December 2009
13 posts
dwineman: This salsa is so unpredictable — it’s like every jar is channeling some other condiment. Maybe I should stop buying “medium.”
jimcorreia: Bring a group of “We have to do something!” people together and what you’ll get is something, not a solution to the problem.
The Noughties: a fond(ish) farewell →
It was almost as if the zealots and nutcases who believed the world would end in 1999 had substituted one dogma for another. The End is Still Nigh, Just Not Quite as Nigh as We Originally Thought.
(via ALDaily)
That Old College Lie →
But the biggest problem with American higher education isn’t that too many students can’t afford to enroll. It’s that too many of the students who do enroll aren’t learning very much and aren’t earning degrees. For the average student, college isn’t nearly as good a deal as colleges would have us believe.
An interesting article from Kevin Carey on the legacy of Pell grants and how to reform...
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Who Can Name the Bigger Number? →
The key to the biggest number contest is not swift penmanship, but rather a potent paradigm for concisely capturing the gargantuan.
(via Give Me Something To Read)
Some people release concept albums; @alcurtizini has concept conversations.
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“Malthusians are always wrong about everything.”
– Brendan O’Neill
Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not... →
A new paper claims that, although different students do indeed have different learning styles, teachers shouldn’t bother trying to match their teaching style to their students’ learning style:
For a given lesson, one instructional technique turns out to be optimal for all groups of students, even though students with certain learning styles may not love that technique.
Of...
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Recently read: The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
Rather than try to write an inappropriately pithy review, let me just point you to the New York magazine roundtable.
adamisacson: “Being Ever Vigilant Against Terror” and “Disputing Who Gets to Go on Break Next” are hard to do simultaneously. The TSA is an elite corps.
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A sentence that always makes me laugh out loud, no matter how many times I read it:
The Dutch Ambassador rolled his eyes and tossed the waffle back over his shoulder—before it struck the ground, a stout, disconcertingly monkey-like dog sprang into the air and snatched it, and began to masticate it—literally—for the sound it made was like a homunculus squatting on the floor muttering,...