via Flowing Data

If you're not already a fan, this might encourage you in that direction. Among the serendipitous gems in the accompanying text, I quote this passage:

Lovelace and Dodgson both loved Euclid (Lovelace: “It is a very pretty little Theorem, so neat and tidy: the various parts dovetail so nicely!”) and the emerging field of symbolic logic, and both stumbled through the Nameless Wood of calculus. Lovelace wrote to De Morgan “these Functional Equations are complete Will-o-the-wisps to me”, and Dodgson, after four years (!) of studying Mathematics at Oxford and despite coming at the top of his class, writes “talked over the Calculus of Variations with Price today; I see no prospect of understanding the subject at all.” You may need to recalibrate your judgements of people’s math by the way: Carroll was already lecturing in mathematics at Oxford when he described the end of Differential Calculus as “new to me” as late as the 1850s!

really worth your time: "…the rise of Oncorhynchus mykiss contains a bizarre and fascinating cache of insights into human motivations and misunderstandings… the rainbow trout is –like corn– both biological instantiation and evolving allegory for our complex relationship with nature, our misguided interventions, and their unintended consequences…"

(new incarnation of the site, most welcome)

(via Bryan Alexander… and might be an effective presentation device for various of my photographic projects, but the output IS Flash swf, so there's an iPad limitation to worry about)

shooting fish in a barrel, delightfully

another take… and I realize that I got Off The Bus in the early 1970s

oh my does it take me back… and reminds me of all I never quite grasped

Considering dimensions of the current malaise: "angry tribalism" sure does sum it up well, and 'agnotology' ("study of the manufacture of ignorance" –see Wikipedia article) is a word whose time has surely arrived

starts with Monticello, but quickly moves on to Vermont, San Francisco, other places …and moots the delicious term "landscape hermeneutics"

tip of an iceberg, I hope

yup: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."