
Posted in Games, Humor |
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October 7, 2013
‘Under a Killing Moon‘ is the third installment in the ‘Tex Murphy’ series of graphic adventure games produced by Access Software in 1994. It was one of the largest video games of its era, arriving on four CD-ROMs (although some material was duplicated among the four to reduce the amount of swapping).
The game combined full motion video (FMV) cutscenes with an advanced 3D virtual world to explore. After its creators reacquired the rights to the series, it was re-released on ‘Good Old Games’ in 2009.
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October 4, 2013
George Grosz [grohs] (1893 – 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933.
According to art critic Robert Hughes: ‘In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art.’
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Posted in Art, Politics |
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October 3, 2013
Adrian Schoolcraft (b. 1976) was a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who secretly recorded police conversations from 2008 to 2009. He brought these tapes to NYPD investigators in October 2009 as evidence of corruption and wrongdoing within the department. He used the tapes as evidence that arrest quotas were leading to police abuses such as wrongful arrests, while the emphasis of fighting crime sometimes resulted in underreporting of crimes to keep the numbers down.
After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was reportedly harassed and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, a swat unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days. In 2010, he released the audio recordings to ‘The Village Voice,’ leading to the reporting of a multi-part series titled ‘The NYPD Tapes.’
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October 2, 2013
‘The Pentagon Wars‘ is a 1998 HBO film, directed by Richard Benjamin, based on a book of the same name (subtitled: ‘Reformers Challenge the Old Guard’) by Colonel James G. Burton, USAF (retired).
Starring Kelsey Grammer, Cary Elwes and Richard Schiff, the film is a dark comedy describing the development of the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
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Posted in Humor, Money, War |
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October 2, 2013
Feature creep (also known as ‘creeping featurism’ or ‘featuritis’) is the unchecked expansion or addition of new features in a product. Such features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design. The most common cause of feature creep is the desire to provide the consumer with a more useful or desirable product, in order to increase sales or distribution.
However, once the product reaches the point at which it does everything that it is designed to do, the manufacturer is left with the choice of adding unneeded functions, sometimes at the cost of efficiency, or sticking with the old version, at the cost of a perceived lack of improvement. Another major cause of feature creep might be a compromise from a committee which decides to implement multiple, different viewpoints in the same product. Then, as more features are added to support each viewpoint, it might be necessary to have cross-conversion features between the multiple viewpoints, further complicating the total features.
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Posted in Money, Technology |
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October 1, 2013
The Moller Skycar is a prototype personal VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft invented by Paul Moller who has been attempting to develop such vehicles for fifty years (with limited success).
The craft said to be currently under development, the M400, is purported to transport four people. It is described as a car since it is aimed at being a popular means of transport for anyone who can drive, incorporating automated flight controls, with the driver only inputting direction and speed required with a cruising speed of 305 mph. Continue reading →
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September 30, 2013
‘The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage’ is a book published in 2009 by Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. The book describes the concept of design thinking, and how companies can incorporate it into their organizational structure for long term innovation and results.
Martin introduces the ‘knowledge funnel’ as the process followed by leading businesses to innovate more consistently and successfully by eliminating mysteries and developing heuristics (shortcuts and workarounds) and eventually algorithms (forumas). The mystery stage comprises the exploration of the problem, this transitions to the rule of thumb (heuristic) stage, where a rule of thumb is generated to narrow work to a manageable size. In the algorithm stage the general heuristic is converted to a fixed formula, taking the problem from complexity to simplicity.
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September 30, 2013
Logical reasoning is the process of using evidence and reason to arrive at a conclusion. Broadly there are two main types of logical reasoning, deductive (general to specific) and inductive (specific to general).
In deduction, a general rule is applied to a particular case: ‘When it rains, things outside get wet. The grass is outside, therefore: when it rains, the grass gets wet.’ Mathematical logic and philosophical logic are commonly associated with this style of reasoning. Continue reading →
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September 29, 2013
Bridge and tunnel (B&T) is a pejorative term for people who travel to Manhattan Island from surrounding communities, a commute that requires passing over a bridge and/or through a tunnel. Though the term originates from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which services the five boroughs that comprise New York City, it has come to encompass all people who originate commute from outside of Manhattan, including the four other boroughs, Connecticut, Long Island, New Jersey, and northern counties, such as Orange, Rockland, and Westchester.
As the Oxford Dictionaries explains: a bridge-and-tunnel person is one who lives in the suburbs and is perceived as unsophisticated.
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September 29, 2013
Kwangmyong (lit. ‘Bright’) is a North Korean ‘walled garden’ national intranet opened in 2000. It may be accessed by web browsers, incorporates email services, news groups, and an internal web search engine. In North Korea, only a small number of government-authorized persons are allowed to use the global Internet, so Kwangmyong is the only computer network available to common people. It is a free service for public use.
Given that there is no direct connection to the outside Internet, unwanted information cannot enter the network. Information is filtered and processed by government agencies before being hosted on the North Korean Intranet. Cuba and Myanmar also use a similar network system that is separated from the rest of the Internet, and Iran has been reported as having future plans to implement such a network.
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