Love that kid…

All from the last week…

Honda data breach sees 2 million car registrations and addresses exposed

Mozilla admits to possible leak of user information

Hackers strike Gawker Media, leaking user accounts, passwords

Your Apps are Watching You: WSJ

Delete older Facebook Apps — or risk everyone’s privacy

Gadgets bring new opportunities for hackers

We live in a fascinating transitory period, folks.

Just remember, don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters (and passwords).

And kill your Facebook account while you’re at it and start blogging again. You’ll thank me later.

I could do this all day…

OMG LASER GUNS PEW PEW PEW

Yet another reason I’m fortunate to be a learner and teacher in 2010 when these sorts of amazing resources are coming online for the betterment of humanity and the cosmos…

About — The Plant List: “The Plant List is a working list of all known plant species. Version 1, released in December 2010, aims to be comprehensive for species of Vascular plant (flowering plants, conifers, ferns and their allies) and of Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts). It does not include algae or fungi. Version 1 contains 1,244,871 million scientific plant names of which 298,900 are accepted species names. It includes no vernacular or common plant names.”

I hope this takes off. What a great resource.

Take that, Nicholas Carr.

This reminds me of how the @ and # signs got incorporated into the infrastructure of Twitter after users realized the need for such things and took it upon themselves to make the characters into community symbols of import…

What the SOS Distress Signal Stands For: “This signal [SOS] was adopted simply on account of its easy radiation and its unmistakable character.  There is no special significance in the letters themselves…”

It’s always funny to hear someone say “Hi, I’m @bobjones.” in public conversation. I wonder when that leap will become socially acceptable (beyond social media conferences)?

Indeed…

Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die | Magazine: “So the topsoil we’re coated in needs to wash away for a while. I want my daughter to have a 1987 the way I did and experience the otaku thrill. While everyone else is grooving on the latest Jay-Z, 5 Gallons of Diesel, I’d like her to share a secret look with a friend, both of them hip to the fact that, from Germany, there’s a bootleg MP3 of a group called Dr. Cali-gory, pioneers of superviolent line-dancing music. And I want her to enjoy that secret look for a little while before Dr. Cali-gory’s songs get used in commercials for cruise lines.”

I’d hate to be the nerdy kid I was in 1990 in 2010.

I banned pencils from my classroom this year…

Electrifying Language » American Scientist: “Putting this bill of indictment in perspective, Baron points out that just about every other new writing instrument has also been seen as a threat to literacy and a corrupter of youth. The eraser had a particularly bad reputation, under the thesis that ‘if the technology makes error correction easy, students will make more errors.’ “

For different reasons, but a good retrospective on writing technologies.

I have to keep reminding myself that we tilted at 23° 26′ away from our star last week (here in the northern hemisphere at least) and our tiny ball of iron and nickel and hydrocarbons is slowly tilting back towards sol.

“Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right…”

It is always a pleasure when an article written for a popular audience (granted, the target audience of the New Yorker is fairly specific and homogeneous) gives you pause on a subject you thought you knew so much about…

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels : The New Yorker: “The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once.”

After four years of undergrad studies focusing on the “Early Jesus Movement,” two years at Yale studying art and archaeology surrounding the Jesus Movement, a year at University of South Carolina studying apocalypse literature and three years at Gardner-Webb University studying theology for a Divinity Degree, I still found pieces of this to be truly enlightening.

Go read.

I just wish my friend Dan Goodman was around to give me a smirk and say “well…” before launching into a balloon busting take on the article. At least I still have Thomas for that… both the person and that gospel.

And as Thomas frequently reminds me, there’s just something about the number 42.

Be passersby indeed.

Sounds like an iPhone/iPad to me…

The New Teachers by Isaac Asimov: “Each person (child, adult, or elderly) can have his own private outlet to which could be attached, at certain desirable periods of time, his or her personal teaching machine. It would be a far more versatile and interactive teaching machine than anything we could put together now, for computer technology will also have advanced in the interval.”

And then:

All teaching machines would be plugged into this planetary library and each could then have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video cassette encoded there. If the machine has it, the student would have it too, either placed directly on a viewing screen, or reproduced in print-on-paper for more leisurely study.

But what about my noble profession of (human) teachers? Asimov makes room for us too:

Of course, human teachers will not be totally eliminated. In some subjects, human interaction is essential–athletics, drama public speaking, and so on. There is also value, and interest, in groups of students working in a particular field–getting together to discuss and speculate with each other and with human experts, sparking each other to new insights.

I actually prefer Asimov’s vision for us (human) teachers compared to the current state of institutional education here in the U.S.

In reality, we’re almost there. We now have incredible “pocket” computers (iPhones and iPads) that have access to a great deal of humanity’s recorded history. Surely a young person, or an old person like myself, could spend their life learning from/with these machines.

The part of Asimov’s vision that hasn’t transpired, and will face a pretty ugly but eventual and already-determined battle, is the human teacher component. Eventually, perhaps in the next decade, that will change for some learning institutions and learners who opt-out of the one-size-fits-all education in a box formula that has so miserably failed our country.