human made

Anil Dash has a great piece regarding what’s next for online activism in the face of the SOPA/PIPA protests.

This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let’s use it.

laureninspace:

there’s something wrong with the system when pirating is more convenient than purchasing.

I’ve had similar experiences with shows like Doctor Who; I buy the collected editions when they’re available, but I find other ways to keep up with them in real time. Yes, there’s BBC America, but they frequently don’t air things at the same time, and have been known to edit things for American audiences. So I buy a product I don’t necessarily use, because I’ve had to find other ways to watch it in the first place.

A wonderful story of early hacking (really, really early hacking) in a true hacker’s spirit—uncovering security flaws for the public.

Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi’s Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre’s brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer’s slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming’s assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector’s electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: “Rats”. A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily,” it trilled. Further rude epithets - apposite lines from Shakespeare - followed.

Great article on the lack of value in a lecture.

The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who
would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and
now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

Anecdotally, this jives with my experience; I had a great physics teacher in high school who avoided the lecture, and I learned a ton from him. In college level classes, I learned a lot of math, but walked away with much less understanding of what the math meant.

In my engineering classes, where the method was usually learning by doing, we all seemed to have a better idea of how and why things worked than a lot of the science students dealing with the same material in their lectures.

There are spoilers for “A Scandal in Belgravia”, the most recent BBC Sherlock ep in both the link and the blockquote below. Stop reading if you give a damn.

I really like the new BBC Sherlock, and I’ll say that I really enjoyed the most recent episode, “A Scandal in Belgravia”. But on later analysis, the episode was not without its flaws.

Everything goes horribly wrong at the end. Out of nowhere, Adler reveals that much of her security arrangements and her outfoxing of Holmes is down to advice received from Moriarty. That’s right. Irene Adler goes from being the fierce, resourceful, clever woman to being somebody who had to ask a man for help in order to succeed. She is not allowed to be brilliant in her own right, only through the advice from a dude who has some tension with the main dude in the show. In the space of a few lines, Adler is reduced from an active force to a passive pawn in Moriarty and Holmes’s ongoing cock-duelling.

I had initially thought that Irene Adler was always Moriarty’s accomplice/pawn, but a quick Cliff’s Notes check of “A Scandal in Bohemia” shows that wasn’t the case—that’s largely an invention of the Guy Ritchie Sherlock movies, repeated here.