Mosquito fish do as well as college students at a basic math test.
I think, but am not sure, that this is part of the academic bubble.
And on a related question, why do we study math and the Brits study maths? And what do the mosquito fish call it?
Category Archives: Social Commentary
A Much-Discussed Paula Deen Recipe
It’s not for beginners, though. Don’t try it unless you know how to use a can opener.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Be sure to read the comments, which overfloweth with snark.
I Don’t Love Lucy
And I’m gratified to see that Lileks shares my opinion:
It’s not funny. I’m sorry to Lucy fans, but it’s not. When Lucy and Ethel start to wail, when Reeky gets an idea and decides to foool Loocy, and Fred pitches in – gawd, it’s contrived and strained.
I laughed at it when I was a kid, but I got over it by the time I was eight or so. One can only watch shallow, star-worshipping empty-head ditzes so much. She made me embarrassed for womankind.
Deferred Gratification
What’s the present value of a future marshmallow? Even five minutes into the future?
It’s made all the harder of course, not just by the fact that kids have lower impulse control, but by the fact that a minute lasts forever when you’re a kid.
I also think that this is a parable for our current economic straits.
If Aliens Exist
…they probably want to destroy us. As Glenn notes, it’s not a new thought. And it’s why we shouldn’t shout.
Deinstitutionalization
I wrote yesterday that there are no acceptable changes to current law that would have prevented Saturday’s horrific events, but Clayton Cramer says that perhaps there is one:
In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.
I will not claim that the public mental hospitals back then were wonderful places. They were chronically underfunded from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, conditions in some were the shame of civilized people everywhere. (Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.) But it did mean that many people who were mentally ill were either locked up (where they did not have access to guns, knives, or gasoline) or at least not sleeping on a park bench, catching pneumonia.
A large fraction of the “homeless” population are people who in earlier times would have had “homes,” though little or no freedom. But it’s not clear the degree to which people who are slaves to the roiling and chaotic chemical impulses of their brains can be said to be free, either, and some percentage of them endanger the rest of us, as we saw. But speaking as someone with a history of this in his family, it’s a very tough problem.
[Tuesday morning update]
“Politically incorrect” thoughts from Dr. Helen.
[Bumped]
On The Self Indulgence
…of the Tucson media orgy. Claire Berlinski puts it in perspective.
Intern Of The Year
This guy should get a raise:
“When I heard gunshots, my first instinct was to head toward the congresswoman to make sure that she was okay,” Hernandez said in an interview with ABC’s Christine Amanpour Sunday. “Once I saw that she was down, and there were more than one victim, I went ahead and started doing the limited triage that I could with what I had.”
Hernandez, who is 20, told ABC that he simply “shut off all emotion.” “I knew I wouldn’t be good to anyone if I had a breakdown,” he recalled. He noted that he went to help because he had “limited experience in triage and training.”
He lifted up Giffords’ head, because he feared she might choke on her own blood, and used smocks from the grocery store’s meat department as a makeshift bandages for her and other victims.
Giffords, he says, was alert, but couldn’t talk.
“‘Just grab my hand to let me know that you’re okay,'” he recalls telling the injured lawmaker.
According to Hernandez, she squeezed his hand, and he didn’t let go, riding with her in the ambulance to the hospital, where she was rushed into emergency surgery.
“It was probably not the best idea to run toward the gunshots,” he told the Arizona Republic. “But people needed help.”
You never know how you’re going to react to such events, but he definitely performed far above and beyond.
A Star Trek Fan Survey
Virginia Postrel needs some data for a book she’s working on.
The Appalling Judgement Of Some Voters
Thoughts on John Edwards’ latest escapades:
There’s a saying that when Republicans pick a presidential candidate, they fall in line; when Democrats pick a presidential candidate, they fall in love. The Edwards saga reminds us that while we may think we know the figures we vote for, support, donate to, and volunteer to help elect, we generally don’t really know them. You know your spouse, your family, and your friends. Beyond that, you know the face that someone presents to the world. There’s probably quite a bit of angst, or regret, or pain, or rage, or zaniness or obsessions or any one of a million quirks and traits and secrets behind your neighbor’s pleasant smile. This doesn’t mean that everyone’s a ticking time bomb; it just means we should be cautious before we put anybody up on a pedestal. This particularly applies to the realm of politics, a field that tends to attract the ambitious, the narcissistic, the power hungry, and those who find it hard to resist the notion that they’re “special” and that the rules don’t really apply to them.
Back when OJ Simpson was first accused of murdering his wife and her friend, I recall how many people were shocked. I wasn’t. That is, I didn’t think of OJ Simpson as a thug, but I didn’t think of him as much of anything except a football player and rental-car salesman, so when I heard that he’d done this, I just said, “Meh.” I was also completely unshocked when Edwards was revealed to be a total sleaze bag (not to insult actual bags of sleaze). And in this case, I would have expected it, because he always came across that way to me.