Ok, I think I had seen before somewhere that you can buy Uranium Ore on Amazon (just $29.95!)
What I find extra alarming is that Amazon is recommending that I buy it together with a book titled “Forbidden Lego: Build the models your parents warned you against.”
Also, see reviews of one gallon of millk. But be warned, if you try drinking milk while reading these reviews, it may leak out of your nose.
(via Scatterplot)
Michael Bérubé uncovers the ancient liturgical form for denouncing AND rejecting:
Famously tough but fair questioner: Abrenuntiatis farrakhanae? [Do you renounce Farrakhan?]
Liberal black officeseeker: Abrenuntio.
Famously tough but fair questioner: Et omnibus operibus eius? [And all his works?]
Liberal black officeseeker: Abrenuntio.
Famously tough but fair questioner: Et omnibus pompis eius? [And all his pomps?]
Liberal black officeseeker: Abrenuntio.
Someone has finally found the answer to a question that has long bothered me: Why is Garfield so widely carried by newspapers when it so horrible and unfunny?
The answer may surprise you: Garfield is actually a great, funny, poignant, and surrealist comic–right up there with Zippy the Pinhead–if you remove Garfield from it.
Now, could someone please explain the Family Circus?
As we contemplate moving sometime this summer, I occasionally wonder about how we should arrange our internet and telecoms. Right now we have a very basic landline with DSL through Verizon, which I’m mostly fairly happy with, except that we really make very little use of the landline, now that we each have cell phones. So sometimes I think maybe we should go with basic cable and internet in the next place. We don’t really do a lot of TV, either, but perhaps it have slightly more utility to us than the slightly superfluous phone line?
The trouble is, while I’m sure that Verizon is no angel in these matters, Comcast, one of the biggest cable internet providers, is just descpicable: they admitted today to paying and busing in 100+ people to “hold places” for Comcast employees at an FCC hearing in Cambridge today, effectively shutting out many citizens who had shown up to protest Comcast’s practices.
No. No way. This is unacceptable. I will not do business with a company that treats the public this way.
Come to think of it, that extra phone line might come in handy for calling my congresspeople.
I got to sign up for this course last week. I’m very excited–I’ve been wanting to go to one of Edward Tufte’s courses for a few years now. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he is a highly respected figure in the fields of information design and visual analysis, to name just a few (he’s also a noted critic of PowerPoint). He’s now in semi retirement, and does a lot of sculpture and other interesting things these days, as well as working on books and teaching these one day classes.
Getting to go to this course was a minor personal triumph at work –there was a last minute call that went out for proposals for professional development funds, and not only am I going to one of the classes up here in Boston, but there’s a whole contingent from the office in Chapel Hill going to one down there later in March.
Now, I doubt it will get people to drop powerpoint altogether, but maybe we’ll get slightly smarter use of it?
Hey, a windmill tilter can dream . . .
It’s a classic story of power and privilege: starting from nothing but piles of bricks, eight builders build a sprawling metropolis over several months. They develop systems of exchange and trade for valued resources, and, when the growing city starts to generate interest, they close ranks and use their consolidated power and control of resources to prevent the entry of additional builders, even while competing for resources among themselves.
But then tragedy strikes, leveling the city. Eventually, a new, more egalitarian community arises out of the ruins of Legotown.
Read the full account of lego construction in a grade-school level after-school program, and how the classroom teachers used it as an opportunity to examine issues of class, privilege, power, and hierarchy with 25 kids between 5 and 9 here: Why We Banned Legos.
(Via Geekdad.)
George Orwell’s critique of Rudyard Kipling came up in some other discussions in the blogosphere lately. This bit caught my eye:
All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.
He wrote that in 1942. It is still, I think, a pretty good summary of a core problem in the world today, although the means of accomplishing it have become much more complicated. There are now the beginnings of recognizing the standard of life problem, in the fair trade movement, but this has still rather a long way to go.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that hypocrisy is exactly the right word for playing to self-advantage under the rules of the existing world system, while using the advantage to advocate for changing those rules in ways that might be more fair. There are definite conflicts of interest in this arrangement, but I’m not certain that it’s a complete sham.
But then, I’m one of the “enlightened” ones.
The right word for the situation might be sin. But that’s a whole other essay, one that isn’t going to get written tonight.
(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal.)
Brilliant: Stuff White People Like
(Via …My heart’s in Accra.)
The technical term is apparently sleep regression. I have no idea why the parenting books all more or less totally fail to mention that there are recurring points at which any routine or regularity you might have had with your child’s sleeping pattern will disintegrate entirely, leaving you tearing your hair out in frustration.
Well, actually, it’s probably because parenting books largely make money selling people answers, and there’s a lot more money to be made by subtly implying Probable Parent Error than there is in saying “sucks, huh? But not much to do except ride it out.”
Fortunately, where the parental guilt publishing industry fails, the internet steps in with sanity and sympathy, if not salvation. Although Moxie comes pretty close, sometimes. For all you other newish parents out there:
Start here:
Ask Moxie: Q&A: What are sleep regressions, anyway?
Then proceed through these as needed:
Q&A: 9-month-old’s sleep has gone into the crapper
Q&A: 18-month sleep regression
The 2 1/2-3 year sleep regression
We are currently in the middle of this last one–I hope not literally. I really want it to mean that this sleep regression happens somewhere between 2 1/2 and 3, not that it lasts for six months, but sometimes that seems wildly optimistic.
He’s just not even remotely tired at 7 anymore.
Time to shift strategies, and bedtime, again.
Update: After finally falling asleep sometime after 9 last night, (taking me with him until 11) he was wide awake before 6 this morning.
This too shall pass.
Zag scowls over at me the other night at dinner and says, totally unprovoked:
“I don’t like you very much, Daddy.”
While I’m still reeling from that blow, he tries to land the sucker punch:
“I not your child.”
but he’s trying too hard, and he misses the mark. It comes off as funny.
Mostly.
Seriously, who writes his material? We have no idea where he gets some of these lines. None.