Rest In Peace Leonard Nimoy

LLAP

Specs

Specs

One of the things that has been floating around my head over the past couple of years is the idea that we spend too much of science classes (in school and in post-secondary) teaching what we know and not enough time teaching how we know something. As in, how did we come to that conclusion and how sure are we that it's true.

This video is a great discussion of how we draw conclusions from observations of the world:
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In addition, I really appreciate how he talked about how big a problem this could be. That is, not all three-fold increases in risk are created equal.

Specs

Hank Green on legitimacy in media:

There is nothing actually legitimate about Fox News (or MSNBC for that matter) and young people know this. They don’t trust news organizations because news organizations have given them no reason to be trusting. They exist not to inform but to uphold the biases and values of particular ideologies. Ideologies and values, by the way, that very few young people embody. Even when they try to strike a balance, they do it by pitting different perspectives against each other in staged arguments. But neither perspective looks familiar to most people under the age of 40, so they just tune out.
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Glozell, Bethany and I don’t sit in fancy news studios surrounded by fifty thousand dollar cameras and polished metal and glass backdrops with inlayed 90-inch LCD screens. People trust us because we’ve spent years developing a relationship with them. We have been scrutinized and found not evil. Our legitimacy comes from honesty, not from cultural signals or institutions.

And with young people having no reasons to trust those cultural signals that we older folks were raised with, this is the only thing that works for them anymore. Our values and interests mesh with theirs enough that they’ve come to trust us. They trust us to make content that they will enjoy and they trust us to be the kind of people they can look up to. People who betray that trust risk losing everything that they have built.

Thanks for the hit of nostalgia!

Oh, Mathnet. You really were the best part of Square One.

On another note, Square One was the only show my sister and I were allowed to stay up late to watch (to the end).