Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 110 of 147)

100 years of Einstein

“2005 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein’s three great scientific papers on relativity, light and matter.

Have you read them? Did you understand them?

If not, you are not alone. When asked who is or was the most famous scientist of all time, many people mention Albert Einstein. However, few people know what he did that made him so famous or realize what a great impact his ideas continue to have on our 21st-century lives. ”

The Chapel Hill Public Library (disclosure I am on the Board of Trustees) is presenting a series of talks by Dr. Henry Greenside of Duke the first of which was this afternoon. Dr. Greenside explains the Einsteinian concepts found in his 1905 papers so that most anyone can understand what wonderful surprising and important discoveries and suggestions they were and how they continue to influence our thinking and understanding.

Beginning with today’s talk on “Einstein’s Relativity Theories and What is E=mc2 All About?” (he spent most of the talk on the special theory rather than the general theory today) and following with two other talks. Sunday, Oct. 9 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and the Photon Concept and Sunday, Oct. 23 (3:00-4:30 pm): Einstein and Atoms.

Sally, Tucker and I were there and took in the talk to our various capacities. Sally caught the talk and a following experiment with bending an electron stream using magnets with her digital camera. [photo 1] [photo 2] [photo 3] [photo 4] [photo 5]

Tucker is looking forward to next week’s talk about the properties of light and the dual nature of the photon. So am I.

Even More Facebook Follow-up

Fred has additional FaceBook observations, with measures to back them, on the ibiblog. This is a very lengthy and wise follow up on Freshman behavior in regards to privacy and disclosure.

One interesting fact that Fred points out: Of nearly 400 personal websites reported “Not one freshman reports using his or her UNC provided webspace.”

As I say in a comment there:

Just observing my students, I notice that reliance on UNC services such as mail and webspace has declined and in many cases vanished entirely.

We require that students have an ONYEN and that they recieve mail at a unc.edu address, but more often than not the unc.edu address is a forward to an account (yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc) that the student has had since high school or earlier.

Similarly, students with web space take advantage of a service that they have had before coming to UNC and expect to have after leaving UNC.

Why? In part because the Only Name You’ll Ever Need (ONYEN) is only temporary. It vanishes when you leave UNC and with it your email and website — and without forwarding of either.

Students — and other users — see their websites and email as more of less permanent (”I want my friends to find me” etc) and the UNC solution as transient.

[end of comment on ibiblog]

The virtual communites of UNC students are mostly privately managed by free email services, web hosting services, blogging services and photo services — as well as, and I don’t recall if Fred has measured this, Instant Messaging services. Of these services, UNC offers only email and limited web hosting.

Big Sweep in Morgan Creek

Before noon today, I was rolling abandoned mud-filled tires out of cold creek water, through the briars and out to the gravel road that parallels Morgan Creek in the Mason Farm Reserve. Sally, Tucker and I along with about ten high school students were taking part in the Big Sweep.

The Big Sweep
is a nation, state and local project to clean streams. So we were a little like the hero of “Spirited Away” as we pulled odd findings and lots of plastic trash out of the sand and mud trying to restore the creek. Sally had been a sweeper for several years, but this was the first for me.

It was actually fun to be in the creek pulling stuff out and leaving a part of the Reserve garbage free (until the next big rain). Sally has pictures that I’ll link to once they’re up.

I don’t know if she’ll have a picture of the oddest of our findings, a bouy from a lake upstream (but what lake is upstream from Chapel Hill on Morgan Creek? University Lake?). A “no wake” warning bouy was quite out of place there in the shallow creek.

Facebook follow up

Heard in the hall. “This class is always boring. I’m glad I can work on my Facebook profile for an hour”
“Your profile is so awesome.”
“I need to catch up with Julie’s”

Heard at the Daily Grind. “Can’t talk now. Not sure about this weekend. Just check my Facebook. I’ll put it [presumably the weekend plans] there.”

The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF [correct link to the presentation] The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF and the talk will be podcast by Brian Russell at audioactivism.org on Monday.

UNC pwned by FaceBook

They know all about us — because we tell them.

the ibiblio blog has covered Fred Stutzman’s Facebook study about the self-reported political orientation of the UNC campus earlier on.

Fred will be talking about that and more tomorrow Friday September 30 at noon o’clock in 208 Manning Hall.

One new observation from Fred: 85% of incoming Freshmen had a facebook account on day one of class.

Hear it all tomorrow. Slides may be available online (when they are I’ll add a link here).

Free listening = CD sales and concert attendance – a personal story

The Old Ceremony
There is this guy Django Haskins who is a wonderful writer and performer. He lives somewhere here in town. I’m not managed to see his shows with International Orange or The Old Ceremony or solo. But I heard a cut or two by him on the local low power FM station WCOM.

Then I looked him up and found his website. His shows were listed and I tried to catch him between his trips to NYC, but I’m too pooped to pop and too old to stroll as the song once went. But I did download rough cuts of his music and became pretty attached to American Romeo, Ole, and Blood and Oil.

Today strolling by School Kids Records, I noticed that the window display was for the new Old Ceremony CD. I checked it out. On it were the songs I had liked as roughs. The CD was on consignment to the store so the chance that I might find it any where else were slim. [yes, you can buy it online at this link] Of course I bought it. I was delighted that the money would go to a local record store and to the band. It’s a professional product in every way and very very listenable.

Chapel Hill Pop Noir — so they say.

Boyle on WIPO and Webcasters

Jamie Boyle’s Financial Times article just appeared online last night and I posted an article about it on SlashDot. Just for fun, here’s what I submitted:

It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to WIPO (who deserves the sticking) in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.
But is Yahoo! the webcasters’ enemy? as Boyle says.

And here’s what showed up on SlashDot:

“It’s always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, “More rights are wrong for webcasters”. Boyle lays it out so that “economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money” can get what’s wrong.”

Jimmy Wales – New Venue – Oct 5

ibiblio.org Speakers Series

Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When:3:30 Wednesday October 5

Where: 209 Manning Hall

What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More about Jimmy and Wikipedia

Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group

Poster in PDF form here (with new location)

See Jimbo on CSPAN’s Questions and Answers (September 25, 2005 and online archive)

“Books on Trial: Witch Hunt in the Heartland and a Nation’s Response”

At the 2006 Henderson lecture:

The lecture focuses on a 1940 raid of an Oklahoma City bookstore by police officers, who confiscated more than 7,000 books and arrested 16 people. Oklahoma officials then put the books on trial, and prosecuted and sentenced four of those arrested to ten years in prison and fines of $5,000.

The Wiegands will present the previously untold story of the trials, the public book burning and the appeals process that was ultimately used to reverse the decisions

.

Brown is the new Black

In case you haven’t noticed, some time this spring brown began replacing black in fashion. Not just brown by itself, but brown accompanied by or should I say complimented by Carolina Blue. Sally mentioned this to me in the spring. Then in June when we walked down Chicago’s Miracle Mile (the street that has been remade to look like the part of a mall that is made to look like a city street), all the store manikins were in the same rich brown and light blue. Matrons and hipplets, teens and office girls, everyone with new clothes was in brown and blue. Now on campus, it’s even more obvious. Folks who two years ago were in black t-shirts now have on brown. Sorority girls and even punkster guys are in the same colors. Even Perry Farrell (once Jane’s Addiction) was wearing the colors at his Lollapalooza show in New York.

post-Spooky

Birth before being ReBirth
Every show of ReBirth of a Nation is a new live mix. So Sally and I saw different shows when we each saw the show earlier. What I saw and danced to at the Creative Commons Birthday was different from the Spoleto show that Sally saw and the show that we saw together with Tucker last night at Memorial Hall was different yet.
People seemed amazed that Spooky does a new live mix at every show, but then as a DJ he’s used to changing his show each time and to trying to read the audience.
This clip was not what we saw exactly but it does give you a flavor of how Spooky remixes the Griffith film. More music, sheet music, photo show, and an essay by Spooky about Rebirth can be found here.
Roger Ebert, in the best less than book length take on Birth, notes that Griffith himself cut the movie in many different ways over time and that the fragility of the film often resulted in prints of different lengths being shown each night. Ebert tells us, at the end of his article, that Griffith “once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer.”

Managing the Digital University Desktop

At the Managing the Digital University Desktop: Understanding and Empowering the Individual; Preserving the Public Record and Institutional History symposium.

“Managing the Digital Desktop” is a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant funded project to study computer file management practices in academic units and administrative offices here at UNC-CH, across the 16-campus UNC System, and at Duke University.

The project is further described here.

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