Including this
Month: April 2007
Outing
Last Saturday (21 April) the folks and I took J, K, and L on an outing to the old homestead.
(The somewhat cheesy music is Brian Eno, surprisingly enough. I used it because of the title: "Deep Blue Day.")
My New Hero
How easily are people manipulated? How quickly can someone change a complete stranger's will? Just how fragile are we, mentally speaking? A few videos from skeptic Derren Brown shows just how easily someone with skills can manipulate people.
- Cold Reading/Predictability
- Instant Conversion Part I
- Instant Conversion Part II
- Russian Scam
- How mediums work
- Voodoo
But by far, the best (a tie):
The Laugh
It’s something every parent eagerly awaits, I suppose — early laughs. Unlike early “smiles,” which are often the result of baby’s gas, laughs come from a sense of humor, and not a pressurized digestive system.
L has been laughing here and there, but only for a few moments, and then it’s just smiles. Recently, however, she has begun laughing for extended periods of time. Not extended enough for all of us huddled around her, but more than a few isolated seconds.
Sort of… (Redux)
Not only did I not provide the link to the video the first time. It turned out that the video hadn’t even uploaded properly.
Chinese Math
America, in general, is lagging far behind a lot of the world regarding education, and this is particularly true with science and math.
Who’s ahead of us? It might be easier to ask who isn’t ahead of us.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese, in their quest for world domination (Mwa-ha-ha!), not only have cheap labor on their side; they also have a higher level of mathematics achievement, I’d venture.
The BBC recently put up two questions from two tests: one, a test intended for first-year university students in English schools; the other, a question from a Chinese pre-entrance exam.
Here’s the English problem:
That’s pretty simple. Even I, having used no geometry for close to twenty years now, can do that with no problems.
Here’s the Chinese problem:
Sort of…
There's a definite developmental order almost all infants follow. Sitting comes before standing. Crawling comes before walking. Babbling comes before talking. Liquids come before solids. It's all very regimented in the child's development.
Or so I thought.
L has been challenging that preconception, though. Now, the Girl absolutely and very resolutely does not want to sit. She wants to stand. Sort of. We've been burping her simply by setting her on bottom and letting the pressure that exerts on her belly (when she leans over slightly) force out all the offending air. Now, she simply extends her feet when we move her from a horizontal to vertical position, and it's virtually impossible to get her simply to sit.
Sitting is one thing. This is quite another.
Update I somehow didn't provide the link to the video. That's been corrected.
Homestead
Over the weekend, my folks and I took K and J on a quick tour of Bristol -- my hometown. As Steve Earle sing's, "Ain't nothin' brings ya down like your hometown." Talk about making someone feel old. The realization that what happened at that street corner or in that church building was not merely a couple of years ago but more like fifteen or twenty plants my feet solidly in my mid-thirties.
We began the weekend with a trip to Natural Tunnel.
Then it was off to Bristol, stopping at South Holston Dam first:
By the time we got to Bristol, we simply decided to stay in the car and show J downtown (such as it is -- though much more lively than when I lived there) and the old house.
“Background Check? We don’t need no stinkin’ background check”
Cho Seung-hui went through the mandatory background check before buying the guns he used in his rampage. No criminal record, no problem.
Yet...
- He'd been admitted to a mental health care unit within the last eighteen months.
- Teachers and students alike commented on his disturbing behavior.
- Complaints had been made about his behavior.
- A professor had raised concerns about the content of his writing.
But what kind of a background check could have discovered all this?
If if someone has recently received significant mental health care in the same state he's trying to buy a gun, it's conceivable that that information could be available. But since there's no national database of such information, all one would have to do is cross the state line.
Do we want a national database to record that kind of information? I don't think I do.
Do we want to have background checks that include interviews with former educators? Is that even feasible?
Just what kind of background check can stop someone like this from getting a gun? The only solutions I can think of involve national databases and inquiries into very personal information.
Note to Self