On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Edward Cherlin <[email protected]> wrote:
< trim > >> I'm glad we live in a parallel processing system such that if Lower48 >> USA gets bogged down in fighting the Scopes Trial, turns itself into a >> Monkey Island, > > To expand what I wrote earlier: We have encouraging polling data > showing that the Old South racism and intolerance are shrinking by > about 2% annually, almost all from the old dying off and more of the > young each year having actual multicultural, multiethnic experience to > convince them that invidious distinctions are evil. That means that > the tipping point on a number of political, social, and educational > issues will come in about 10-15 years, even in darkest Alabama and > Mississippi. I can give anyone interested the references. We also have > wonderful anecdotes, such as a Klan rally of about 10 at Ole Miss > (University of Mississippi, Oxford MS) confronted by about 250 > students, many wearing Turn Your Back on Racism T-shirts and standing > with their backs to the Klansmen. > This reads as good news after a fashion, it's just that we don't want the rest of the world supposing it's stuck behind this slow moving truck going up a mountain, no passing lane, nothing to do but grin and bear it. By some analysis of the world, you have Alabama's values advance by a superpower's, making the rest of the world bow down, but most people have never heard of Alabama and don't imagine it really has that kind of power. >> we still have other regions chomping at the bit to make >> meaningful contribution to the advancement of our collective human >> saga. They're not really stuck in line in some sequential pipeline. >> We're *not* all waiting for the USA to get its act together, praise >> Bob. > > Amen. So we're in agreement on that score. Good news about the Old South though, sounds like Forest Gump has lots to celebrate. Racism is so on the ropes because genetics found nothing like a "race gene" and the statistical mappings are too complicated to really follow, the whole nomenclature breaks down (unless you keep it on life support, but that gets old too). Scientific American did a cover on the race issue recently, agreeing to still see some relevance, in terms of correlating DNA markers with illnesses (disorders). Mostly what people imagine as "race" is really "ethnicity" which is a "meme thing" not a "gene thing". We had these discussions again recently on the Diversity list within Python, team owned, archive open to members only, but anyone can join... > >> Iceland has been doing a good job, as has Ireland... South Africa. >> I'm proud of many nations. > > Check out Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal. > >> Some of our newest curriculum modules, for example these four new ones >> on Wikieducator coming through my corner (including Martian Math) >> maybe won't develop a following in Portland, Oregon, my home town, >> despite my being on hand to teach it, share it with other teachers. >> >> Perhaps my true fan base is in Vilnius or Gothenberg? > > Certainly Andrius Kulikauskus is there, running Minciu Sodas and > working on a math book for Earth Treasury. > I should look them up next time. >> Given the Internet, that's not necessarily a problem, although I'd >> prefer to have more team members locally (working on recruiting, >> including through Pauling House). Thanks to Wikieducator, I'm already >> finding a new community of collaborators. > > We also have the FLOSS Manuals, Squeakland, MIT and other Ed schools, > OLE, Creative Commons ccLearn, various museums, and others involved. > Also the state of California digital textbook program and the Open > Access movement, and more. See Stacy Reed's > http://www.librarianchick.com/ for available materials. > Good inventory, thank you for such a compressed list. >> Web 2.0 is like that. >> OLPC/XO is going to introduce a lot more children into this privileged >> way of networking and I'm quite happy about that (during the Duke's >> event, we upgraded one of my two XOs, to a more recent version of the >> system (767)). > > Exactly. > >> Kirby > If we get a footprint for Wikieducator in some default XO distro, I'll be sure to agitate for Martian Math and its connected modules. There's a lot of Python in there, and Sugar's Pippy application is right there. With PEP 3003, maybe Pippy will have time to jump to 3.x with the stronger Unicode support. Or maybe that's happened already. My tutorials on Generators (PYTHON_TUTORIALS) anticipate this development. Kirby > > -- > Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin > Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. > The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. > http://www.earthtreasury.org/ > > > > -- >>> from mars import math http://www.wikieducator.org/Martian_Math --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
