everything is an experiment
This post will not mean very much to anyone other than myself.
Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung 「楊國偉」 and Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu 「余玉蘭」 are child abusers. I just wanted to post this fact on the Internet so that it can be recorded for posterity… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
No related posts.
This post was inspired by the post from two days ago on the flags of the world.
I’ve always considered Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1935 decree requesting that the country formerly known as Persia be referred to as “Iran” by foreign governments with which it had diplomatic relations to be a mistake. Naturally, once governments began to refer to the country as Iran, their citizens followed suit. This change at once led to a severing in the Western consciousness of Iran from the Persian culture of classical antiquity, and also created a situation in which the name of the country can easily become confounded with that of its neighbour and recurrent rival, Iraq, a name which entered the mainstream vocabulary of Western languages only in 1932 with the founding of the Kingdom of Iraq in that year.
Actually, in Arabic and Persian, the names Iraq and Iran sound quite different, and they are not very similar to each other when written in the Perso-Arabic script… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
This post was inspired by the paragraph about the former flag of Hong Kong in yesterday’s post on the flags of the world.
Hong Kong island was actually ceded in perpetuity by the government of Qing China to the British crown in 1842 in the Treaty of Nanking… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
Two random events inspired me to write this post. The first is that Toby Cubitt gave a talk at IQC recently. (I didn’t attend the talk, but I did receive the announcement.) The second is that I chanced upon the book Quirkology by psychologist Richard Wiseman. (Another influence for this post is the fact that job hunting is clearly still on my mind.)
In high school, a friend and I had noticed that several of the people we had to learn about in class had names which were oddly apropos of the accomplishments for which they were famous, and so we started to compile a list. At the head of the list was Robert Boyle, who studied the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Another name on the list was Alexander Graham Bell. (”You rang?”)… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
Since I have dropped out of university, I am looking for work, or, to use a common expression, “hunting for a job”.
I find the expression humorous — for me, it conjures up the image of a certain bulbous cartoon huntsman on the trail of a wise-cracking, carrot-munching leporid. But I hope that the outcome is more favourable for me than is usually the case for our animated friend… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
A large part of the reason I have put my autobiography online is to help students with authoritarian parents cope with their parents’ interference in their education. Previously, a person whose parents disagreed with his or her educational or career choices had the option of trying to hide them from their parents. With the Internet, this has become essentially impossible.
Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
I have written an essay advocating the adoption of open notebook science by the computer science community. The essay is self-referential in that it discusses the process of collaboratively writing papers online, and is itself written using MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. I invite suggestions and comments on the discussion page for the essay.
I have tried to keep the essay as impersonal as possible. The benefits given in the essay of keeping an open notebook apply to any scientist, but I especially have some very personal reasons, if not for advocating the practice, then at least for engaging in it myself… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
I was searching/browsing through the online archives of Scientific American while writing the previous posts, and came across some articles about raising gifted children that I thought I’d comment on, especially with respect to their relevance to my personal situation.
The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:
Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.
I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
I recently came across this list of “Thirteen Abusive Behaviours”. While the list was about abuse between domestic partners, most of the thirteen abusive behaviours apply to abusive parent-child relationships as well.
I will list them and comment on each one in turn… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
I was actually very disappointed with what officially passed for “interfaith dialogue” at the university. I believe very strongly that one of the roles, if not the primary role, of a university education is to teach critical thinking skills and to inculcate the habit of subjecting truth-claims to skeptical scrutiny. But I observed all sorts of ostensibly university-educated people making claims which, I think, they quite frankly ought to have been embarrassed about; they were either flat-out self-contradictory or obviously wrong, or could have easily been verified to be so by a quick trip to the library.
I set out to unofficially rectify this situation by engaging in conversations with a lot of people of various religions… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
page hits