I first saw Wolfram Demonstrations when it was just over a thousand pieces old. At that stage a trove of passingly interesting ideas. No longer: I now realise each of them is a tool of first water. Each can be built into a model from game up to post-doc research. Any can grab a child and give a lifetime of deep maths. For the design engineer, the artefacts list is endless. For the builder of prosthetic organs, the fluid flows mesh neatly with the metal matrix. For the knowledge builder, any maths concept can be instantly on display for reforming and adapting, and related to all the cousins at a click. For the open source enthusiast, the ability to add original stuff is empowering, arguably the greatest asset of the system as it grows both complex and adaptive, like life a rarity that reverses entropy. For the career scientist, the opportunity to model freely any aspect of science from daily minutia to broadest concept in the discipline and across disciplines offers professional insights and oversights that are rare in any working lifetime.
But the greatest use if the publicity flows right in UK is the potential to solve the three biggest social challenges and current failures of our education system: our inability to catch children’s enthusiasm for mathematics, the fear and stress most parents have for the subject from their own schooldays which they pass straight on to their children, and the total lack of remedial maths for the 100 000 school-age escapers and the bigger number of penal system victims. Only when the pleasures of mathematical thought outweigh the benefits of standard mental activity will global society be on the way to fulfilling potential. Plato would have agreed, if he hadn’t thought it first.


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Most of us need a faith, a strong faith, to carry us through the bleak bits.
Is no religion at all better than midwestern Christianity?
If Christians truly turned the other cheek, would we not close Wall Street and the NYSE, the promoters and wardens of jealousy, when someone attacks the Twin Towers? Our strike back reaction thus far is neither Christian or western liberal. At least the understanding is growing, and awareness of the bitterness of the disenfranchised. With our leaky borders, we are perhaps talking gradual world revolution, not just national uprisings. As the ruling French classes failed to see, enlightenment brought desire to the middle classes for a place in the sun, until it was too late to stop the deluge.
Understand and care for your neighbours? Iron fist more likely.
Realise the strength of the motivated guerrilla? Send in assassins.
See distress in Baghdad widows, the anger in their children? Surge on!
There are Ghandis out there, but we do need to find and hear and heed them.


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An emotion is a reaction to things. Like to mother, trust, gold bars, spiders. An emotion is usually instant, but can linger and be triggered by later stimuli.
So a challenge like a crossword or sudoku raises a series of emotions, mostly pleasurable – I have done these well – enough to challenge, to keep us on task. There’s the first clue, got that hard one, cunningly changed method and found one, half-way, just a few now. These are primitive but driving emotions. If stuck or the train is sitting, tough cheese, different emotions. All these evolved in us as survival instincts.

All could be harnessed in the search to release our species mental competence.


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There seems to be very little of the usual dark side in this grouping. The combination of writely, jotspot, skype and doubtless many geek-blessed others is far more subtle than the old Microsoft extend and embrace method (Show us your secrets, tell us your dreams, and we will give you and your descendants reasons for hating our outfit forever.) This minimal evil has to come from all the layers at the top for it to work. One hopes the compliance directors are up to pruning the career-honers, or at least the sin if not the sinner. This way lies loyalty to the open source ethos essential for trust by us punters who are literally storing our intellectual lives in the google memory bank. Thus far so good, as long as wikipedia can ride ombudsman shotgun.


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I am not yet born, please hear me ..


It is every child’s right to have -
Security
Caring parenting
Choice of languages
A just society
Full access to the culture of that society when young
Full access to global earth
Freedom from imposed views and cultures
Nutrition
As much learning as she desires
Pride in parents and environment
Freedom from untoward grooming from foot binding to mental conditioning
PHSE on request or on maturity
Acceptance by society on maturity

It is also necessary for the survival of the rest of us that each child not only has all these rights and more, but is happy nay delighted with the responsibilities they bring.



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