I know of two meters to monitor the NYTimes Op-Ed page:
David Brooks Meter by Ben Smith at Politico
Thomas Friedman mideast-o-meter by Marc Tracy at The Scroll
Personally I'm not a fan of Friedman, especially his Free Trade ideas. Brooks, I am enjoying very much in the last two years and my mom recently sent me a hardcover copy of his Social Animal that I read through Chapter 4 so far and am liking.
Here's something that bears following up -- in a survey of 17,000 elections, the actual result and the poll result were compared by The 538 Blog. It's not a surprise that the polls are barely more accurate than a Farmer's Almanac weather prediction, but the actual numbers are interesting.
Forty percent of the time, the actual result was more than two standard deviations outside of the survey prediction! Recall from Statistics Class that a result two standeard deviations should only happen 5% of the time.
More at 538., an innovative statistics site that was originally focused on a crucial number of Congress seats, 538, and, like all good blogs, went from being one man's dream to being part of the big media scene: Nate Silver now blogs at the New York Times!
I think I just got 99 times better at finding things on my computer thanks to Indexed Tags and Preview Pane.
To get Preview Pane click the blue and white square in the upper right corner of Explorer (the name of the program Windows uses as a file browser window). Now every time you highlight a file, you see the first page of the file. For example I was trying to remember which test had a stern warning against cheating on the first page. Looks like it's not this one:
Preview pane is not cutting edge - my mom's old Windows 2000 computer uses it. I just didn't know where it was in Windows 7 for some reasons. My other discovery, tags with indexing is more profound.
Putting tags on my files will be enormously useful. In teaching I have increased my amount of spiral curriculum , which helps students learn but it has also increased the difficulty of finding all the mentions of a given topic. For example since I teach density in multiple chapters, I need to be able to go back later and see when I first mentioned density, what level I have tested density at, which homework examples I've recycled from the last time I taught density, etcetera. By tagging density throughout the year in every file that has it I make this easier. I make it more portable for when I teach a different version of chemistry too (New York State Regents, SAT, A.P., etc).
Windows won't find tags if you don't tell it to fully "Index" those parts of the drive. To do that, hit the blue "?" while you are in Explorer and look up Index FAQ's.
Then to tag, the Explorer file window has a space to add tags at the bottom every time you highlight a file.
One way to
Imagine the mutual thrill: I bumped into a woman at the church potluck who turned out to be a retired career librarian from the Mid-Manhattan NYPL branch, a veteran of one of the world's great libraries and an enthusiastic patron of that library. She was happy to talk and I was happy to listen; she had lots to lament and I had lots to ask.
Bitter at her forced retirement, one of this librarian's vindications was that The Nation published a critique last month of the NYPL's modernization strategy.
The trend at our library here, as elsewhere, is toward's "efficiency", a term which seems to mean hiring expensive conusultants who recommend firing the best staff members and comoebsating the CEO to the tune of $800,000 a year, plus perks, such as a Park Avenue apartment and scholarships for his children. There is a push at the NYPL to dissolve the rare and unique parts and turn it into a series of small, ordinary neighborhood lending libraries. The main building, the landmark structure built in the era of Carnegie philanthropy, is to be maintained as a visual tourist attraction but cleansed of its collections.
The Nation article is a little long. I plan to read it on the train home from the Riverside NYPL branch now.
Really interesting Korea images from 2010 at Bag News Notes.
The readers of BNN noted, regarding Clinton: "Exhausted and bored. One of the toughest and most unrewarding jobs on the planet and it's all about school boy bullies." and regarding the two soldiers, one from each country: "How these two can be inches apart while military tensions are high like this is mind-blowing."
My year end music list is from my iPod: the most played artists from 2011:
Last FM keeps track of my iPod stats at http://www.last.fm/user/atom_box If you are on Last.FM too drop me a line and we can be friends.
A close inspection of the hood reveals that Reed Richards is driving a Dodge in outer space in the second Fantastic Four movie.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a nice article debunking the use of college reputations.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell
One interesting thing about field trips at a New York City School is that we don't get anywhere on a school bus. Every trip I've ever gone on here has involved marching a big mass of tenth graders across the field and down to the subway.
Here we are last week, on our way to enjoy a day of ice skating at Bryant Park on 42nd Street in Manhattan. To get there we had to take two different rush hour trains, standing-room-only, including transferring at the very busy 6th Avenue stop on the L Train.
I really enjoyed teaching the fingerprint unit in Forensics Class recently.
There were many hands on things we were able to do, including one that I had always wondered about, how to 'dust' for a hidden fingerprint around a smooth surface like a doorknob or cookie jar. [That one it turns out is super easy to do at home and anyone with a child and time to spend should show the child how to do that because it's very satisfying. The only trick is you need a make up brush, borrowed from the lady of the house. Search on You Tube for any of their examples of how to do the dusting.]
(Thanks to Juan in my first period class for the fingerprint image at right, obtained by rubbing his finger with a pencil and then touching that to Scotch Tape.)
I invite you to try out below one of the questions I wrote for their exam. I was worried whether I had worded it clear and unambiguously {always tough when addressing to a mixed group of teens} but there were zero issues with wording. I will put the answers down in a post below this one. . .
Question #19.
In each blank write looks the SAME or looks DIFFERENT
It's time for vacation homework. My advanced chemistry class is going to have to do chemistry but they will also read and respond to Chapter 2 of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers', titled 'The 10,000 Hour Rule'. Hard work as a road to success is a great theme for a tenth grader and has been my theme in chemistry since the first day of September this school year.
Gladwell points out that the Beatles hit America in 1964. But they began playing in 1957! And they went through a period as the house band in a Hamburg caberet where they worked (brace yourself) 8 hours of playing onstage (brace again) for 7 days a week. For weeks at a time.
By the time the Beatles had their first burst of success they had played on stage an estimated 1200 times.
There are a few dozen periodic tables at this Ohio school's site.
Some are historic, others are modern and strange.
How should I clean my bathroom? Meg is a conservationist who permits only Bon Ami into the house but I want a clean white tub at home and believe that only Ajax-style bleach with cleanser can do the job. Can this marriage be saved?
enter OxyClean laundry supplement :
As a chemist I was skeptical that a bleach alternative would do the job in the bathroom but I tried it anyway: poke a hole in the cardboard side of the Bon Ami cannister, dump in Oxy Clean (sodium carbonate & sodium percarbonate), enough so that it is half an inch deep on the cleanser pile. Shake it all to mix it up. Now use the Bon Ami and a scrubbie to clean your sink, tub, or toiliet.
I did this yesterday, mixed up some 10:1 Bon Ami Cleanser andOxy Clean and I, The Skeptical Chemist, am pleased to announce that it worked! My tub is whiter even than Ajax makes it! Caveat: I would assume that sodium percarbonate probably decomposes when exposed to air so the cleanser will probably poop out before you finish the can. Either add more bleach alternative every 5 months or store it airtight somehow.
I've been busy this semester with a new class: Forensic science. The science of crime solving is my new strategy for spreading the good news of science to the portion of the student body who previously didn't want to buy what I'm selling.
So far it seems to be working; parents and other teachers report positive chatter about forensics outside of class.
I like forensics as a science class because it allows me to go broad, touching on all the different disciplines I like to teach. In a typical week I teach them biology, a little chemistry, a little physics, a LOT of math [a great achievement for this particular student audience], and even English and history.
Thursday and Friday we spent two days on the microscope looking at $35 worth of pollen bearing flowers that I bought in the neighborhood. Fairly cheap student light microscopes gave decent views for them to sketch the pollen of Lillies, daisies, gladiolas, and a few flowers that I haven't gotten the correct name for. If we had more time there are routes of inquiry I wish we could follow on this, because the flowers that DIDN'T yield viewable pollen interest me as much as the ones that did. (One of the main things they taught us in research at Ohio State is that a negative research result can be exploited just as well as a positive one if you're clever and curious.)
I didn't take any pollen pictures under the microscope yet but here is a picture of my own skin cells that I took Tuesday with a hand held camera and the microscope at 400x power:
A computer programmer and a painter both with the same understanding of abstraction!
That's abstractionist Georgia OKeefe on the right. Her great quote about abstraction is "Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. "
Edsger Dijkstra quote on left is from Linfo. For the photo on the right, I meant to put an example of GOK doing her abstract painting but how great was it to find an abstraction of the woman herself that proves the sentiment of her quote, above. So we have instead Stiglitz taking the photo of her abstracted neck (from here). A painting by O'Keefe at her abstract extreme is here inspired by a view from her window.
Because I have NYC in my tag-cloud at the right of this page Two Dishes got a huge traffic spike on September 11th:
I have no secrets from the web server at www.last.fm; it uploads my iPod usage each week. So I was amused but not surprised when the web page for Last serenaded me with a 3 minute clip of Nixon's Vietnam is Over speech from 1973. Here's the web page, suggesting I might also enjoy similar artists, like Spiro Agnew for example, and asking me whether I would like to start a radio station called Richard Nixon Radio.
I ended up at the opening weekend of The Lapsburgh Layover only by the strong solicitation of a sidewalk barker earlier in the summer -- probably the best sidewalk promoter ever.
Less play than immersive dinner theater [though few in the audience ate the bizarre food] Welcome to Lapsburgh takes at least two surprising turns in the course of the evening. First, in the 'Arrivals Area' on the way to our seats we had to pass through an immigration & customs line where the customs officer presided over a bag of siezed hand tools, handguns, handbags, a bag of marijuana, and a shrink-wrapped piano.
Later, in the airport lounge the play itself, initially threatening to be a mildly amusing Guy Noir type of Garrison Keillor corny play, became very funny, proving itself closer to the skill of The Firesign Theater in writing and delivery. There was also a later twist involving a plague of frogs that I won't reveal here.
The two scenes that made me feel like I got my money's 'worth were Mickey with the bartender (right before he dies) and Mickey with Mr Bigshot Mayor (before he dies and after he dies, if that makes any sense -- see the play!).
It's a play with no neuroses or avarice. The characters are silly but also have a simple wide-eyed sincerity that make you like all of them and so at the end of the night we left the theater feeling like we'd spent the evening with some interesting new third world Lapsburghian friends.
The only reason we knew about the play was that weeks before I had been given a flyer on the street in the Lower East Side during Fringe Festival and the flyer was so unusually shaped that for the rest of the evening I kept it and everyone kept commenting on it. It looked just like a boarding pass for an airline. At home the flyer got put up on the fridge where the boarding pass appearance commanded so much attention that we eventually bought tickets for the play.
Web surfing is almost non-existant now for me. I only use the internet for extremely utilitarian purposes. I miss the old days when I would make the rounds, follow specific places hang out on certain sites. Now its used for checking grades and writing email.
You can see what your most frequented sites are by going in Firefox to History/Show all history/More than 6 months. Then in the column of "Number of Visits" click the top to sort the visits.
The only interesting sites I see in my top 40 are ones that I forced myself to watch by making them my home page at various times.
The easiest one-stop way to get LOTS of coverage of Tour de France and Women's World Cup 2011 is to go to The Guardian UK.
The Tour is being led by a Norwegian named Thor, pronounced "tore" (no "H" sound). (standings here) (Guardian coverage here) They racers have already ridden almost 400 miles in 4 days. Over mountains! I can't even imagine.
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There are still games to see in the World Cup which has been going on for a week or so.
The Women's World Cup is still choosing which teams will go on to the bracket stage. Here is the bracket so far:
The Women's World Cup finishes on July 17th. It is actually easy to find tv coverage of most of the games on ESPN2. Standings here. Guardian coverage here.
On Soundcheck (WNYC's afternoon talk show about music), John Schaefer, described Abigail Washburn's instrument as "looking like a banjo on performance enhancing drugs. Almost like Barry Bond's head." I had to go look up both to see if the comparison made any sense:
AP photo by Eric Risberg via LAist
Washburn photo from KM's Live Music Shots:
I finally sat down and tried cutting up a computer laptop power supply and dangling the leads into some salt water. I clipped graphite on the ends first. It works great. I can take this to school now and use it as a demo, with something more benign, like H2SO4 or MgSO4 in the water. (NaCl gives irritating NaOCl or possibly Cl2, not sure which -- no good for school).
Below is a video file.
I sprinted for 150 feet alongside a rat last night, sometimes passing him up. It was really, really cool. They're usually so evasive, this came as a sort of ambition realized. I feel like I dreamed it. I'll have to ask Meg when she gets up if it was real.
(animated .gif by Karrakas)
My new Shakespeare project for this year was King Lear. Coming on the heels of last year's discovery of MacBeth, I set to work discovering this other, older king, one who gives not takes. My Lear year culminated last night in seeing it on stage in a state of the art, touring production with an all name cast.
It was emotionally demanding. I lived in despair for the last two acts, having the sensation for a good 30 minutes that I was sliding down a slate roof, straining for traction with my fingernails and arriving at the end, not a precipice but something more like abandonment. Leaving the theater I felt a little ill and wanted no more mention of the characters or themes. I was Leared out.
Now, the next morning I can write a little about it. Hopefully further little blossoms of reflection will continue to sprout for a few days.
I'm new to King Lear and had prepared by reading only the first three acts in a heavily annotated Sparks Notes edition and then hearing those same first three acts on my iPod a few times. I left the last two acts undiscovered though so that in the watching I could have some motivation and involvement in their discovery.
Main memories:
1) Commenting here not on the particular actors but on the roles as written, Cordelia and Lear didn't look all that fun to play. Cordelia is just a virtuous character but I didn't come away with any deep revelations more than her virtue, honesty and loyalty, qualities all stellar but uninteresting to see here. Blame the age of irony? Cordelia's suffering was played too straight, pedantically instructive.
2)Lear himself, the role, not the actor, too, seems less interesting than the roles around him. His lines are relatively unintersting taken as individual bits. I suspect what is worthy in contemplating the character King Lear is what you come up with when you contemplate his motivations. You try to read between the lines during his bizarre decisions in the First Act and then for the rest of the play are left evaluating the gap between how he feels versus how you would feel if him. The regret and confusion of the lost and stumbling King felt to me like the whorling of my 2AM staring at the ceiling self reevaluating a job interview or a botched romantic encounter.
3) There was great physical acting from The Fool. As he talked he would juggle imaginary balls, he would mimic the other actors, he would hold a pose against the floor or wall that emphasized his disrespect for who he was addressing. With regards to Goneril he spoke while refusing to look at her, or he evaluated her with a judgemental gaze, or he showed her his bottom as she passed by.
4) Body language was great too from the scoundrel bastard Edmund. He slouched deep as the shape of a question mark when in the presence of the ascendant daughters or dukes and stood open, chest thrust out when relaying his private thoughts of ambition and complaining of his bastard baseness. His slouch pose, whether in fawning or in truly felt bastard shame was so deep that his hands hovered just a few inches above his knees sometimes, looking at the floorboards while people addressed him -- really dramatic.
5) The actors last night all seemed a bit too bellowing for my taste. I've only seen Shakespeare on stage a half dozen times but this cast had the most yelling quality. Only in the last third, spinning off into daisy plucking dementia did the King settle into something quieter, a lost, spacy, wistful delivery. And he was deliberately quiet in Act III; wandering lost in the storm, they actually had him whispering (into a microphone, luckily) his lines, momentarily hushing the wind that had left "hardly a bush for miles around".
6) The plucking of Gloucester's eyes was done gleefully by the ascendent Duke, who made us all gasp when he noisily flung the second eyeball, it making a wet thud as it ricoceted off of the wall, two streams of blood covering Gloucester's eyes and white shirt for his remaining scenes.
On the whole it was a great, unpleasant evening at the theater, which means, since it's Lear, we can judge the production a success.
The tragedies, King Lear and MacBeth left me hopeless, whereas ones like Othello and Hamlet are alwayslike dreams I can imagine dwelling inside, subconsciously thinking that with so many sympathetic characters maybe they'll turn out alright.
Poor Tom:
There's an abler local blog review than mine at BedStuy Patch.
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