Items to share (7 January)

• A murmuration of starlings (thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link)

• What Americans (and the rest of us) keep ignoring about Finland's school success by Anu Partanen

• Here are Stuart Kauffman's new year thoughts, always worth reading, and actually quoting Gordon Brown with approval (in a tiny way).

1) Not only do you not know what will happen, you don't even know what can happen [...]. Then reason, dream of our Enlightenment, is an insufficient guide to living your life. We need reason, emotion, intuition, sensation, knowledge of our culture and our evolved humanity. 2) Because you do not know what can happen you cannot make normal probability statements about what you cannot know: [...]. (So management from the top as if you knew and could optimize is often deeply wrong). 3) Radical emergence occurs all the time, Turing machine to the Web to Google, Facebook and the Arab Spring.

• Lord Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) argues cogently on the Limits of Secularism.

• If you want to know how people go about thinking through courses from the bottom up, using experience, theories, coincidences, epiphanies... then read this piece by Paul Maharg on designing a graduate diploma in law. There's at least a term's work in it!

• Francis Fukuyama on the virtues of analogue media. 

• At the nominating session for the American Dialect Society 2011 Word of the Year,  Geoff Pullum made "a strong case for his favorite word of the year, assholocracy." (Thanks to Language Log)

• An excellent debate on the "flipped classroom" model--the article is just the stimulus, the quality is in the comments (for once!)

• ...and the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, on the brain, by Bruce Hood, are now on line.