Archive for the ‘ History ’ Category
This quarter, I’m taking a design studio class focusing on the dissemination of video interviews of members of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. You might not be familiar with the Rwandan genocide and the ICTR, so here’s some background: Over three months, starting in April 1994, about 800,000 Rwandans were killed, mostly with machetes, mostly [ READ MORE ]
Today I read a paper from 1971 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber about “wicked problems” – problems that are intrinsically difficult or impossible to solve in the sense that one can solve a crossword or mathematical proof, or win a game of chess. Wicked problems abound in policy questions and design, and it’s interesting [ READ MORE ]
I’ve heard of colour affecting mood, but not performance. Interesting paper in last week’s Science on several studies examining performance and creativity in various tasks when using a computer with different background colours. It seems surprising to me that they were able to get significant differences simply by changing the background colour, not the content, [ READ MORE ]
On the TPN blog, Cameron talks a bit about the wholesale acceptance of the ‘it preserved lives’ justification for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He doesn’t accept it at all, and quotes from an article by John Pilger questioning this justification. I read three main points in what he says and cites: evidence of a [ READ MORE ]
Just quickly, I wanted to link to this rather awesome animated map of England from 0 -> 1050 CE, drawn by Curzon at Coming Anarchy [ READ MORE ]