Friday, September 20. 2013
 Sultan: Dear Corporate America
PHOTOS: The Great New England Hurricane of 1938
Men give up on their appearance at the age of 46 - while women care about their looks for 13 years longer
Via Insty, Death of an adjunct - Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor of French for 25 years, died underpaid and underappreciated at age 83
Peter Schiff On The Taper That Wasn't
Atheists: "Whatever happened to the good old bacchanalian infidels? Why are they now spending all their time doing the equivalent of filing complaints with HR?"
"Education": Government Programs Blowing Air into Debt Bubble
Tunisian girls return home pregnant after ‘sexual jihad’ in Syria
Sheesh. The Moslem kids these days
"Lovingly crafted"? Not likely
Review of the new Jeep Wrangler
A Psychologist studies crack cocaine use:
“Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” said Dr. Hart, an associate professor of psychology. “And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”
Stilton Jarlsberg, IMHO the best political cartoonist out there these days, is still going strong:
I have an intro to him here. Carry on, Stilty!
It's all about who to blame. I blame the kids. Failing to Teach
I do not really blame teachers, I blame the kids. Most kids are not scholars or intellectually-inclined, and just need readin, ritin, and rithmetic to get by. By and large, that works if you have a useful skill. Ignorance is the norm, generally-speaking.
 This will cover generally cleaning your keyboard, thoroughly cleaning your keyboard, and repair.
A lot of keyboards over the years have been tossed in the trash "because the (fill in blank) key stopped working!" That's not to be confused with the Any Key not working, which we'll cover later.
If a key starts getting a little erratic or stops working altogether, chances are it's just a piece of grit that got in between the two layers of plastic sheets that reside inside the unit. The ESC key going out is the most common, just because it sits up in the corner by itself near the edge of the plastic sheets where a piece of grit could sneak in.
Amazingly, of all the pieces of computer gear, this is the one item you actually can fix yourself, and without a lot of effort. Just take a large garden hose and-, no, wait, I'm getting ahead of the story.
Continue reading "Doc's Computin' Tips: The keyboard"
Article here.
Thursday, September 19. 2013
Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding:
Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.
This gap in education engagement has dire economic consequences for boys.
As I have said before, all boys have some ADD. The best male students have some OCD to compensate.
What did you really learn?
The Collegiate Learning Assessment. No reason that it should be limited to college grads. It's like a Baccalaureate exam.
It tests your math and related skills, literary and writing skills, historical, art and music knowledge and sophistication. Unlike the SAT, it doesn't look for your potential - it looks at what you have under the hood.
Of course, a good interview would reveal all of that in under an hour with a handful of pointed questions. For a job, though, it's not about what you know about Beowulf, but it's about what value you can add and what sort of personality you show.
A Liberal Arts education - however obtained - is for life-enrichment and enlightened citizenship, not commerce. It was designed mainly for the wealthy and prosperous who didn't have to worry too much about those things and could learn on the family or family-related job.
The
Collegiate Learning Assessment--Let's Support It - See more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/09/the_collegiate_learning_assess.html#sthash.uhy0a9kE.dpuf
It's a breakfast drink, the Italian version of cafe au lait.
In Italy, they make it with beautiful swirls. After noon, you drink this in the photo for your needed jolt (but you can get "Cafe Americano" if you ask - all they do is to put a double espresso in a cup, and add water. 2.5 Euros for that, but it's Monopoly money. However, they always serve that Americano with a little thing of hot milk, which is good). Some hotels make ordinary American-style coffee, and it is excellent.
Wednesday, September 18. 2013
Excellent advice on job and career from Megan McArdle.
These sorts of things worked for me.
Does "neuro-everything" make the concept of Mind obsolete? Mindless - The new neuro-skeptics.
The really curious thing about minds and brains is that the truth about them lies not somewhere in the middle but simultaneously on both extremes. We know already that the wet bits of the brain change the moods of the mind: that’s why a lot of champagne gets sold on Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, if the mind were not a high-level symbol-managing device, flower sales would not rise on Valentine’s Day, too. Philosophy may someday dissolve into psychology and psychology into neurology, but since the lesson of neuro is that thoughts change brains as much as brains thoughts, the reduction may not reduce much that matters. As Montaigne wrote, we are always double in ourselves. Or, as they say on the Enterprise, it takes all kinds to run a starship.
A Sherwood family Bible (ancestors from Greenwich, CT). Congregationalists, like almost everybody in New England at the time. Somebody scribbled comments on some of the NT verses.
Tuesday, September 17. 2013
I agree with everything Scott Johnson says here.
"...seven to eight times as much sexual misconduct takes place in public schools as in the Catholic Church."
California Protects Pedophile Teachers
The real destination of our trip was the Dolomites. We just threw in Lake Garda and Verona for fun.
Hiking (plus rock-climbing and mountain-climbing) in the Dolomites is the local summer sport. People don't walk - they hike and cover a lot of ground. Most people use hiking poles or hiking staffs, for good reason. You are always going up or going down. There is some mountain biking too. In winter, it's all skiing.
The Italian province is the Trentino/Alta Aldige/Sudtirol , on the Austrian border. Of the ten or so Dolomite valleys where people can stay, Mrs. BD picked the Val Gardena.
We drove from Lake Garda up on the scenic route and watched the agriculture change from olives, palms, and lemons to vast apple orchards and vinegards, and finally to Alpine hay fields. ...caught the autostrade in Trent (Trentino) and drove up it to Bolzano (where the Ice Man resides) to exit before the Brenner Pass to drive up windy roads to our classic Alpine Hotel in the tiny hamlet of Bulla on a hillside up above Ortesei.
Here's one of the high Alpine meadows above Ortesei - the highest Alpine meadow that exists. Alpe di Siusi.
As I have said, there is no one Italy - it is many places. Observations, suggestions, and lotsa scenic pics below the fold.
Continue reading "Northern Italy 2013, #4: Hiking in the Dolomites"
Monday, September 16. 2013
Took the BD daughter with her special friend to birthday brunch near her new place in Hell's Kitchen. We brought her cookies from Verona, and she brought us condiments from Tokyo from which she had just returned.
It's not hell anymore. Hopping neighborhood. We went to 44X10 (corner of 10th Ave. and W. 44th). Did Alicia Keys really grow up there?
The wait staff wore t-shirts saying "Heaven in Hell." Rule of thumb: Always make reservations.
I can remember when this area was Irish and black gangland, creepy. When you see this many gay fellows, you know it is gentrifying. I had scrambled eggs, grits, and sausages. The others had better stuff: Eggs Benedict with Crab Cakes, etc.
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Inlet Carved Across Fire Island by Sandy