Tag Archive for 'clash of civilisations'

Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics

After I finished writing this post, I realised how long it was, and also how much I have written previously about the re-emergence of religion in global politics. I don’t want to give the impression that this was my primary interest during high school. In fact, it placed a rather distant second to the physics of computation. But I cannot write about that right now, because every time I try to do so my mind freezes — that’s basically the reason I cannot complete my research proposal.

My career as a computer scientist should have ended the night my parents locked me out of the house in high school for doing research on the physics of computation. But it didn’t, and that is due almost entirely to the fact that I turned my attention to the topics discussed below in this post… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study

An experience that I think must be common to a lot of the children of authoritarian parents is to have their extracurricular interests disparaged, and to be told that anything that isn’t on the school curriculum is not worth studying. I know this is very common among Asian parents, and it’s just one more manifestation of the inherently anti-science attitude that is present in traditional Asian beliefs about raising children.

My parents’ rationale for attacking me for spending time studying subjects not on the school curriculum was, according to them, so that I would be more “focused in school”. This is just so wrong on so many levels… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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