Two Dishes But To One Table

Like Putting Your Eyeballs into Warm Honey

Two things about Magic Eye Pictures:
1) About 70% of my friends say they hate them.
2) Magic Eye images strongly and surprisingly relax me more than a dog that's getting scratched between the ears -- not sure why. My bro-in-law gave me a calendar of them and on the back page it has actual testimonial from optometrists confirming this beneficial eye effect.
3) I figured out how to make an ultra low-grade, barely passable flat Magic Eye, by telling my UNIX terminal window to fill up with zeros.   I'll admit this particular Magic Eye is, oxymoronically 2-D but the font on terminals has a little dot in the center of the zero, so I feel some kind of Tibetan transcendence, staring at the screen.

Real Magic Eye images here.
Real mean Magic Eye image here.
Let me know if you end up building your own stereogram here.

I Still Think 1988 Is Pretty Likely

I would like to propose a law.  Every time someone wishes to publicly declare that they are making public policy or Mideast wars based on THEIR interpretation of a religious prophecy, they must append  a list of apocalyptic disclaimers.  Just as cigarette packs, beer cans, and pharmacological ads are required to give caveats, so too must the Branch Davideans, Hal Lindsey's, and the entire Left Behind crew. 

At the very least, the American Fundamentalists would be required to state
"1.  We are following Hal Lindsay ("The Late Great Planet Earth").  2. He said it would come in 1988" 3.  It didn't.  4.  We would still  like America to spend taxes and lives in the belief that Hal Lindsay is still correct."

This would include people from Ronald Reagan's cabinet.

Chris Nelson writes "James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under the Reagan administration, felt that there was no need to protect the environment because the end was coming SOON! In 1981, he told a Congressional committee, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

Some info on the Christian-Zionist voting block at Wikipedia and Jack Chick Tracts

No Need to Reinvent the (flashcard) Wheel

Sometimes the web works the way you want it.  For instance, today I found flashcards galore. Flashcard Exchange is an extremely "Web 2.0" site that has scads of student-authored mnemonic aids for students of -- anything.  Maybe you'd like to memorize:

Perl programming syntax
Klingon Language
military protocol
organic chemistry
math
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury
as well as, of course, tons of medical school, anatomy, architect license, New York State Bar exam, and almost any professional exam you can think of.

Instructions (for the impatient): At any of the links above, click on "Study" at the upper left.  Once the flashcards appear, mouse or keyboard the (f)orward, (b)ack, (f)lip, (x)got it wrong! links at the left margin. 

The cards can even (allegedly) be printed out.  Okay, gotta go memorize some Elven verb declensions now...

Uneven

My right side is weaker than my left.  I discovered this when I found I could do this morning exercise in one direction better than the other direction. Asymmetry in muscle groups is surprising.

By the way, if you're looking for a bunch of workout recipes, I recommend the book shown above.  It's called Morning Strength Workouts by Annette Lang. It was at Barnes and Noble.

But What's a Henway?

You know, just when I have begun to assume that the standardized state physics tests for New York High Schools are completely devoid of anything artful, crafty, or involving true thinking, comes this charming question, from the January 24, 2008 Regents Physics Exam.

#37   The weight of a chicken egg is most nearly equal to:
(a) 0.001 newton    (b) 0.01 newton    (c) 1 newton    (d) 100 newtons

Hens are funny to me -- almost a sight gag.  But my further, pedagogical appreciation of this question, is that it probes the student's number sense, estimation ability, and back-of-the-envelope thinking, pet topics of mine. More importantly, near and dear to any teacher, it asks the student "Did anything we studied in the last 200 days make enough sense to you that you can connect even the tiniest bit of it to your 'real' life?"

A plain old English analogy of the above question would be: "Does an American quarter weigh 1 ounce, 1 pound, or one ton?". 

Anyway, if you are a nerd, masochist, or just bored, take the test here. Learn more about the titular Henway here.

Quote of the Day: My Sister

"I can't find a Baby Jesus that won't melt."

(The context was an Epiphany inspired  "el pastel de tres reys" baking project...)

Gallup Poll: Partisan Gap on Global Warming Grows

Source: Gallup