An aggregation of strange things that interested me in one way or another.
tl;dr and government communication in the age of the hipster
SPD seized a bunch of my marijuana before I-502 passed. Can I have it back?
No.
Seattle PD’s information on marijuana legalization is an interesting piece with a tl;dr reference and an embedded Lord of the Rings “finest weed” video clip.
Compare the voice and audience of this government communication to other state communications.
We will kill you so fast
We need doctors because people grow up and you fall down and go boom. Everyone’s going to need a doctor. Let’s have 3 doctors per floor of every apartment building in this town. How about that as a good idea? Like that is a good idea. OK.
So let’s make college tuition either free or really low. And if you have a country full of whip-crack-smart-people, you have a country the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a country of educated people because we are so smart. We’ll build a laser that will burn you, the enemy, in your sleep before you can even mobilize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart.
–Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins gives a whole new side of STEM education that I missed from all of the other experts. Let’s thank Big Think for helping to clarify the issue with helpful videos from experts in the field.1
The Maginot Line For Cursive
I’m not really interested in arguing about cursive either way. I just don’t care but this article claiming to argue for keeping cursive does about the worst job I can imagine. Seriously, it makes me sad. Basically the article breaks down to –
- One PTSD flashback to a nun who threw the author’s work away because apparently nuns can’t read print and really like being mean to kids for no reason.
- The next argument seems to indicate we should spend time teaching cursive because it’s now being used in CAPTCHAs. I think this is a case of putting the monkey2before the cart.
- That’s followed by a double-summarized reference to printing (rather than cursive) resulting in “adult” like brain activity. This was also compared to saying the words rather than typing them- which might have actually been a useful comparison for this article.
- Finally, there’s a half-joking (I guess) reference to students not being able to read the Constitution because it’s written in cursive. So writing vs reading, the many, many versions of the Constitution in typeface3aside, let’s look at the ability of our cursive educated students and adults ability to read and understand the Constitution right now. Then I’d like a conversation about where we are failing our students and where we need to place attention.
The essentials
This was an old screenshot I took of a middle school student’s computer. Apparently these were the phrases she needed for daily success.
Please do not come again
Some people are more serious about shutting down their blogs than others.
GNU?
Strange message in a spam Google Form URL. Oddly the URL worked and I can’t figure out anyway the message could have been customized, nor any reason to customize it given this was a phishing attempt.
Nothing is safe
