Retraites. Weak gravitational lensing and weak arguments. In the last issue of Times Higher Education, Chris Ormell argues that mathematics is taught in way which is disconnected from reality, and that this played a major role in the financial crash.
The author may have a point, though it's not clear from the article whether he thinks more mathematical knowledge in the City would have helped or made things worse. Fatally for his credibility however, he then moves on to cosmology as a key example in his argument that there is a dangerous "blind faith" in mathematics. Gravitational lenses as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008.
SXSW 2011: The internet is over. If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco.
It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"?