ThTh5: I'm old enough that I predate the vaccines for measles and such. I have trouble with the 1 in 5 kids requiring hospitalization. My recollection from the time is that everyone got measles at some point early in grade school, and no one went to the hospital with it. Is there a difference because the kids getting it now are older than my age cohort were when we got it? Certainly age makes a difference with how serious mumps can be.
Americans are just really weird on math. For most of the post-World War period, it was generally assumed people were either good at math or not good at math and no amount of teaching would help the former.
At some point after I put my wife in memory care last year, I started drawing again. It seems to be helpful as therapy. Talking to friends, family, and neighbors and mentioning it, the most common single thing I've heard is, "I can't draw at all."
Suppose that one of our goals from the K-12 public system was that every person be able to sketch a recognizable intersection with buildings, cars, people. The same way that we have a goal that every person be able to complete an individual tax form by hand, sans pages and pages of tables that do the division for them.
How would we get people through that? We'd teach useful tools like one, two, and three point perspective. (We teach the particular long division algorithm we do because hundreds of years of experience shows it minimizes the number of errors people make.) But mostly it would be rote: practice, practice, practice.
I started a comic drawing class through the local parks and recreation yesterday evening. Most of the participants are much younger than I and are early in the learning process. One of the exercises the instructor had us do was to draw as many shapes as we could think of. I noticed that everyone but me was drawing flat shapes: square, circle, triangle, etc. I was drawing 2D representations of 3D shapes: box, cylinder, ring, disk.
The rings are obviously a confusion with Saturn. OTOH, in 1912 the question of canals on Mars was still being hotly debated by real astronomers. In the space of about a century, we went from ground-based telescopes that weren't good enough to resolve the question and sending machinery to land on the surface and take a close look.
The local Kroger chain's background music is like this.
As for why they settled on music from the mid-60s to mid-80s for background, the other day I watched a grandma -- that is, someone my age -- dancing down the aisle to some 70s song, much to the delight of the little girl in the cart grandma was pushing. Grandma still had moves.
Where else is there a wealthy country of 330M+ people, who own 200M+ automobiles, who routinely fly long distances, who depend on trucking for internal transport of goods, where there is a top court that seems willing to kill environmental regulation, and the possibility of a strong president who would kill electric cars?
I'm thinking the Saudis go to a bonding company and guarantee the $355M. IANAL, but my understanding is this happens regularly on a smaller scale.
I admit that my only experience with bails/bonds was long ago in graduate school. My gay roommate was caught in a Friday night sweep the Travis County sheriff ran on a gay nightclub. He called me about 2:00 am and told me briefly the situation, and that the choices were post bail or he spent the weekend in (crowded) county lockup. Bail was $300. My bank had a 24/7 walk-up teller*. I got $300 out of my emergency fund** and bailed him out. On Monday morning the county judge waived all the charges and the clerk gave me my money back.
* Access was from the sidewalk along one side of the bank. I asked the guy about whether people tried to rob him. He said the bulletproof laminate between us was 1.5" thick, and he just stuck his tongue out at them.
** Asked about it once, I replied that at that time (1977) $500 was enough for me to disappear for at least a couple of weeks should that ever be necessary.
Given the structure of the Trump Organization -- more than 500 interlocking LLCs -- how are the "running the business" terms going to apply? Is being the managing member of an LLC an executive? What about single-member LLCs? What about LLCs whose rules require a Trump to be the managing member? What about LLCs that own a property, where the money was put up by other people and Trump put up his brand?
Anyone else here spent time in a house with coal heat? My Grandparents Cain had a coal-fired furnace. In the winter, someone had to get out from under their pile of blankets and go to the basement to shovel coal into the furnace. I was so eager to eventually be big enough that I could be the one. Then I was, and found out why you took your shirt off before you started. Lots of effort, and the furnace started putting out lots of local waste heat before you were half done.
When I worked on the staff of the Colorado legislature, late one Friday afternoon one of the newer members of the Joint Budget Committee asked if I was doing anything special for one of those. "Nope," I told him. "The General Assembly meets on Tuesday. The JBC meets on Tuesday to hear a half-dozen supplemental budget bills. I'll be here all day Monday making sure that Tuesday happens properly."
JBC staff hours were insane during the session. Two or three weeks of comp time off in the summer was nice, though.
Exactly. With very few exceptions, the federal DOT doesn't build roads. It hires the states to do the job, subject to the normal rules. (The feds don't even specify design, only requirements, as the surface must be this durable. Everyone who pays attention remembers crossing a state border on an interstate highway and it abruptly changes from high-durability asphalt to concrete.)
Anything on the CSA schedules, no matter which category, requires a prescription. What you and I want is for marijuana to be treated like ethanol: no prescription, perhaps age restrictions, perhaps strength limits. Given freedom to do selective breeding, the growers are producing weed with strength I could only dream about when I was young.
Myself, I put the change back when Mercedes did the commercial that included Willem Dafoe, Usher, Kate Upton, and the original Sympathy For the Devil. Suddenly, Super Bowl commercials could be art (well, the 90-second version; the 60-second one was kind of choppy). It didn't have to be embarrassing to be in a Super Bowl commercial.
I've always wondered what the Stones charged for the one-time license for that commercial :^)
I admit that prior to her running for national office so I was exposed to her history, but knowing she was the AG in California, and based just on her skin color, I assumed she was Hispanic.
This was my thought. Legalized gambling is a state-by-state thing. $7M for a 30-second national spot probably isn't nearly as many eyeballs who can actually gamble per buck as buying more and much cheaper slots in regional/local games. Also too, I think the network is much stingier about slots reserved for the local affiliates during the Super Bowl.
Anyone have any idea if the California teams' regional games -- California doesn't have legal sports betting -- are saturated with gambling ads to the same level as the Broncos' games?
Ever notice how both teams' players mill around on the field after a regular season game, obviously looking for specific people and chatting, patting each other on the shoulder? I am given to understand that much of that is because of prior relationships, and questions are often like, "Heard you had a new kid. How's that going?" As for the game itself, it's a job and win or lose there's another game next week.
Also that much of that goes away as the playoffs progress. Large numbers of NFL players never get within sniffing distance of a Super Bowl.
I went to the grocery this morning, thinking I would beat both the last-minute Super Bowl shoppers and the usual Friday high customer volume. Wrong. But at breakfast I noticed that I needed milk before tomorrow.
Game predictions... Kansas City in a close game with multiple lead changes. Isiah Pacheco is a surprise MVP with two long runs for KC, one for a touchdown and one to set up another touchdown.
Ad predictions... The major auto manufacturers have looked at the government mandates in the US, EU, and Japan, their own sales, and that they can't all buy credits from Tesla any more. You'll swear that no one is bothering to build cars powered by ICEs.
The court-watchers I've read all seem to think 9-0 or 8-1. The 1 is presumably Gorsuch, who wrote while he was on the 10th Circuit that states have the final say about who goes on their ballots.
Interestingly, at the giant telecom where I did the work legal wouldn't allow us to publish, although we managed to at least talk about it at little conferences. I was the lead heretic and we were not popular for telling marketing that they were making a disastrous mistake.
The people who wrote the software that the schools pivoted to had no excuse to have ignored the literature. The products they were selling in 2020 were crap.
When I was in ninth grade in a small town in Iowa, the school superintendent ran an experiment to see how much math the better students could absorb in a year. They took a group of us, gave us the textbook for Algebra I and II, a classroom where we met daily and a teacher to answer any questions we had. Self-paced all the way. Two of us made it through I and II and spent the last couple of weeks with the trig/pre-calc textbook. My family moved the following summer.
Geometry was okay, but then I was stuck in Algebra II and I already knew all the material. I was carving my initials into my desktop with a Bic pen, and just about the time I got through the darned plastic surface so I could really make progress, got sent to the principal. When the Algebra II teacher showed up, hilarity ensued. I aced his Algebra II final the next day on a dare. As it turned out, the school had recently received a time-share terminal connected to the small mainframe at the local university. They handed me the manuals and wished me luck. Taught myself FORTRAN and bad habits that it took me years to unlearn.
...it was only in hindsight that we concretely determined that remote learning was inferior to in person learning for goal #3.
Nonsense. Just about 30 years ago I had started doing research on real-time multi-party multi-media communications using workstations and internet protocols. I certainly wasn't the only one. Any of us could have told anyone who asked that it wasn't as good for #3 as face-to-face and a teacher with a class of 25 K-6 students was a particularly hard problem.
When the pandemic started and I saw what sort of remote technology my granddaughter's class had, I was appalled. My daughter wasn't too pleased when I burst out with (where the granddaughters could hear), "Wasn't anyone paying any f*cking attention to the research?"
Make it before October. By October 1, a large percentage of ballots -- a substantial majority in the western states -- will have been frozen and being printed. This year, in the 13 states of the American West, >90% of all regional ballots cast will be distributed by mail well in advance of election "day". Here in Colorado, Oct 4 is the day county clerks are required to be in physical possession of the printed ballots. For the ten or so large population counties, that means the ballots have been folded and inserted in properly addressed envelopes. I believe the corresponding date in California is at least a week earlier.
A half-century ago, Disney comes in and says, "We will invest billions to improve the land. We will generate very large tax revenues. There will undoubtedly be long coattails with other parks, conventions, conferences, etc. But we insist that we have control over the utilities and roads, with the normal taxing authority you give special districts, so we know they are managed up to our parks' standards." The counties and state fall all over themselves to do the deal.
If I were Disney I wouldn't have made it a First Amendment case. I'd have sued on the grounds it was an illegal taking, and asked for the state to pay back billions worth of investment for backing out of the agreement.
(In large parts of the country, the accommodation isn't unusual. See, for example, Highlands Ranch south of Denver, an unincorporated area with >100,000 people (density about 4,000 people per square mile, urban density by almost everyone's standards), run by a glorified HOA and special districts.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Throughput: Oydsseus Edition”
ThTh5: I'm old enough that I predate the vaccines for measles and such. I have trouble with the 1 in 5 kids requiring hospitalization. My recollection from the time is that everyone got measles at some point early in grade school, and no one went to the hospital with it. Is there a difference because the kids getting it now are older than my age cohort were when we got it? Certainly age makes a difference with how serious mumps can be.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/19/2024”
Americans are just really weird on math. For most of the post-World War period, it was generally assumed people were either good at math or not good at math and no amount of teaching would help the former.
At some point after I put my wife in memory care last year, I started drawing again. It seems to be helpful as therapy. Talking to friends, family, and neighbors and mentioning it, the most common single thing I've heard is, "I can't draw at all."
Suppose that one of our goals from the K-12 public system was that every person be able to sketch a recognizable intersection with buildings, cars, people. The same way that we have a goal that every person be able to complete an individual tax form by hand, sans pages and pages of tables that do the division for them.
How would we get people through that? We'd teach useful tools like one, two, and three point perspective. (We teach the particular long division algorithm we do because hundreds of years of experience shows it minimizes the number of errors people make.) But mostly it would be rote: practice, practice, practice.
I started a comic drawing class through the local parks and recreation yesterday evening. Most of the participants are much younger than I and are early in the learning process. One of the exercises the instructor had us do was to draw as many shapes as we could think of. I noticed that everyone but me was drawing flat shapes: square, circle, triangle, etc. I was drawing 2D representations of 3D shapes: box, cylinder, ring, disk.
On “Curiosities: Welcome To Our Midst”
The rings are obviously a confusion with Saturn. OTOH, in 1912 the question of canals on Mars was still being hotly debated by real astronomers. In the space of about a century, we went from ground-based telescopes that weren't good enough to resolve the question and sending machinery to land on the surface and take a close look.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Returning to New Vegas”
The local Kroger chain's background music is like this.
As for why they settled on music from the mid-60s to mid-80s for background, the other day I watched a grandma -- that is, someone my age -- dancing down the aisle to some 70s song, much to the delight of the little girl in the cart grandma was pushing. Grandma still had moves.
On “Trump Civil Business Fraud Judgment”
Where else is there a wealthy country of 330M+ people, who own 200M+ automobiles, who routinely fly long distances, who depend on trucking for internal transport of goods, where there is a top court that seems willing to kill environmental regulation, and the possibility of a strong president who would kill electric cars?
"
I'm thinking the Saudis go to a bonding company and guarantee the $355M. IANAL, but my understanding is this happens regularly on a smaller scale.
I admit that my only experience with bails/bonds was long ago in graduate school. My gay roommate was caught in a Friday night sweep the Travis County sheriff ran on a gay nightclub. He called me about 2:00 am and told me briefly the situation, and that the choices were post bail or he spent the weekend in (crowded) county lockup. Bail was $300. My bank had a 24/7 walk-up teller*. I got $300 out of my emergency fund** and bailed him out. On Monday morning the county judge waived all the charges and the clerk gave me my money back.
* Access was from the sidewalk along one side of the bank. I asked the guy about whether people tried to rob him. He said the bulletproof laminate between us was 1.5" thick, and he just stuck his tongue out at them.
** Asked about it once, I replied that at that time (1977) $500 was enough for me to disappear for at least a couple of weeks should that ever be necessary.
"
Given the structure of the Trump Organization -- more than 500 interlocking LLCs -- how are the "running the business" terms going to apply? Is being the managing member of an LLC an executive? What about single-member LLCs? What about LLCs whose rules require a Trump to be the managing member? What about LLCs that own a property, where the money was put up by other people and Trump put up his brand?
On “Coalgetter”
Anyone else here spent time in a house with coal heat? My Grandparents Cain had a coal-fired furnace. In the winter, someone had to get out from under their pile of blankets and go to the basement to shovel coal into the furnace. I was so eager to eventually be big enough that I could be the one. Then I was, and found out why you took your shirt off before you started. Lots of effort, and the furnace started putting out lots of local waste heat before you were half done.
On “Weekend Plans Post: A Sneaky Three-Day Weekend”
When I worked on the staff of the Colorado legislature, late one Friday afternoon one of the newer members of the Joint Budget Committee asked if I was doing anything special for one of those. "Nope," I told him. "The General Assembly meets on Tuesday. The JBC meets on Tuesday to hear a half-dozen supplemental budget bills. I'll be here all day Monday making sure that Tuesday happens properly."
JBC staff hours were insane during the session. Two or three weeks of comp time off in the summer was nice, though.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/12/2024”
Exactly. With very few exceptions, the federal DOT doesn't build roads. It hires the states to do the job, subject to the normal rules. (The feds don't even specify design, only requirements, as the surface must be this durable. Everyone who pays attention remembers crossing a state border on an interstate highway and it abruptly changes from high-durability asphalt to concrete.)
Anything on the CSA schedules, no matter which category, requires a prescription. What you and I want is for marijuana to be treated like ethanol: no prescription, perhaps age restrictions, perhaps strength limits. Given freedom to do selective breeding, the growers are producing weed with strength I could only dream about when I was young.
On “The Big Game Sunday”
Is that for national spots? What about regional ones? Does it include local ads?
"
Myself, I put the change back when Mercedes did the commercial that included Willem Dafoe, Usher, Kate Upton, and the original Sympathy For the Devil. Suddenly, Super Bowl commercials could be art (well, the 90-second version; the 60-second one was kind of choppy). It didn't have to be embarrassing to be in a Super Bowl commercial.
I've always wondered what the Stones charged for the one-time license for that commercial :^)
"
McCaffery.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/12/2024”
I admit that prior to her running for national office so I was exposed to her history, but knowing she was the AG in California, and based just on her skin color, I assumed she was Hispanic.
On “The Big Game Sunday”
This was my thought. Legalized gambling is a state-by-state thing. $7M for a 30-second national spot probably isn't nearly as many eyeballs who can actually gamble per buck as buying more and much cheaper slots in regional/local games. Also too, I think the network is much stingier about slots reserved for the local affiliates during the Super Bowl.
Anyone have any idea if the California teams' regional games -- California doesn't have legal sports betting -- are saturated with gambling ads to the same level as the Broncos' games?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/5/2024”
And as the week closes out, a 200-foot tall AM radio tower has somehow gone missing in Alabama.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Big Game”
Ever notice how both teams' players mill around on the field after a regular season game, obviously looking for specific people and chatting, patting each other on the shoulder? I am given to understand that much of that is because of prior relationships, and questions are often like, "Heard you had a new kid. How's that going?" As for the game itself, it's a job and win or lose there's another game next week.
Also that much of that goes away as the playoffs progress. Large numbers of NFL players never get within sniffing distance of a Super Bowl.
"
I went to the grocery this morning, thinking I would beat both the last-minute Super Bowl shoppers and the usual Friday high customer volume. Wrong. But at breakfast I noticed that I needed milk before tomorrow.
Game predictions... Kansas City in a close game with multiple lead changes. Isiah Pacheco is a surprise MVP with two long runs for KC, one for a touchdown and one to set up another touchdown.
Ad predictions... The major auto manufacturers have looked at the government mandates in the US, EU, and Japan, their own sales, and that they can't all buy credits from Tesla any more. You'll swear that no one is bothering to build cars powered by ICEs.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/5/2024”
The court-watchers I've read all seem to think 9-0 or 8-1. The 1 is presumably Gorsuch, who wrote while he was on the 10th Circuit that states have the final say about who goes on their ballots.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
Interestingly, at the giant telecom where I did the work legal wouldn't allow us to publish, although we managed to at least talk about it at little conferences. I was the lead heretic and we were not popular for telling marketing that they were making a disastrous mistake.
The people who wrote the software that the schools pivoted to had no excuse to have ignored the literature. The products they were selling in 2020 were crap.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/5/2024”
When I was in ninth grade in a small town in Iowa, the school superintendent ran an experiment to see how much math the better students could absorb in a year. They took a group of us, gave us the textbook for Algebra I and II, a classroom where we met daily and a teacher to answer any questions we had. Self-paced all the way. Two of us made it through I and II and spent the last couple of weeks with the trig/pre-calc textbook. My family moved the following summer.
Geometry was okay, but then I was stuck in Algebra II and I already knew all the material. I was carving my initials into my desktop with a Bic pen, and just about the time I got through the darned plastic surface so I could really make progress, got sent to the principal. When the Algebra II teacher showed up, hilarity ensued. I aced his Algebra II final the next day on a dare. As it turned out, the school had recently received a time-share terminal connected to the small mainframe at the local university. They handed me the manuals and wished me luck. Taught myself FORTRAN and bad habits that it took me years to unlearn.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
...it was only in hindsight that we concretely determined that remote learning was inferior to in person learning for goal #3.
Nonsense. Just about 30 years ago I had started doing research on real-time multi-party multi-media communications using workstations and internet protocols. I certainly wasn't the only one. Any of us could have told anyone who asked that it wasn't as good for #3 as face-to-face and a teacher with a class of 25 K-6 students was a particularly hard problem.
When the pandemic started and I saw what sort of remote technology my granddaughter's class had, I was appalled. My daughter wasn't too pleased when I burst out with (where the granddaughters could hear), "Wasn't anyone paying any f*cking attention to the research?"
"
Probably worth including that the sanctions are against four specific individuals.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: 2024 Election Edition”
Make it before October. By October 1, a large percentage of ballots -- a substantial majority in the western states -- will have been frozen and being printed. This year, in the 13 states of the American West, >90% of all regional ballots cast will be distributed by mail well in advance of election "day". Here in Colorado, Oct 4 is the day county clerks are required to be in physical possession of the printed ballots. For the ten or so large population counties, that means the ballots have been folded and inserted in properly addressed envelopes. I believe the corresponding date in California is at least a week earlier.
On “Disney Lawsuit Against DeSantis Dismissed: Read It For Yourself”
A half-century ago, Disney comes in and says, "We will invest billions to improve the land. We will generate very large tax revenues. There will undoubtedly be long coattails with other parks, conventions, conferences, etc. But we insist that we have control over the utilities and roads, with the normal taxing authority you give special districts, so we know they are managed up to our parks' standards." The counties and state fall all over themselves to do the deal.
If I were Disney I wouldn't have made it a First Amendment case. I'd have sued on the grounds it was an illegal taking, and asked for the state to pay back billions worth of investment for backing out of the agreement.
(In large parts of the country, the accommodation isn't unusual. See, for example, Highlands Ranch south of Denver, an unincorporated area with >100,000 people (density about 4,000 people per square mile, urban density by almost everyone's standards), run by a glorified HOA and special districts.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.