These are my links for November 12th
- WordPress › Postalicious « WordPress Plugins – Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that automatically posts your delicious, ma.gnolia, or Google Reader bookmarks to your blog.
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Archive for November 12th, 2008
These are my links for November 12th from 22:34 to 22:38:
- POSIWID: Purpose of Reading 3 – If you search for the “Purpose of Books” you will find dozens of websites repeating (with small variations) a quotation from Christopher Morley stating that the real purpose of books is to trap (or perhaps to inspire) the mind into doing its own thinking.
- POSIWID: The Purpose of Reading 2 – But I still want to quibble with the way this “Bad-Dads-Don’t-Read” agenda is being presented, because it is confusing about the true purpose of bedtime reading. If the purpose of (bedtime) reading is defined solely in terms of the educational benefit to children, this is not sufficient reason why it has to be the father who does the reading.
Tags: Books, change, education, POSIWID, presentations, systems, thinking
Richard Veryard writes in POSIWID: Don’t Waste A Crisis that:
Rahm Emanuel, just appointed chief-of-staff by President-elect Barack Obama:
“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid. In 1974 and 1978 we never dealt with it, and our dependence on foreign oil never changed.” [BBC News, 7 November 2008]
And goes on to reflect on this comment in light of the cybernetic principle that the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does and comes to the conclusion that “A cliché is a terrible thing to waste.“
Series
NASA image of the day
Snapshot of the International Space Station
On March 13, 2008, the International Space Station passed across the field-of-view of Germany's remote sensing satellite, TerraSAR-X, at a distance of 195 kilometers, or 122 miles, and at a relative speed of 34,540 kilometers per hour, or more than 22,000 mph. In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not 'see' surfaces. Instead, it is much more aware of the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits. Smooth surfaces such as those on the station's solar generators or the radiator panels used to dissipate excess heat, unless directly facing the radar antenna, tend to deflect rather than reflect the radar beam, causing these features to appear on the radar image as dark areas. The radar image of the station therefore looks like a dense collection of bright spots from which the outlines of the space station can be clearly identified. The central element on the station, to which all the modules are docked, has a grid structure that presents a multiplicity of reflecting surfaces to the radar beam, making it readily identifiable. This image has a resolution of about one meter (about 39 inches). In other words, objects can be depicted as discrete units--that is, shown separately--provided that they are at least one meter apart. If they are closer together than that, they tend to merge into a single block on a radar image. Since this image was taken, the station has expanded and is more than 90 percent complete, including a full complement of solar arrays. Image Credit: DLR
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