Friday Ephemera (661)
The machine uprising, day 5. (h/t, Emil) || The machine uprising, day 6. || Someone else’s dinner. || Arsehole detected. || A map of undersea cables. || A triumph of elastication. || Combat aircraft concepts. (h/t, Things) || Courtesy in odd places. || Suburban scenes. || When you need nine hours of cassette-play. || Music typewriter, circa 1950s. || Your expectations of punctuality are “white supremacy,” and sexist, and also homophobic, you bigot. || His incriminating browser history is probably worse than yours. || Hers, I dare say, is bigger than yours. || Bit snug, some chafing. || Couch glider. || Assorted German pipe organs. || Pick your champion. || The progressive retail experience, part 452. || Passenger came prepared. || When you defer to the lie, complications will ensue. || And finally, with some patience, it takes a village to park a car.
And yes, by all means, follow me on Twitter.
If this doesn’t save the Red Sea corals, nothing will.
To run a business, you need employees who show up.
Whether in the workplace or in social life, avoid those who cannot be bothered to show up on time.
He’s quite endearing…or recounting tales…
I’m only 3 minutes in and must agree.
If this doesn’t save the Red Sea corals, nothing will.
Appropriate response.
red sea corals: watched with the sound off, is hilarious
red sea corals: watched with the sound off, is hilarious
And has been pointed out, the uniformity of opinion at Davos should set of warning bells: These people are not getting together to find answers; they already agree on essentially everything. The meetings are not about acqiring knowledge but rather wielding power (and jacking each other off with compliments about how “wise” and “enlightened” they all are.)
Heh: “Every STEM degree field has a sub-field within it for people with severe mental illnesses. Then in the Humanities you have sub-fields for people who aren’t mentally ill.”
This is hopeful, but will the Government-Academic-Corporate Complex even allow discussion of it?
…will the Government-Academic-Corporate Complex even allow discussion of it?
Probably not because that would require retooling of the universities which don’t have anyone qualified to teach that to the dimwits in the education programs, and the current crop in the schools generally don’t have the skills or experience either.
which don’t have anyone qualified to teach that to the dimwits in the education programs
which argues for getting rid of teacher “credentialing”. There are teachers with all manner of busywork certificates who can’t handle or shouldn’t be anywhere near a room full of 10-year-olds and a lot of retirees with only a high school diploma who would rock the classroom with the skills and talents honed over decades.
We need to summarily replace those purple-haired, pronoun obsessed activists with people who haven’t set foot in a classroom for decades.
which argues for getting rid of teacher “credentialing”.
Hear, hear! Schools of education only do harm.
Victor Davis Hanson, talking about his longtime involvement with Hillsdale College, said that there are a growing number of schools which reject the idea that a teaching degree or teaching certificate is necessary to teach and that it is better to have a real degree in the field that one will teach plus maybe a few classes in teaching techniques.
We need to summarily replace those purple-haired, pronoun obsessed activists with people who haven’t set foot in a classroom for decades.
First we need to yeet all the purple-haired, pronoun obsessed activists and other bozos in the hierarchy and faculty of the teaching colleges who insist on grinding out people with Ed.Ds and other pompously inflated degrees who grind out more purple-haired, pronoun obsessed activists posing as teachers, excuse me, “educators”.
It appears to be the only non-disrupted supply chain left.
Farnsworth: ed schools and schools of social work, among others, require loyalty oaths do DIE and leftist ideology. Almost impossible to go there as a conservative.
normal women do not take selfies in the loo
Kinda do.
Meanwhile, in the world of Ottawa’s elementary school teachers
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I now live in Mexico.
“Is my uterus a cultural construct? I think I should be told.”
Almost impossible to go there as a conservative.
The key word being almost. DeSantis may be successful in the “takeover” (leftist MSM, (BIRM), media term) of the New College of Florida and integrating it into the UF system.
May not be a big deal in the grand scheme initially, but The Long March begins with a single step.
DeSantis may be successful in the “takeover” (leftist MSM, (BIRM), media term) of the New College of Florida and integrating it into the UF system.
IIRC, he also is recruiting vets without credentials to become teachers and that caused massive tantrums in the teachers’ unions.
“You actually have to be nice, be non-judgmental, and have a nice personalty”, just like this fetching lass, if you want to be a sex worker.
A period is a state of mind.
Arethea Franklin causes harm to “trans” people.
This young lady discusses the work week.
Kids, this is why you actually study at school.
Conan, what is best in life?
To crush the leftists, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their pundits.
This young lady discusses the work week.
Not sure if that’s sincere or a parody. It’s hard to tell nowadays.
“You actually have to be nice, be non-judgmental, and have a nice personalty”…
It’s a niche market.
There is a lot wrong with modern education, but this is one of the biggest issues.
Problem solving is not a learned skill, and 100% certainly it is not a teachable one.
Think of the analogous situations.
How do you teach a goalkeeper situational awareness? You can’t. You can give some guiding principles, review mistakes, and after that it is practice, practice, practice. You can’t just take some random tall person, get them fit, teach them how to be situationally aware and expect them to be a good goalie. That’s not how it works.
How do you teach a budding composer to write good hooks? Would anyone seriously even try? Some people have a gift, and after that it is practice, practice, practice.
All problem solving is context dependent. It does not transfer across realms.
A brilliant engineer, able to come up with ingenious solutions, is reliant on a depth of knowledge that allows them to reason within what is possible. Take them into an area of ignorance, say writing stories, and they flounder.
Meanwhile taking a brilliant writer, showing them a few basic coding techniques, and then expecting them to solve programming problems would be an exercise in futility.
If schools want to teach “problem solving”, whatever that is, and “making good decisions” (really??) then they need to teach a topic in sufficient depth to give the students the tools and knowledge to work with. And lots and lots of practice.
You know, like traditional schooling did.
Focusing schooling on problem solving and creativity is to the detriment of actually learning anything. It is a pernicious idea, and needs to be crushed.
We have a generation of students who get into the workforce and actually believe that their ideas, based on no knowledge whatsoever, will be valued from the moment that they enter the door and that the ability to “work as a team”, as opposed to work as a functioning part of a team, is useful.
I’m on a rant now and you can’t stop me!
Who the hell employs people out of school to solve their problems?
Here fresh engineer, design an innovative bridge for me. Here brand new IT guy, design our town’s traffic light system. Here burger flipper, explain how I can improve sales. You don’t get to that level for many years, after learning the basics of the problems in the field.
I have worked for thirty years, and only in the last ten have I started to have genuine problems to solve. They are invariably very specialist and technical, because that is what I am good at. Those problems require a depth of technical knowledge, sufficient that I can’t even explain what they mean to most people. I don’t do people problems very much.
Before that I did analysis and breaking down the problems into component parts, for which my education had prepared me adequately. But I did not get to make the decisions.
My boss is a master at solving people problems, but beyond inept at technical matters. It matters not a jot. He learned how to solve problems involving people over his thirty year career too. Do you think having done “problem solving” as school would deal you with how to deal with underperforming staff?
Problem solving and making good decisions require knowledge, experience and a bit of natural ability in whatever field. I don’t do people very well. My boss doesn’t do technical at all. And no-one cares, because we each do our own thing well.
A period is a state of mind.
So if I understand this correctly a period is more than just punctuation.
Arethea Franklin causes harm to “trans” people.
The ignorance is so strong in these people. They don’t even know there are living people who actually wrote the song that they could make ridiculous charges against.
This young lady discusses the work week.
Or we could all live in mom’s/grandmom’s windowless basement and make tiktok videos.
“Hers is bigger” . About 30 years ago I was with a group lobster picking in Provincetown harbor (MA). One guy came up with a bug even bigger than this. Skipper estimated age at 75 years. He said it would make terrible eating. We took it to the town aquarium, and a week later it was put back in the harbor.
Pro tip: do not dive in 5° C water in a rented wetsuit.
@Chester Draws
I’ve been a secondary math teacher for 30 years. Your comments could not be any more spot on. The establishment math gods have written endless manifestos lauding the importance of “problem solving” and the “mathematical practices” as decreed by NCTM et al. I’ve taught classes of high school students who have no clue how to convert fractions, decimals, and percents. I’ve tutored college students who can’t state the properties of a rectangle.
On tattoos and attractiveness.
Link updated.
One more time.
On tattoos and attractiveness.
From the comments…
Right, following the trendy trends is independent and brave, got it.
Heh. Yes, even when the thing was published, in 2007, that would have made me laugh. Not a fan of tattoos myself, but whatever they do, they don’t signal that.
Meta’s Oversight Board ruled that the old policy of barring women’s breasts was discriminatory to gender-fluid people.
However, real women still cannot flash theirs unless they claim to be an LSMFT+ person, so IOW it is OK, as it always has been, for men to flash theirs.
They are going to assume gender from a quick look at at a photo? That is almost as bad as OB docs guessing a baby’s sex and gender. I am literally shaking.
TRANS KNOCKERS ARE REAL KNOCKERS.
TRANS KNOCKERS ARE REAL KNOCKERS.
ZOMG, you are right, thank you for educating me about my transphobia, I denounce myself and after regrooving, I will do better.
Meanwhile at the State Department, Times New Roman is cancelled.
San serif typefaces were developed to make large blocks of text more readable, so I am not sure how a sans makes the Department “more accessible”, though I guess the Large Type Reader’s Digest 14 point is meant to eliminate sightism against those who have to use reading glasses.
On tattoos and attractiveness.
Any similar studies of tattoos on men? I assume that the social stigma is less but not non-existent. And then there is the question of facial and neck tattoos, which seem to be most closely associated with socially undesirable characteristics. And even more so, body piercings, ear plugs, etc.
We have a generation of students who get into the workforce and actually believe that their ideas, based on no knowledge whatsoever, will be valued from the moment that they enter the door
I did once have a personal encounter with that attitude, to the detriment of my development team.
How do you teach a goalkeeper situational awareness? You can’t. You can give some guiding principles, review mistakes, and after that it is practice, practice, practice.
A lot of that learning–situational awareness, problem solving, etc–takes place at the subconscious level: Scientists and engineers and writers will tell you that, based on their own experience, much of that thinking takes place at a level which is inaccessible to conscious scrutiny. In fact, many will say that the best solution when they are stuck is to sleep on a problem and let their subconscious work more.
Meanwhile at the State Department, Times New Roman is cancelled….San serif typefaces were developed to make large blocks of text more readable, so I am not sure how a sans makes the Department “more accessible”
A two-fold justification: First, that studies show sans serif fonts to be somewhat easier to read. Second, that the problem with serifs is exacerbated for some people with visual, cognitive, or learning disabilities.
The first is what I have been hearing from Europeans for decades in response to my preference for the elegance of serifs: Sans serif fonts are the norm in Western Europe specifically because of readability.
The second is new to me, but unsurprising: Sooner or later everything becomes a DEI cause.
The change was recommended by the secretary’s office of diversity and inclusion, but the decision has already ruffled feathers among aesthetic-conscious employees who have been typing in Times New Roman for years in cables and memos from far-flung embassies and consulates around the world.
“I’ve known for my entire life that I’ve wanted children,” said Danny Wakefield, who gave birth in 2020.
Not sure that explains all the extra steps she took.
Bearing in mind her physical appearance the donor during that 2020 one night stand must have exhibited a cross between m butterfly levels of inexperience and nth degree beer goggles.
Not sure that explains all the extra steps she took.
You must say “they”, not “he” or “she”. I won’t warn you twice.
[ Glares in Maoist indignation. ]
I’ll just leave this here.
I’ll just leave this here.
Not totally unrelated, things did not go to plan.
Ah, modern wooing.
First, that studies show sans serif fonts to be somewhat easier to read.
Same typo I made, serif typefaces are easier to read, and why they were developed.
Sans serif are easier for things like captions, subtitles, display (why most display typefaces are sans), and similar non-large text blocks.
Of course with this present crop of semi-literates who can neither write nor read cursive, big block letters might be easier for someone to read to them.
Same typo I made, serif typefaces are easier to read, and why they were developed.
Well, the claim is that recent studies show that sans serif typefaces are a bit easier to read:
“Several experts said the research now leans strongly toward the conclusion that sans serif fonts are more readable, but there is a decades-long history of disagreement.”
But I suspect that much of the pressure to change is aesthetic, as also reflected in the evolution of corporate logos from complex to hyper-simplified. I’m sure that everybody reading this blog can think of examples. Right off the top of my head, I can think of a few local banks whose old logos were complex and represented their origins, but which are now so simplified as to erase all that history and mean nothing beyond “this is us”. So: A generations-long push from hyper-modern designers, which has now been joined by advocates of the learning-disabled.
“In recent years, the decorative “wings” and “feet” of serif fonts have gone out of fashion in design circles and consumer brands have opted for cleaner sans-serif fonts in their logos such as Helvetica. “Millennials Have Killed the Serif,” hailed a New York magazine headline in 2018.”
Happy Dead Communist Day: Lenin died 99 years ago.
For the State Department, Comic Sans would be more appropriate.