A pair of interesting sites.

The Wooden Mirror: "an art installation ... the piece explores the line between analog and digital." The dispay is real time and computer controlled; the pixels are wooden and 40 mm square. See a QT video of the mirror in action. Daniel Rozen, Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

The History of Eating Utensils: from a collection assembled by Carl Austin Rietz, an inventor and businessman in the food industry. Originally, many of these utensils were only for the rich or royal, and were often minor works of art. On exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences.

...but he's done it, he claims. Produced a geometric construction to trisect angles, that is, with only the euclidean tools of unmarked straight edge and compass.

The title of the website gives the game away: Euclid Challenge: Successful Response. The first and most obvious sign of a mathematical crank: taking the statement "it can't be done" to be a challenge (as in "nobody before has managed to do it") rather than a mathematical impossibility: it's been proved that you can't trisect an angle with the euclidean tools. The second sign of a mathematical crank: a claim that "an eminent American Professor of Mathematics" (unnamed, of course) has vouched for the result. The third sign: a prominant copyright notice.

What's novel is his misinterpretation of just what is meant by "euclidean tools". True, he uses straight edge and compass. But to a mathematician, "straight edge and compass" are shorthand for two allowable geometric constructions: you may draw the line connecting any two points, or draw the circle with a given centre through another given point. The author treats his compass as - er, well, a tool - as in "Grasp with the left hand a compass leg above the legpoint ...Grasp with the right hand the other compass leg above the legpoint ... Move both legpoints at a uniform rate ... " and so on. Justifiable only if he justifies his "uniform rate" in terms of the basic allowed constructions, which of course he doesn't.

We can expect to see more of this sort of thing on the web in future, and I, for one, am delighted. I'm delighted because, to paraphrase Voltaire, though I disagree with what he publishes, I defend to the death his right and means to publish it. On the web, he can do so by himself easily and freely, directly to his intended audience, bypassing the vetoes of publisher-gatekeepers. Those of his audience who know something about his topic and care enough can in turn criticise his work if they choose, or ignore it altogether. Those who complain about this and other inaccurate or misleading information on the web are free to set up their own websites reviewing that information. The author may be ignored or condemned, but he is not silenced by an "authority" - he has a voice.

Bring on the cranks and the crackpots! - just be prepared to accept the responsibility of judging their value for yourself.

I've just read The Cluetrain Mainfesto. (Yes, I know it was published a few years back; I'd never read it, and happened on a copy in the second-hand bin at the campus bookstore.) The book left me wishing there was a version for academia - as someone once put it, when it comes to the pace of change, business is Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers compared to the Academy.

The Academy is still largely clueless about how the web works. Web-based teaching still comes wrapped in lessons and courses with lists of learning objectives at the beginning and assessment at the end - "we'll tell you what you're going to learn and we'll tell you when you've learned it." It's an authoritarian model that ignores or is unaware of the huge amount learning currently going on online by individuals who quietly decide for themselves what to learn and don't need or care about official validation of that learning. At the same time, universities are investing huge resources in trying to "manage" online learning.

The other main academic pursuit, research, is still rigidly bound to official peer review through accredited journals; at least that's where the rewards are. But huge numbers of papers are now being circulated for discussion as electronic preprints before official publication (and in many cases, instead of it). Informal academic discussion lists also flourish, usually well beneath the radar of promotion and tenure committees; ditto for blogs and other informal channels of communication. While there's some academic interest in freeing research from the tyranny of commercial journal publishers (see the FOS News blog), there's very little interest in freeing it from the tyranny of official peer review - "how will we know it's good if some official authority doesn't certify it?" (One example of how.)

As with business, a huge interconnected mass of people now talk to each other electronically and informally about all manner of academic concerns, bypassing the old and increasingly irrelevant authoritarian structures altogether. The Academy is missing its own cluetrain by failing to see or ignoring those people.

This past week, I've been immersed in learning actionscript (the scripting language that makes Flash interactive). I've only just surfaced today - it's amazing how much of my "afterhours" this can absorb, and how absorbed I can get in it. The plan is to put some of my ideas about designing interactivity in mathematics into concrete form, and the more I get into it, the more possibilities I can see. I also want to experiment with interactive art, and Flash/actionscript seems an ideal medium for that. A few days to catch up on housecleaning and life's other necessities; then I'll submerge again.

I'm just back from the MathML conference (abstracts/papers). Overall impressions (from my non-techie end user's viewpoint): mixed. More technical than the 2000 conference and less end-user oriented (both presentations and participants). Some interesting tools, most notably Wolfram's WebMathematica server. Some indications that MathML may be becoming more an academic research area and less a technical/applied one. The most interesting presentation (from my design-focussed point of view): Robert Miner's A Dynamic Math Object Model, exploring what we actually want to do with intractive online math text once we have it. (A participant comment: "Robert is one of the few people who actually get it".)

The claim that "MathML is here" is a bit premature. It's here in that the major browsers will display it (natively in Netscape and Mozilla, with help from Design Science's MathPlayer in IE), but authors must link to a "universal stylesheet" to detect browser/platform and provide the appropriate individual markup. Most of this is pretty recent; expect bugs and fiddle time. If you want Mac users to be able to read your stuff, you're still out of luck: the style sheet doesn't include Mac browsers and there didn't appear to be much interest from those involved in making it include Mac browsers. (I asked. However, rumour has it that Mac-friendly Wolfram may take on the task. Also, there's now an early third-party Mac version of the W3C browser Amaya, which displays MathML and allows editing.) The moral? If you need MathML badly enough and/or want to get a head start (e.g. for major online publishing or education initiatives), accept that there'll inevitably be a lot of tweaking to do and go for it. If you're a non-techie individual looking to put up a few pages for students or something similar, stick with PDF or other simpler technologies for a bit until stability and authoring are no longer issues. IMHO.