maccam

Paraphrasing a a meme I recently saw: perhaps for the first time in history when using the phase “he’s an idiot”, 90% of the people will know who you are referring to.

Wesley Hilliard said:

leighr said:

The end of so called “fact checkers” is a welcome relief for true free speech. When one person, or group, has the power to decide what is ‘true’ or not, we are all in trouble. See exhibit one: China, or even worse, North Korea. We all need to fight against this sort of abuse of money and power, and while I am not a huge Facebook fan, I’m glad that they are following X’s lead in allowing free speech. 

I'm assuming this means that when a teacher graded your paper and marked an answer incorrect, it was a violation of your free speech? No one has the power to decide what is true or not. Reality is the only truth. But by making fact checking crowdsourced, you remove truth from fact, and I guess that's why they say we're in a post truth society. People only want to hear things they agree with, and everything else is deemed a lie, "fake news."

It is tragic how bad things have become. People mistrusting professionals, believing conspiracies, hating everything different from themselves.

It is tragic. I mourn the death of knowledge, of fact, of reality, of compassion. The only thing left is greed and hate in the people that follow him. It is pitiful.

Brilliant comment

My biggest hope for Numbers is that someday Apple will include the matrix functions found in Excel.

I wrote my PhD dissertation before the word processor era. Professionally, I started out with WordPerfect and eventually MS Word. I switched to Pages pretty quickly after it appeared because professional journal submissions in my field consist of essentially three separate sections: the manuscript (all text), tables, and illustrations. I originally used Adobe’s page layout software when I needed that for teaching or field trip guides, but that was a lot like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Page layout (integrating text, illustrations, and tables) was a nightmare in Word. It was a breeze in Pages. I started using Keynote as soon as it appeared for teaching and for professional meetings wherever I could use my own laptop. I never looked back.