He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero. — Johann Kaspar Lavater
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
Posted by Danny on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm
(I usually write these posts by hand before putting them up, which means, I think, somewhat less horrible prosody that may otherwise happen, but also, that I can be side-tracked and my posts are either lost or terribly delayed. And, because I don’t date the writing in my notebooks, I have no idea how long ago this was intended to go out. The timestamp is a guess—I actually posted this on May 31, 2011. Appy-polly-logies, absent reader base.)
Both of the projects planned for Exploring Our World at Youth Group have come to nought: attendance is too spotty and folks are too tired coming straight from school to generate a consistent sort of participation. We got one good petition-planning meeting in, with fun, Mark-Thomas-style discussion, but our political machinations petered out; as has been the practice in the past, it’s been just me bringing in neat things, so the Web of Awesome has similarly failed. Alas.
But! While there’s been sadness there, I have discovered a few exciting things that have occupied much of my time and may pleasantly occupy yours.
Posted by Danny on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:54 pm
In response to the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the earthquake on March 11, 2011, there’s been an understandable but unfortunate rise in opposition to nuclear power in Canada (and elsewhere, of course) by folks like me with limited and patchy knowledge of the physics behind radiation, and cynically advanced by stakeholders in public fear and, probably, providers of competing energy sources like fossil fuels. This is unfortunate if you feel that
nuclear power is a contending alternative to fossil fuels for sustaining our energy needs while we seek to transition to cleaner, more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, or that
public fear is, on balance, bad.
I wanted to post about this because there are a few public scientists and science-literate public figures who are trying to make the available data digestible (even appetizing, considering the circumstances) for folks whose dominant sources of information may be less than disinterested in public ignorance. If you have nine minutes, consider watching Martyn Poliakoff covering the workings of a nuclear reactor, the meltdown process, why the sea-water pumped into the plant as an emergency measure will compromise its future viability, and why potassium-iodide pills are being used as a precaution against radiation sickness. I found this to be a valuable and concise primer. (Direct link here.)
If “radiation” is equated uncritically with “badness,” it becomes impossible to judge the gravity of situations involving it, or to make decisions about its use as compared with, say, a coal-burning power plant, the byproducts of which seem to be more readily quantified in public discourse. The enterprise of usefully quantifying radiation (that is, the harmful form of radiation pertinent to living near nuclear reactors or eating bananas) has been recently undertaken by XKCD’s Randall Munroe to provide a sense of context and scale. The blog post featuring the chart in question is over here, but consider also reading Phil Plait’s brief discussion of it, here at Bad Astronomy.
Posted by Danny on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 11:56 am
I’ve spoken before about the two archetypes of Internet-based distance education: asynchronous (typically using message boards, email, etc., and allowing participants to contribute at times of their convenience) and synchronous (text or video chat, immersive environments, etc., which permit instantaneous communication and feedback, but require participants to adhere to a common meeting schedule like a traditional classroom). My interest is mainly in the latter, but there are awfully neat asynchronous environments being designed at OISE and elsewhere to plumb the affordances of time-independent communication, such as deep organization, refinement, and archival of ideas while the communities involved collaborate to build knowledge. We’ll be talking with Stian and Marlene Scardamalia at my research meeting in an hour or so about Knowledge Forum, which you can learn about quickly with Stian’s video, below.
Stian mentions a common problem with information overload when approaching a typical threaded conversation on a forum; this is something I experienced acutely during my two online courses, and it’s exciting to see the idea-map style of Knowledge Forum work to address this. However, when a space in KF is mature, it can seem at least as impenetrable as the index for a huge threaded conversation. I hope to raise the following point today to address this:
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:54 pm
A whole bunch of Evenings for Brainses ago our conversation turned to the decline of funding for orchestras and the loss of public interest and understanding in concert music generally. I remember I was advancing (in part on behalf of Satan) that the end orchestras would not be synonymous with the end of culture or even with the end of sophisticated music—that, though tragic especially for the last few, lonely members of a moribund species, species do go extinct; languages do go extinct; crafts do go extinct, and life continues impoverished in that sense but certainly able to develop new species, languages, crafts, etc. For music specifically, there are neat, crowd-sourced newcomer-species like Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, arriving with the growth of access to the Internet and to creation tools; the musical language in which one needed to be fluent to understand the ideas of complex concert music is changing, like any other living language (if also simplifying); multi-track digital audio workstation software, sophisticated digital signal processing, and especially physical modeling synthesis, challenge the definition of “musician” and the nature of the craft. Rah, rah, rah. At the time, even though I was exploring the above position in earnest, I was pontificating far outside of my aesthetic: I abhor extinction because I like information; not—and this is a much better reason—because diversity of species, of ideas, and of skills makes for a more resilient system in which to live.[1] It doesn’t really matter, though, since at the time, I didn’t go to concerts or speak Concert Music; my positions were tediously academic.
Joel returned to Toronto from his work in Mongolia this summer and Gid and I became housemates in October, so I’ve had a sudden influx of concert music in my life. Among other things, this has meant three (so far) trips to Roy Thompson Hall to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the last two months, after a drought that probably goes back to Grade Nine. I’ve noticed some things I want to tell you about.
Posted by Danny on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:13 am
Yay, more astronomy, sort of. I think It’s safe to assume that most people who’d read this blorg have heard of (and probably by extension, seen) the Powers of Ten video produced by IBM in the bygone era of the ancient 1970s, but if not, here. (also, a heritage-style website may be found here.)
I love the tour through the sciences, moving from cosmology at the outer extent of the journey, through astronomy, then sociology (what the hell, right?—urban sprawl and stuff), biology, chemistry, and then physics. Also, the narrator has the sort of voice that’s only broadcast without irony in productions that are at least two decades old, or The Sciences. Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks or Jay Ingram of Daily Planet are local exemplars.
Recently(ish) on Astronomy Picture of the Day, they featured a video that struck me as a contemporary successor to Powers of Ten, and which I present below. If you have the bandwidth, I strongly suggest viewing this at 720. (Also, if you’d like to read the APOD commentary, it’s here.)
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
