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POPS12 Popular Wikis that actually ‘WORK’ (6) WikiSummaries - short, quick summaries for thousands of books. (Summaries: Freakonomics, Getting Things Done, …, see other bestsellers) (7) WikiMapia - cool mashup between Google Maps and wiki-style editing. Lets you browse, view, search and add descriptive notes to any location on the globe. (8) Wiktionary - multilingual, comprehensive, user-edited dictionary. Provides word definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. (9) Uncyclopedia - extremely entertaining wikipedia clone, that is filled with funny and not-necessarily correct articles. Check out: Colonel, Britney Spears, Donald Trump, …or an image pulled from an article about Women. (No offense ladies, it’s just funny…)
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POPSThe Mathematical Lives of Plants The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand. ... Scientists have puzzled over this pattern of plant growth for hundreds of years. Why would plants prefer the golden angle to any other? And how can plants possibly "know" anything about Fibonacci numbers? For the first time, scientists have found convincing biochemical mechanisms responsible for the interlocking spiral growth patterns seen in many plants. (The Romanesco broccoli plant is a striking example.) The video of the experiment with magnetized liquid iron droplets demonstrates how the geometry of such growth could occur in nature.
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POPSBush Outlaws All War Protest In USA I can't believe it. I'm not good at legal speak so I am not sure what to make of this. Go to the site and read the rest or just google the title of the article and find out more. If anyone has any idea if this in any way can be true, please say so. "(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order
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POPSQuotes from Voltaire Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite strict censorship laws in France and harsh penalties for those who broke them. A satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize Christian Church dogma and the French institutions of his day. -- From Wikipedia
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POPSAvoid Ad Hominem on Clipmarks Having seen this logical fallacy used on Clipmarks several times, I thought it would be a good idea to point it out to everyone so that we can avoid this in the future.
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POPSThe mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world " There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. For instance, we need more powerful ways to filter the information we get online, so that we don’t get a mass case of distractibility. Some people may fear that trying to fine-tune the brain-Internet connection is an impossible task. But if we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind,” it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world. "
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POPSWikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly. So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based? Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wiki
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPSThe Humungous Fungus See wikipedia: Largest Organism Armillaria ostoyae (Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Armillaria_ostoyae.jpg)
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POPSTeen summonsed for calling Scientology a cult The City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology. The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening of its headquarters in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)
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POPSWhere mathematic and art meet - Fractal art ..inspirational "A fractal is generally “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” -Wikipedia
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