Concerning events in and around Anoka, MN
This is so depressing/infuriating that I actually recommend putting off reading until you have time to decompress afterward. I took it in two chunks.
“This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; 13-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
Ice Cube Celebrates Charles and Ray Eames (and Los Angeles)
In a world full of McMansions where the structure takes up all the land, the Eames made structure and nature one.
(via @gary_hustwit)
Safety is Serious
Are you being too safe or are you not being too safe enough?*
*Trick question: You’re already dead.
whoa
I just had a miniature explosion – the good kind – inside my head. I don’t quite know how to tell the story, but I’ll try to do it linearly. That’s usually a good strategy.
1st: I become an English teacher and rely almost completely on a book by Jim Burke to figure out what I’m doing. I think it’s a great book. I read every word, including the eloquent epigraph from one of Burke’s students:
Without companions, the world is a sea of stories with no one to listen.
2nd: I join Clusterflock.
3rd: I find that a certain Clusterflocker – Kelsey Parker – was the author of that epigraph.
4th: I hum “It’s a small world” to myself incessantly.
“Uncreative Writing”
Kenneth Goldsmith in The Chronicle Review:
For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
from the comments
I’m not a sweets person either. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Turkey at Thanksgiving. Rolls. That’ll work. The secret with the sledgehammer is to let it do the work for you. You hold yourself still and let the hammer go. You guide it, like what do they say about how to hold a bird? Then, once a crack begins to open up, you guide the chisel to the hairline and open it. It splits as effortlessly as butter. Move to a new location. Repeat.
headline of the day
Toddlers won’t bother learning from you if you’re daft
Early morning conversation
Daryl: Germans like bananas.
Cindy: How do you know?
Daryl: I saw a show about Germans and bananas.
A fine book by Robert Coles
I just finished The Call of Stories:Teaching and the Moral Imagination, and I recommend it.
I love this passage:
At one point he (William Carlos Williams) reminded us that an important part of our lives would be spent “listening to people tell you their stories”; and in return, “they will want to hear your story of what their story means.”
Vegan Black Metal Chef
Mike Lee on Victimhood
This is not going to be a good essay. This is going to be a terrible essay, which you should not read, for two reasons.
It deserves to be read anyway.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
To find Bin Laden, follow the birds
A class of undergraduates, using methods for tracking endangered species, predicted the whereabouts of Bin Laden to within 89.9%.
Gillespie’s class focuses on using remote sensing from satellites to study ecosystems, and one common challenge is finding where endangered species would be located within an ecosystem. As a class exercise, Gillespie introduced the Bin Laden search. The students used a geographical theory called “island biogeography” to home in on what turned out to be Bin Laden’s real hideout. Gillespie was so impressed by his students’ work, they published the findings in the MIT International Review.
(via @tcarmody or @mattyglesias)
the four stages of competence
1. Unconscious Incompetence
The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit.2. Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit.3. Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration.4. Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. He or she may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Plus, a possible fifth.
(thanks, Luke)
Making Sentences First
Before the essay, make students learn to write a great sentence.
This brief article by Andy Selsberg, in today’s New York Times, presents a fine approach to writing instruction. I have done similar things in my classes, assigning micro essays that have a strict limit of 250 words. I like to push students to be concise. Many of them suffer from habits of writing short choppy sentences or rambling patchwork sentences filled with comma splices, mixed tenses, and thoughts that don’t make it to the end of the journey. The first order of business is to get them to see that there is a problem, and that concentration can transform a smear of words into a structure that seems to hold up a world. As Selsberg notes, this method allows a teacher to “give everyone serious individual attention.” I often find that my own editing suggestions and comments on such brief essays exceed the number of words produced by the student.
Salman Khan’s TED talk
I don’t usually post TED talks here, because if I did, then I’d be tempted to post all of them.
This is an exception, because it absolutely needs to be heard:
EDIT: The Khan Academy website can be found here. Just read through the course listing if you want to be stunned.
What Flannery said
The vet charged $400 to tell me that Bruce needed to fart.
tweet of the day
Middle-class rabbits
1980s: During its examination of school learning materials, the London County Council in England banned the use of Beatrix Potter’s children’s classics The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from all London schools. The reason: the stories portrayed only “middle-class rabbits.”
Ya gotta wonder. Beatrix Potter “banned”? The skeptic in me wonders.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
from the comments
Along these lines, I just filled out a lengthy review form for a textbook published by a big publisher of university-level textbooks. The experience left me with the distinct impression that the publisher has not realized the doom that awaits their aims. But–perhaps they asked for opinions because they do see what lies ahead. It’s the students who have changed. They now always occupy several time phases at once and won’t sit still in the way that some books ask them to. In my view the future of publishing lies in youtube and books made as book art artifacts. I’m still a lover of paper, though, and I imagine I will go out that way.
from the spam
Some types of values are represented on a log scale. This means that the scale increases exponentially. Log scales can be identified by their grid lines that are at inconsistent spacing. This is normal.
How to Explain It to My Parents?
A documentary video series “in which 5 abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about,” by Lernert & Sander.
How to explain it to my parents – Bart Julius Peters from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.
Do your parents understand what you do? No matter what my current job title may be, my mom has a strange compulsion to tell people I’m an editor—one of the few jobs in publishing that I haven’t had and don’t want. Maybe I should make a video.
(Via Good, via somebody else. Perhaps it was you? @the99percent)
from the comments
Daryl, I know I’ve told you about my father’s disciplinary method from his one-room schoolhouse days in Tennessee. Now and then, he would wrestle the big farm boys at recess. He always won, even against the ones twice his size. Don’t you wish you could do that? My father said he never had a minute’s trouble with any of his students in any way, assignments, etc. They knew what would happen otherwise…
