Sam Harrelson

The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan Hamilton, one of the great innovators in Victorian algebra. Hamilton decided that manipulations of numbers like adding and subtracting should be thought of as steps in what he called “pure time.” This was a Kantian notion that had more to do with sequence than with real time, and it seems to have captivated Dodgson. In the title of Chapter 7, “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time.

Have to show this to my 8th graders currently taking Algebra...

Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out.

I love that he calculates the G's using a Nexus One.

Yay Science.

The person of more classical disposition does not believe this. On the contrary, he believes that there are some things that are much better not expressed at all. He counterbalances his belief in the value of freedom of opinion with that in the value of freedom from opinion. He believes that rage will not decrease with its habitual expression, but rather increase with it.

Here is a thoughtful piece on why blog commenting (and internet immediacy especially in the age of the "live web") might not be the best course of action for human response.

After all, we are an animal that has survived millennia because of our ability to soak up facts, details and information before making a response. There's something to be learned from our past steps.