Jason left a great comment on my earlier blog post on the consciousness of bats, pointing to Nagel's essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" He and I seem to come at many of the same questions from completely different directions, in terms of the things…
This past Saturday I was listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks. I was amazed to hear one of the guests make the following statement: You don't spend your life studying a miracle. It immediately took me back to something I had just been reading in Heidegger: It is important above…
Luis von Ahn has a great post up today, thinking about his teaching and how to do it better, asking: instead of my amateurish attempts at making good lectures that fail most of the time, and instead of repeating the same crap every semester like a broken record, why don’…
I'm continuing to work my way through Heidegger's later writings, and today was reading "Building Dwelling Thinking." I loved this section, and won't ruin it by commenting: "When we speak of a man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the…
Tonight, as our entire family lay on the hammock, tired from a walk around the field through long grass, looking up into the twilight at bats moving silently between the stars, my oldest sat up to ask a question: "Daddy, do bats know what kind of animal they are?…
Tomorrow (or maybe today if you're reading this on Tuesday) is a big day. It's the day that Firefox 3.5 will be released, and with it, an upgrade for the entire web. Mozilla's done a fabulous job of showcasing some of these new things here and here, so I…
For a while now, whenever I've had spare time, I've been "building a boat in my basement." Today I'm pleased to bring it out and launch it: I'd like to announce the first public release of DXR, version 0.1. DXR is a two things. First, it's a…
After scoffing for as long as I could make up excuses, I decided to try twitter. I'm @humphd (I don't know who @humph is, or why he/she has my nick and no posts!).…
A number of people sent me a link to this story about Kyle Brady and his ordeal getting his school to let him post the source code to his assignments. In the spirit of the academy, Kyle wanted to share the results of his work. His professor said no and…
This is the story of the time my wife and I decided to mount her 24" iMac to the wall. I'll just cut to the chase: you can do it; don't try it. Straight, plumb, square, centred, level--pick any eight. That's what we were after. Our goal was to…