Thursday, August 28. 2014
I am, always have been. Dalrymple is too.
Sol Stern: When the Instructors Need Instructing - A new book reveals the damage education schools have done to pedagogy.
... the founders of the twentieth-century education schools—iconic figures like William James, Edward Thorndike, and John Dewey—were disinterested in the nitty-gritty of the classroom and thought little about how to improve methods of instruction. (Thorndike abhorred school visits, calling them “a bore.”) Instead, they preferred to write and do research about more intellectually challenging subjects, such as psychology and human intelligence. What Green calls the uniquely American “myth of the natural-born teacher,” along with the corollary assumption that good teachers simply “know what to do to help their students learn,” also encouraged the ed schools’ inattention to the art of teaching.
 Bob Dylan's Complete, Legendary 'Basement Tapes' Will Be Released
I've had them all for many years. Kinda fun. Bunch of music guys having a good time fooling around with riffs and crazy tunes.
Besides this in NYC, her stuff is at a number of stores on the East Coast from Maine to Florida - and also at Nora Gardner.com
At Maggie's, we love entrepreneurs. It's the American Way - you work 24/7 with no benefits - and nothing but total red-blooded American independence and American risk. New York is where all the energetic youth go - if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
 Image via Ace
50 Shades’ for girls: Planned Parenthood pushes porn
The 10 Biggest Classic Rock Douchebags
Hmmm
The Welfare State - How long can a shrinking number of taxpayers support a growing number of beneficiaries?
Warren Buffett, Tax Hypocrite
Why liberals are embracing GMOs and rejecting mandatory labeling
Home Invader Assaults Woman, 11-Year-Old Boy, Kills Family Dog, Gets Shot Dead
Stick a Fork in Your Newspaper
Government to track political speech on internet
How can this be done in my America?
‘Negative Stereotypes’ Influence Minorities To Get Fat, And Stay Fat
Racism - plus climate change. Forget the carbs and inactivity.
The IRS Scandal Has Arrived
Stop the presses!
in Under 60 Seconds, George Will Takes Down Claim That It’s Too Hard to Find ‘Lost’ IRS Emails
This is not from The Onion:
She teaches part-time in the university writing program with courses focused on the representation of women and reading hip hop as poetry. Finally, she is a doctoral student in higher education administration with research interests including intersectional analysis of working-class students and faculty and their experiences on campus.
Neither is this:
On the See The Stripes website, Carson says he wishes he would have known he was attending a “school on a plantation.” However, he says that even had he been more aware of the southern history of South Carolina school, he still would have chosen to attend the university after he explained his decision to his friends and family.
Big Sugar update
A scam
Kia to open $1-billion auto factory in Mexico
Tesla: We Don't Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Quoting Al Sharpton Is Racist
Lefties starting to wonder: Why hasn’t Hillary said anything about Ferguson?
Big Sugar
India update: Goodbye to All That Central Planning - India’s prime minister takes on Big Government.
Is this normal in Yorkshire? The Rotherham Horror
‘The American Banking System Might Not Last Until Monday’
Why the World Needs More Carbon Dioxide
Europe's Slow Surrender to Intolerance
Is The Left Approaching a Kool-Aid Moment?
Why is the media so biased against Israel? Let us count the ways
The Islamic State Has Nothing to Do With Islam?
Toon below via Nice Deb
Midnight view from our outdoor bed, in the Sierras. 2-min. exposure.
Wednesday, August 27. 2014
A former reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press writes about what journalists get so wrong. It's all well worth reading:
A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate....
Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported....
The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press....
Readers know the BD is a lover of marshes and swamps. They are full of life - more than any other form of habitat.
When a dike was built across the Herring River in the late 1800s, the tidal flow was interrupted and the river began silting up and turning into fresh water. A few years ago, the bridge was reconstructed to permit a full tidal exchange without removing the road dike.
The phragmites is dying out, spartina is returning, and the tidal flow is vigorous. Environmental successes usually come in small pieces.
Deep in town, a railroad dike was built in the late 1800s to carry vacationers and mail to Wellfleet - and to carry fish and oysters to NYC. This dike also impeded free tidal flow and caused the inner harbor to silt up. Tall ships used to dock in there. The pilings of the railroad bridge on the dike remain:
I doubt that the village would spend any $ to remove the old dike.
Here's my challenge to the town of Wellfleet: re-open the dike between the marina and the marsh behind it - the marsh that begins behind Capt. Higgins Pearl and used to stretch back for several 100 acres until the harbor construction closed the salt flow to a tiny trickle destroying a large salt marsh. I'll donate.
All it needs is a simple 30-40' bridge there to de-silt and salinate the old marsh.
Addendum: Thanks to commenters for some corrections.
In my view, of course not. Science cannot even answer science questions but can only offer up their best theories du jour. Just ask Feynman. That's what he always said. Science is a method of pursuit, rarely gives us permanent facts.
About Sam Harris’ Claim That Science Can Answer Moral Questions
That's an assertion by AVI, but I don't know whether he refers to high school or college students. Presumably every college-bound kid would have taken Alg ll in high school, if not AB Calc (most do that too, it seems). He also says:
The math that the other 90% are going to need, day in and day out, to understand the lives they are going to be living, are probability and statistics.
I'm not sure what I think about this. How much math is enough to make a person functional and numerically-literate, and how much to be considered well-educated? I think all of these areas are excellent training for rigorous and critical thinking. It's basically a logical language, and seems best approached that way.
I have heard experts say that around 5-10% of high school grads are truly eager and ready for rigorous higher ed. The rest are just postponing adulthood.
 I can use words like hammers, and be paid for it. I do. But I won't do it here.
Elite schools are still mostly attended by wealthy people
Cool: 40 maps that explain the Roman Empire
Good Grief: Climate Change To Ruin Your Breakfast And Drown Atlanta From Sea Rise
Good Grief: Ocare To Pay For “Gender Reassignment” Surgery
Why “S&P 2000″ Is A Fed Manufactured Mirage: The “Buy The Dips” Chart That Says It All
Government Policies Made the Economy Worse - and They're Still Impeding the Recovery
Who-d a-thunk it? Total tax costs in Canada are 46.4% lower than in the US, and Burger King wants to move there?
Politicians feel businesses work for government and their only function is a source of tax revenue
The Democratic Shift to the Left:
... the Democratic Party is torn between a liberal establishment that wants more government, and an even more liberal wing that wants the same thing squared. At bottom, both wings believe the formula for perfection is simple: Put the government in charge of everything, and put the right people in charge of the government. Then just sit back and wait for Shangri-La.
Lema's, for all those years, really was a crappy little market. The new place is great, but people still call it Lema's.
Tuesday, August 26. 2014
From our sandy back yard
The friendship paradox is the empirical observation that your friends
have more friends than you do. Now network scientists say your friends
are probably wealthier and happier, too.
Back in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld made a surprising discovery while studying the properties of social networks. Feld calculated the average number of friends that a person in the network has and compared this to the average number of friends that these friends had.
Against all expectations it turned out that the second number is always bigger than the first. Or in other words, your friends have more friends than you do.
Researchers have since observed the so-called friendship paradox in a wide variety of situations. On Facebook, your friends will have more friends than you have. On Twitter, your followers will have more followers than you do. And in real life, your sexual partners will have had more partners than you’ve had. At least, on average.
I always figured that it was because my friends are friendlier, wittier, and more fun than I am.
Readers know that my favorite grilled veggies are eggplant and corn (maize to our readers overseas).
Drizzled with a little olive oil and salted, all of these are tasty: red onion, peppers, asparagus, tomato, summer squash slices, potato slices, pineapple, apple, etc. Anything can be grilled, and it keeps you outdoors.
Best way to grill corn on the cob? Soak them in the husks in a bucket of water for an hour or two, then strip off the roughest outer husks, then toss on grill. When the husks brown a little and the flossy stuff burns, they are done. A little salt to serve - no butter.
(A good, non-academic intro is Tom Sowell's Basic Economics (2nd Edition): A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.)
We all seek all of the kinds of basic literacy we can attain: Moral, Religious, Mathematical and Scientific, Historical, Literary, Artistic, Recreational, etc., but it's a never-ending pursuit because life is so full of riches. Most of us join the heavenly choir before the job is done. Either that, or begin to forget what we once knew and need to start at the beginning again.
For example, at lunch I have been trying to figure out how Hannibal fed his 90,000 troops, plus the elephants and horses, during his march from Carthaginian Spain over into what is now called Italy around 218 BC. I learned about it once, but have forgotten. Talk about logistics...
Prof. Jacobson found this: New study finds economic illiteracy correlates with political preferences. I find that basic economic illiteracy is rampant, and thus is replaced by emotion.
Everybody knows that there is a dysfunctional black urban subculture, and that there is not a single thing that liberal white folks can do about it.
There are deeply dysfunctional white, mostly rural, subcultures too, but nobody cares at all about them. There will always be people on the fringes of society.
I work alongside black Americans. They are totally normal nice people. Living in NYC, I no longer even notice race, ethnicity, etc anymore. A waste of mental bandwidth. But when I (rarely) encounter a member of my tribe (New England Christians, gun-owning Red Sox fans with some immigrant blood), it's a fun moment of reunion. A shock of recognition.
Surber: Ferguson is about white guilt
Bill O’Reilly gets schooled on white privilege by Megyn Kelly
Happens to me all the time. "You're white - so let me give you a great job with more money than you want, and I will never fire you. Plus free cupcakes." Being white is way cool.
Yep, that's a Lightning - a good boat
Monday, August 25. 2014
 The Marshmallow...
Marshmallow candy originated in ancient Egypt. It was a honey candy that was flavored and thickened with Marsh-Mallow plant sap.
Photo below is the Marsh Mallow plant which is a native of marshy areas in the Old World, now wild in North America. You can read about it here.
In Yankeeland, the revolting Marshmallow Fluff is an old classic in the form of the Fluffernutter sandwich. Generations of New England kids were raised successfully of a diet of this goo.
Apparently it is easy to make your own Marshmallows at home.
I prefer my Marshmallows plain, on a stick over an open fire, preferably permitted to burst into flame to produce a black crust before blowing them out. Few can resist some campfire S'mores, but I can. Too sweet for me.
It makes good sense to me. Texas Ends High School Early.
In three years, any ordinary, motivated kid can get through the HS basics: Essay-writing, grammar, basics of research papers, math up to or through Calc 1, American History, World History, Bio, Literature-reading, Chem, Physics, Civics, and whatever.
Why not just complete HS requirements as quick as you can, and then leave?
I still do not understand the mission of Middle School.
"[W]ealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent -- not to say toddlerlike -- idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums."
P. J. O'Rourke
View from our Cape Cod deck
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