bigideas

About this time last year I posted about what Big I webmaster Danny referred to as “the dematerialisation of music”, and suggested I was reconciled to it and everything was OK. Today, on Record Store Day, I’m feeling more ambivalent.

As you may already know, Liverpool University is considering closing a number of its departments, including Philosophy and Politics. This is a Bad Thing, and I think it exemplifies some of the muddled thinking that pervades current debates about education, especially in the Humanities.

So, with much glee the British media report that the Local Government Association has published a list of “words and phrases that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide”. Let’s have a look.

So, as you will no doubt know, telly writer and journalist Ariane Sherine has used her Comment Is Free blog to raise donations for an advertising campaign for atheism. One word in the ads has caused far more comment so far than the others.

In the last Big Ideas we talked about Anthony Giddins’s view of modernity as involving, in part, an abstraction of space and time from our immediate environment. The railway timetable, for example, is able to refer to places and times distant from where we are, and perhaps places and times at which nothing particular happens. This, Giddins thinks, is something new.

A recent post at Good Math, Bad Math concerns a proposal for evaluating university courses that tries to measure outcomes. One relatively easy outcome to measure is salary; another is the qualification earned. But, like Mark CC, I started to feel surprisingly skeptical about the whole idea.

One of the things mathematicians soon learn to look for when they meet a new mathematical object is its “subobjects”, which are parts of the object that have the same type of structure as the whole thing. In our case those are “subgroups”, which are subsets of a group that are, themselves, groups.

Columnist Charlie Brooker recently stirred up this familiar hornets’ nest by writing a piece about censorship of computer games, inspiring a slew of comments comparing the medium to films and novels. Are modern computer games a valid art form, and should Grand Theft Auto IV be treated just like a painting or a symphony?

In the previous instalment we saw some very “mathematical” examples of groups, but group theory also has an important geometrical aspect. We’ll take a look at that before we get into the more abstract material of group theory proper.

I was reminded of supertasks the other day and thought they’re interesting enough for a post, particularly as an argument that they’re impossible uses a similar tactic to some arguments against time travel and other speculative activities.