From the BBC: The University of Bristol team looked at 1,400 babies born from 1937-1939 and followed their progress for 60 years. Those who were breastfed were 41% more likely to move up in class than those who were bottle-fed. Do you suppose it works retroactively? This is so much better than Stephen Covey or Tony Robbins.
The video of T. Danae — a giant squid — is from 2005 and I’m sure that PZ Meyers has posted extensively about the story (he is the king of all things cephalopod), but a quick search didn’t turn it up. I wonder what it must feel like to have your darkness shattered that way just before you’re crushed and eaten?
That’s the headline from the Associated Press this morning. There has to be more to this story than we’re being told because it just doesn’t make sense. I run a computer lab for a local supplementary school and we use a blocker program that works very well (too well at times), but I can’t imagine being imprisoned because the blocker program failed.
Until recently, Julie Amero says, she lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher, with little knowledge of computers and even less about porn.
Now she is in the middle of a criminal case that hinges on the intricacies of both, and it could put her behind bars for up to 40 years.
She was convicted last month of exposing seventh-grade students to pornography on her classroom computer. She contended the images were inadvertently thrust onto the screen by pornographers’ unseen spyware and adware programs.
Prosecutors dispute that. But her argument has made her a cause celebre among some technology experts, who say what happened to her could happen to anyone.
“I’m scared,” the 40-year-old Amero said. “I’m just beside myself over something I didn’t do.”
This has all the earmarks of a cyber lynching. The peasants parents are marching in the street with pitchforks and torches and Amero is the target of their panic.
It all began in October 2004. Amero was assigned to a class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, a city of around 37,000 people about 40 miles east of Hartford.
Amero says that before her class started, a teacher allowed her to e-mail her husband. She says she used the computer and went to the bathroom, returning to find the permanent teacher gone and two students viewing a Web site on hair styles.
Amero says she chased the students away and started class. But later, she says, pornographic images started popping up on the computer screen by themselves. She says she tried to click the images off, but they kept returning, and she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off.
“I did everything I possibly could to keep them from seeing anything,” she says.
One of the jurors said that she could have turned off the monitor or thrown a coat over the screen. And she could have. But now she faces 12 to 18 months in prison because she didn’t.
Can you say scapegoat?
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre by Jerry Palmer.
Conclusion: A world that is riddled with conspiracy in opaque: things happen that are only very partially comprehensible. When conspiracy is compounded by treachery, the world is extra-opaque. when the truth of treachery is out, we are left in a very bleak landscape. This bleakness is a quality… that dominates many of the best thrillers. p. 39
Teflon Don: I’d like to try to describe a bit of what I feel every night, what it’s like to roll out of the relative safety of the Forward Operating Base to hunt for bombs and bad guys. Last night was typical for me and my platoon. We were slated to conduct route clearance operations near the center of Ramadi to “prep the route” for the Marines following us to raid several…
The Russian army has a history of brutality that includes not just those it fights against, but also those among its ranks. During the days of the Tsar, Jewish conscripts would do anything to avoid service, knowing the horrors they would experience. From the BBC this morning comes this story that tells us that nothing has changed.
Every one was rightly focused on the big winners — The Dixie Chicks — at the Grammy Awards the other night (Natalie Maines’ comment — at 50 seconds –was precisous), but there was a pretty much ignored but significant award given to President Jimmy Carter for the audio-book recording of his Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.
Carter follows in a line of Grammy winners that includes Democratic presidential nominee candidate Barak Obama (2006), President Bill Clinton (2005 and 2004) and Democratic presidential nominee candidate Hillary Clinton (1997).
And to answer my own question: because they’d have to write a book first.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
With apologies to Ken Duncan:
A woman eating
from a bowl and talking
on a cell phone walked
past a railroad crossing gate and
into the path of a freight train,
police said Monday.
She later died.
Investigators suspect the incident
Sunday was an accident
but have subpoenaed the 26-year-old
woman’s cell phone records to
find out whom she was talking to.
“She wasn’t paying attention,”
Lt. Mark Duke said.
(And there’s more, from the Associated Press)
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre by Jerry Palmer.
If the hero is to be credibly isolated, he has to demonstrate the strength not only to beat his enemy, but also to control everything in himself that might reduce his self-reliance. p. 39
Yambo: Time for another mission. This time we’re off to Mezar-e-Sharif, all the way up north. We get up early, pile into a C130, and fly like a bat out of hell. These pilots here do not fly like pilots in the States; they want to get up in the air as quickly as possible, and back down out of the air just as fast. So there is no taxi-and-gradual-assent or gentle-coast-down-onto-the…
My dad isn’t the only one who sends me fun stuff via email. A good friend and educational mentor also routinely passes along her share of chuckles — intermixed with not a few requests for veracity on things viral and outragious. Don’t worry, there still plenty of stuff to come From My Dad but occassionally I’ll toss a few of Mona’s finds in as well.
A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds.
After explaining the commandment to “honor” thy Father and thy Mother, she asked, “Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?”
Without missing a beat one little boy (the oldest of a family) answered, “Thou shall not kill.”
[Update — 1154 — A guide to Slave-Free Chocolate. ]
But boycotting chocolate isn’t. Yet, blogger Terry, she-who-sees-invisible-people, makes a compelling case for doing both because of the human suffering involved in the mining of diamonds and the harvesting of cocoa beans. It easy to not buy that 2.3 carat stone, but just saying no the morning mocha? That takes real moral conviction.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre by Jerry Palmer.
Specifically [the hero] shows that he is above the fear of loss of sexual pleasure, which would make a lesser man cautious, just as he is above the fear of physical danger. p. 38
CAPT Lee Kelley: Four years later, here we still stand and fight, cycling back to America across the jet stream, across the ocean, to heal, to re-supply, and then we return to the desert. Four years and some of us have been here two or three times. We are doing a good job, but it’s hard work. Four years and here we lie at night, under these particular constellations, thinking…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
(but she got it from sally first.)
New Rule: just as it is not OK to just paraphrase a famous quote and then make up a plausible attribution, it is not OK to use words that you think you know the meaning of and just blabber on. That’s why a guy named Samuel Johnson spent so much creating a thing called a dictionary. The word that set me off this morning? Moot.
From Merriam-Webster’s 10th Collegiate Dictionary:
1: a deliberative assembly primarily for the administration of justice; especially : one held by the freemen of an Anglo-Saxon community 2 obsolete : ARGUMENT, DISCUSSION;
2: archaic : to discuss from a legal standpoint : ARGUE 2 a : to bring up for discussion : BROACH b : DEBATE;
3a: open to question : DEBATABLE b : subjected to discussion : DISPUTED;
4: deprived of practical significance : made abstract or purely academic.
From Dictionary
moot 1 /mut/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[moot] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
-adjective
1. open to discussion or debate; debatable; doubtful: a moot point.
2. of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic.
3. Chiefly Law. not actual; theoretical; hypothetical.
-verb (used with object)
4. to present or introduce (any point, subject, project, etc.) for discussion.
5. to reduce or remove the practical significance of; make purely theoretical or academic.
6. Archaic. to argue (a case), esp. in a mock court.
-noun
7. an assembly of the people in early England exercising political, administrative, and judicial powers.
8. an argument or discussion, esp. of a hypothetical legal case.
9. Obsolete. a debate, argument, or discussion.
[Origin: bef. 900; ME mot(e) meeting, assembly, OE gemÅt; c. ON mÅt, D gemoet meeting. See meet1]
From the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
moot (DISCUSSION) verb [T] FORMAL to suggest something for discussion: The idea was first mooted as long ago as the 1840s. His name was mooted as a possible successor.
moot adjective tending to be discussed or argued about and having no definite answer: It’s a moot point whether building more roads reduces traffic congestion.
noun [C] SPECIALIZED a trial or discussion dealing with an imaginary legal case, performed by students as part of their legal training but in exactly the same way as a real one: a moot court
moot adjective MAINLY US LEGAL having no practical use or meaning: The district attorney said if McVeigh is given the death penalty and his conviction is upheld on appeal, the state prosecution would become moot.
The misused definition that drives me bonkers is No. 4 in the first case, No.’s 2, 5 and 8 in the second case and the final meaning in the third case.
In the past week I have heard several ostensibly intelligent people on various public radio shows use the word as a way of dismissing another’s argument; as in: there’s no point in even discussing that, it’s moot.
If the other party feels there’s something of substance to yet discuss then the point is not moot in the obsolete sense, but is rather moot in the broader sense of being a debatable point.
Using moot has become yet another way of shutting down discussion; another way of saying: you’re an idiot, go away.
Word do not mean what we want them to mean. We do not live in Orwell’s hell.
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