bloodykitty.com

Was trying to remember this idea the other night, all I could remember was that it was from somebody who did triangles and his name started with a “p” and it WASN’T Pythagoras. Anyway it’s been killing me for the past few days and google searches didn’t help. I knew it was someone really famous and it would be obvious if I could just get the name. In the end I found a list of mathematicians beginning with P on Wikipedia. It was Pascal! Yay! Anyway here’s a link to his triangle and his wager (that was the idea whose attribution was annoying me so).

Boing Boing had a post on Friday about Tuomo Sipola attempting to create a common fantasy language, ” a kind of Esperanto for inhabitants of fantasy worlds” which is a pretty cool idea. It would be nice to establish some common fantasy languages for public domain use for fantasy writers.

BB picked it up from Making Light which in turn had a lovely link to langmaker.com, a wonderful wiki for constructed languages. They have a huge list of constructed languages from more well known ones like Star Trek’s Klingon and the Lord of the Ring’s Quenya to things like Anglo-Saxon Computerese (in case you needed to talk about computers in Anglo-Saxon) and smaller personal projects like Antique Lantian.

Yale to Make Select Courses Available on the Internet

Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation… The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years. The new venture joins a growing number of university-based initiatives that use the Internet to make educational materials widely available.

The three courses being taped this winter are Introduction to the Old Testament, Fundamentals of Physics and Introduction to Political Philosophy. Detailed information on the Yale project and others supported by Hewlett’s Open Educational Resources Initiative is on the Foundation’s web site including an initiative to provide free educational resources from the UK’s Open University.