The Children Must Play
“If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play.”
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US
“If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play.”
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US
Giving an "adult" camera to a three-year-old may seem like a recipe for confusion and broken electronics, but I'm continually amazed at kids' thirst for knowledge and empowered responsibility.
The big lie about laws like DADT and [Arizona] Prop. 102 is that they effectively prevent gay people from taking part in venerable institutions like military service and life-long committed relationships. Of course, gay people are already everywhere, deeply woven into the fabric of mainstream society even where they’re invisible, quietly doing what needs to be done. All the laws do is to try to deprive them of human dignity while they do it.
Steve Silberman, http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/01/10/why-cant-the-heroic-intern-who-saved-giffords-life-get-married-in-arizona/
God, we must have 10,000 or 15,000 books in our house. We have one room that's become basically a mountain of books. It's become impassable. So we have no lack of access to material and yet I didn't have access to my own head until I went to the library.
http://www.librarian.net/talks/lanier/
Via Jessamyn's 2010 booklist I found this interview with Jaron Lanier from about a year ago.
I mean, sure, yeah, technically Rachmaninoff is classical music — but it’s easily more “Intense and Rebellious” than, god save us, Nickelback.
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2010/12/who_feels_chill.php
If bloggers and web designers become microcelebrities, with fun gossip blogs following them around, will they all end up addicted to meth and racism like real celebrities?
http://www.theawl.com/2010/12/bomb-the-ace-hotel-every-geek-and-blogger-now-a-microcelebrity
Too good not to blog. via frantic.
You pay good money to be able to cry in public.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/how-to-live-in-new-york-city/
"*dress like a slub", but yeah.
Facebook and Twitter are restoring some of the basic functionality of the early ’90s Internet, so now people are going, “Wow, people can share things in a peer-to-peer way, and there must be a way for highly branded, centralized corporations to exploit that, right?” But the trick is that it’s really hard, because if this is a peer-to-peer technology revolution, then it necessarily reduces our dependence on highly centralized brands for meaning and supply.
Lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.
Q: People say he killed the Newton – your pet project – out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge?
Sculley: Probably. He won’t talk to me, so I don’t know.
This interview with John Sculley is full of eye openers & jaw droppers.
Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.
randomwalks/sudama is a James Franco fansite.
Who buys copious amounts of unsalted, unbuttered popcorn? It's messed up.
The truth about homicide is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people.
These lyrics were just the same when we did them again in American accents. There was nothing different, and all of a sudden, people were saying, 'Oh, wow. They're just as good as Eminem.' But in the Scottish accent, they're saying, 'Oh, no. They don't have any talent.'
The Fake 'American' Rappers Who Fooled Everyone, www.npr.org
When this idea came to me, I was really excited and euphoric even. It’s not often you get a chance to say something new about Newton’s laws.
via www.nytimes.com
The way the story frames this, what we have been taught to think of as gravity may simply be probability: the universe settling into the most likely configuration. Think electron orbitals, think Scott Adams' God's Debris, Think Douglas Adams' Heart of Gold.
The most interesting thing I know about W. S. Merwin is that he once got into a terrible battle with Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg's Tibetan guru over an episode of forced nakedness at a poetry party (this weird history is chronicled in a previous Litkicks article, When Hippies Battle: The Great W. S. Merwin/Allen Ginsberg Beef of 1975).
via www.litkicks.com
this is a narrative based explicitly on Asian roots, and for a movie that lavishes in the history and beauty of Eastern culture its casting of White actors in the lead “hero” roles is racist and ethnocentric.
via splinterend.tumblr.com via Roger Ebert's tweeting
Drilling will resume in deep water. That's where the oil is… people all around the world are going farther offshore and farther into deeper waters. So we have to develop methods to recover hydrocarbons, and do it in a much safer way.... It kind of creeps up on you, but this tragedy is a wakeup call.
Energy secretary says 'top kill' should have been tried earlier, www.latimes.com, 22 June 2010
The Nobel-prize winning Secretary of Energy of the United States is on the case!
Those of you who know what a "switch" is may also remember what it felt like to be whipped with one. Child abuse? Probably. But these were people who'd seen people they knew dangling from trees by ropes. ...They were deathly afraid that we would act out in the wrong place at the wrong time and wind up as dead as those long lost relations. It was the only way they knew of making it clear just how dire our circumstances truly were.
One time we took out half of a Volkswagen. How did it end up there? We don’t know. One time we took out a fifteen metre roll of carpet that was obstructing a whole pipe. Really, anything you can think of, we can find it in the sewage.
Julio Cou Cámara is one of only two sewage divers in the world, working full time keeping Mexico City's trash streaming out of the city. Edible Geography is my new favorite blog.
Each of the balconies is held up by these fantastic wrought-iron dragons:
You've got to see the close-up of the dragon. Magnificent.
"Orange Beach, Alabama"
i had no idea D.C. had their own "design your D.C." cupcake challenge. amateur cake decorators showed off their stuff at hello cupcake last week. how cool is that? i kind of wish i could have been there. the metro map cupcake below is my favorite. to see all the cupcake entries, click here.
D.C.'s Metro Map cupcakeNom Obama cupcakeBen's Chili Bowl cupcake
via taza-and-husband.blogspot.com
Unbearably awesome.
via tim.shey.net
