The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not…
Teachers should teach nothing. Students should learn nothing. Students should know nothing. Nothing is worth teaching. Nothing is worth learning…. —Nothing Matters Read the whole thing — I’ve had students stop after the first section, but the whole page expresses a single unified thought that develops from the first “Nothing Matters” section. I’ve blogged this…
Chemtrails: 18,600 hits on Google. A lunatic fringe of dittoheads, convinced Doom is wafting down on the populace via 747s and DC-10s. A whole subculture of contrail conspiracy freaks. God bless ’em, at least they’re looking up. —Matt Rasmussen —Contrails (Orion Online) Similar:I'm Asking My Students to Be Deliberate about the Word "Novel"In the past few…
Here I was in a place where the jungle goes all the way to the ocean, with only a strip of beach dividing the two. Sand crabs, hermit crabs, and crab crabs skitter across the path, and lizards are pretty common. If you look up you likely see white faced monkeys, and iguana are common…
I had to laugh; well, of course this is why the Saudis hate us. Look at this: a beer garden, games of chance, rock music, hot dogs, teen girls with bare midriffs, purple hair, exposed bra straps and you-go-Jesus! baseball caps – and it’s a Catholic Church Fair. Of course, this is why I love…
—Torill’s a doctor!!!!! (jill/txt) Congratulations, Torill… I’ve enjoyed following Torill’s account of the endgame in her quest for the Ph.D., and it seems only fitting that an online community helps her celebrate it. My own doctoral defense was a rather lonely affair. The only date available was 3-5pm on the Friday after American Thanksgiving. My wife…
Two Japanese girls shrieked and flapped, driving him away and giggling when he’d gone, swinging hands at each other in foreign conversation, and the woman beside them smiled as she listened, comprehending or not. The orange-haired goth wearing a black dress with a neckline that plunged farther than she may have realized jumped in her…
Three short steps into the New Millennium, written SF is paradoxically in sharp decline. …. And the reason is depressingly clear: Those few readers who haven’t defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises. | Incredibly, young people no longer find the real future exciting. They no…
The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: “Écrasez l?infame!” In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition. | Today, credulous doting on Islam is not just an expression of western…
We hear it echoed in recent debates over the ways professors spend their time. What do we do all that time when we’re not pontificating? Surely it can’t take all that time to write the lectures we deliver. Surely there can’t be that many books in our fields worth reading. The only logical solution that some people can draw…
The special efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who point to males’ success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is unnecessary. |…
With great anticipation, I contacted the project manager — let’s call him A.H. — who would copy-edit my manuscript and, I genuinely hoped, find ways to improve it. I had no idea things could go so wrong. as he kept the schedule. … For the book to be published on schedule, I would have needed…
“[E]excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing?” — Mike May —Mike’s Journal (Sendero Group) A fascinating excerpt: I found it very distracting to look at people’s faces when I was having a conversation. I can see…
We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as in reporting the news…
Yet even though Mr. Crowley had moved mountains on the scientific and business fronts to get the treatment into testing, he couldn’t seem to speed the drug to his own rapidly weakening children. When he sold his company, he gave up control of the medicine they needed. The shortage of the drug, conflict-of-interest questions and…
I am cutting the whole thing into paragraphs, using my very sharp scissors. I will read a paragraph at the time. I will read it disjointed and jumbled, and see what I can do about the argument before me, without linking it to the devastating argument over or under on the page. Doing this I…
With a bachelor’s in chemistry, a Ph.D. in history (with a concentration in the history of science) and publications in hand, I applied for the job. The director never interviewed me. He hired a 22-year-old communications major but promised me work as a landscaper and all-purpose cipher as long as I wanted it. | He…
“Too many ?studies? and ?reports,? with tables of data in small print appended, have purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact have revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the ?investigators.? For me, the epiphany came when I interviewed the nation‘sleading climatologists for a magazine article on acid…
“As most people know by now, dictionary makers today merely record how the language is used, not how the language ought to be used. That is, lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. People using “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested” does not displease a descriptivist. | A prescriptivist, by contrast, is a language conservative, a person interested…
“The National Council of Teachers of English, recommending the use of hip-hop lyrics in urban public school classrooms (as already happens in schools in Oakland, Los Angeles, and other cities), enthuses that ?hip-hop can be used as a bridge linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world of academics.?|But we?re sorely lacking…