From the preface to The Vision of Islam by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick: In this book we try to pry open the door to the Islamic universe. We are not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes of self-understanding the basis for judging [...]
DonorsChoose announced the winners for their Hacking Education contest today and unfortunately Print & Share, the app I developed with my coworker Billy, didn’t win. The consolation prize is all of the positive feedback I’ve received from teachers who are using Print & Share: Now this is probably just sour-grapes writing, but I am disappointed by [...]
Peter Elbow on the editorial act, from Writing without teachers (1973): The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, “What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,” you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender. Not tightass. More… You can’t [...]
Today, according to NPR (and many other outlets), “more than 30 pastors across the country are expected to preach a sermon that endorses or opposes a political candidate by name. This would be a flagrant violation of a law that bans tax-exempt organizations from involvement in political campaigns.” I’ve previously discussed two pillars of nonprofit [...]
My associate, Rebecca, and I have been starting to think critically about Panlexicon.com, the unique, tag-cloud based thesaurus I’ve written about <a href=http://island94.org/node/128″>previously. We’re hoping to put some more time and effort into the project and in the process, learn some more about what’s happening with the language and the underlying structure of the thesaurus [...]
I’ve had these notes kicking around my desktop for a few weeks and just got around to typing them up into a cohesive post. Drop Zone trailer I’ve an avid participant of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center’s Tuesday Luncheon Series. On February 27, author Matthew Pearl gave a great talk on copyright in the nineteenth [...]
