Adlai

I don't see the problem with a projector. The teacher can control what material is displayed, and can thus choose to display relevant material for the current lesson. Yes, this relies on the teacher knowing what they're doing, but the entire school system does anyways. If a student wants to have their own reference in class, it would be cheaper and more educational for the student to take notes on whatever topics they found interesting or wanted to have on paper.

I'd be interested to look at those studies, though.

I can think of a few ways to lessen this problem. One would be to ensure that public libraries are freely accessible to students, and offer Internet access for students who don't have it at home. Another option would be to allow students to print out, at school, relevant materials from on-line texts. The second solution would be very expensive in the long run, so I'd say that some form of the first solution needs to be put into effect for the Governator's proposal to succeed.

However, it is good that Google is putting it's weight behind this project, because anybody who uses anything built on Python (which has weaseled its way into virtually everything nowadays) is going to experience a performance boost.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. -- Esther Dyson

We're only just starting to find ways to connect over the internet. I suspect that there will only be more examples of things like IE as connectivity spreads.

I think that every culture has had their fair share of overly-respected sophomores. How many do you think trolled around Athens, and were forgotten by history because nobody cared to record what they said? With a bit of common sense, that's what will happen here too.

I'd say that's a good thing, though. It helps to understand that there are probably better ideas than yours, because then you don't sit put, but at the same time, it's good we all have a drive to explain and create. Otherwise, we'd still be using punch cards -- to weave our HN postings into Jacquard's loom.

Ever heard of a "meme"?

Dawkins has contributed plenty to his field, and he writes very accessible books.

That essay by him obviously doesn't criticize the entire field. He's just telling his readers to put up some nonsense filters before they start reading padded fluff.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17948

C, C++, C#, Common Lisp, Java, Ruby, Smalltalk, x86

Heh, I listed those in alphabetical order without even planning to...

Also, there's the cliched moth flying into a candle/lightbulb. Birds and bats, however, don't do that.

Speaking of bats -- it might be interesting to see similar experiments studying bats' reasoning abilities. Does "seeing" the world through SONAR make them reason differently from birds (or us)?

From what I've learned about evolution, and "selfish gene" theory, it seems as though cooperation pervades social animal societies. According to this page [1], and the Wikipedia article on rooks, they seems to flock together. I wouldn't be surprised if further study reveals some cooperative behaviour.

[1] http://www.first-nature.com/birds/corvus_frugilegus.htm

I think that they'd either allow members to simply get a copy of the ebook, or, as mahmud mentioned below, they would only allow access from within the library, and they'd try and regulate the amount of information you accessed.

The rook seems very hesitant in the first experiments shown, but in the last two videos, it seemed much more confident. One possible reason for the lack of hesitation in the "metatool" experiment is that the rook seemed to watch closely as the scientist set up the trapdoors, and might have been already formulating a plan ahead of time.

I think that if that's the case, then the rook has a pretty high level of sophistication -- more than if it was just using trial-and-error to figure out the right combination of stones.