I listened to a talk today by Steven Wolfram about his new book A New Kind of Science. Can't say I understood much of the talk beyond the idea that he believes that much of science - relativity, quantum theory, biology and more - can be explained by cellular automata type processes, which can produce unlimited complexity from very simple seeds.

The book is the culmination of over a decade of work and is self-published - understandable, given his stated opinions on peer review in response to the inevitable question from an audience of academics. (It helps, of course, that he's a wealthy businessman not dependent on academic approval of his ideas for status, salary or grants.) He clearly believes very strongly in the value of his work, and is willing to promote it on his own, which of course damns him automatically in many academic eyes.

It's a very thick book, packed densely with ideas and examples, and the reviews are very mixed and contentious (objecting to his immodest personality as much as his ideas). Perhaps some day when I have lots of time to spare ...

Pythagorgrams is a simple tangram-type learning widget to help students understand Pythagoras' theorem. I began it as a design exercise, but I like the way it turned out well enough to spread it around, so here it is. ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses a new report from the US National Academy of Sciences on the effects of technology on the future of US research universities. The report's vision of that future includes not only the by now obvious consequences for university teaching, but further disruptions in governance and financing as well, some of which may threaten the very existence of universities, and very rapidly. Similar visions have been put forth elsewhere (though with less eye-opening detail); what caught my attention is the report's predicted time scale for change: "For at least the near term, meaning a decade or less, the research university will continue to exist in much its present form." [p. 48; italics mine] "A decade or less" - that's scary, even to those of us who follow the changes closely or actually participate in them.

The tone of urgency permeates the report, which advises repeatedly that research universities avoid complacency and consequent extinction by remaining aware of technological changes and their social consequences as they happen, and by taking advantage of those changes. The advice may be falling on deaf ears; my impression is that most academics, administrators in particular, don't really want to understand cyberspace, much less be a participating denizen of it.

Should be an interesting decade.

I bought the latest Giles book yesterday, an addition to my collection of over forty Giles books. Giles himself died a few years back, but his work lives on, and appears yearly in the form of a collection of cartoons spread over fifty years or so of work. The latest has all the wonderful characters in the Giles family - if you've never met Giles' Granny, you've missed one of the most delightfully cantankerous characters ever to grace a newspaper page.

Giles cartoons touch on many aspects of British life over the last half-century of so - post-war privations, current events, politics and more - but their humour is still understandable to a Canuck like me. What I appreciate as much as the humour, though, is Giles' marvelous portrayals of British weather. It's amazing how, with a few strokes of pen or charcoal, he could place his characters in a miserably cold, wet and windy countryside, or embed them in great street-clogging gobs of heavy, wet snow - all, of course, contributing greatly to the humour of the cartoon.

The book comes with a Giles calendar as a bonus.

Educational television can sometimes educate its viewers in directions not originally intended or even foreseen. For me, an educator interested in the design of onscreen mathematics, the real learning began while reflecting on an animated segment of some now otherwise forgotten educational program ...

Experiments in making algebra animations accurate, clear and easy to learn.