Self satisfaction, not happiness, is the goal of life
I’m a little late to this, as this posted on a Google blog last week. I’ve posted info on QR codes before (QR codes are ubiquitous in Japan).
A commenter on the blog said that the features wasn’t working, so I am trying it now.., and I still get the 400 error. When it’s up and running, it should be a cool feature (at least in Japan)
Teaching science is tough business. They pay, awful. The students, worse.
LIBERTY, Mo. - Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection - in a word, by evolution.The challenges begin at once.
“Isn’t it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands. “‘Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn’t.”
Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but the student isn’t listening.
“I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.
Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He is about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100 percent sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon.”
From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found? You’re not just making this up?”
“No, I am not just making it up,” Frisby says.
At least half the students in this class of 14 don’t believe him, though, and they aren’t about to let him off.
Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they have learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments, but also with sophisticated questions - and a fervent faith.
As sophomore Daniel Read put it: “I’m going to say as much about God as I can in school, even if the teachers can’t.”
Such challenges have become so disruptive that some teachers dread the annual unit on evolution - or skip it altogether.
Science doesn’t have a good repution in America, and I don’t know maybe in not many other places either. Conservatives believe that scientists are another liberal political faction who’s pushing corrupt ideas like climate change and evolution as part of a larger conspiracy to destroy America by getting us to hate God and establish a liberal Reich in Washington that would turn us all into secular humanists and next thing you know everyone will whoring an such, because it’s simply in our biology. Scientists don’t know what they are talking about anyway. And these science teachers are simply the front line soldiers of this consipracy.
Science teachers have to be rabidly involved in the conspiracy. After all, they accept crudy pay when they could use their degree to get another job that pays twice what they are making. They must be true believers, zealots, in what they are preaching in order to do that. Conservative and truly Christian people who try to make as much money as they can. They are the front line to brainwash kids into believing the conspiracy and hating God. Christianity is under siege and Bin Laden is laughing in between his kidney dialysis treatments.
Don’t believe me 
Just grab the latest books from the NYT Bestsellers list from author including LaHaye, Coulter, and O’Reilly.
OK, this is really what I believe. I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t really matter much if kids in Liberty, Missouri or say Sandersville, Georgia or Rawlins, Wyoming to name a few places, don’t learn about evolution. They’re destined to work at Wal-Mart or go into the military to fight the Global War On Terror (copyrighted). They aren’t going to save America. We will continue to import smart people from places like India and China to do the real scientific and engineering like work. Mostly they aren’t Christians, although one could make the effort to get them to convert and become true believers in the faith.
And when these folks don’t want to come here anymore, we’re fucked.
Two of these will get you a loaf of bread and some change.
Inflation is climbing so high you wonder where the sky is.
“Nowadays, for my expenses a day, I need about Z$500 billion,” one resident said.
Good news is that perhaps even the lowliest soul is a millionaire.
Updates here.
The Consumerist has been holding an NCAA tournament style competition involving a list 64 companies to decide which company is the worst in America. Brackets were made out by the site and matchups between companies were decided by users’ votes
The final four baddies were Countrywide (Bank of America), Wal-Mart, Comcast and Diebold. Bank of America, who has bought Countrywide, made it to the elite eight of companies, when it was defeated by, who else, Countrywide.
The championship game pits Countrywide versus Comcast. The winner gets a Golden Poo award that looks, like, shit.
Another IT half empty article, salaries are tight. Lots of griping comments, and this one
One of the commenters left a what I would assume is a satirical comment. Satire seems to be in steep decline these days in America, so here I will quote some IT satire from someone named “Sabu”
I have a new home in Bangalore, new car, new wife …. I don’t mind stealing your jobs. Americans are rich, they can afford it.
Ooooh, I am standing beside myself ….
get the picture)
Inflation has hit 2.2 million percent in Mugabeland, AKA Zimbabwe, as admitted by the government. Here’s a photo of a man holding some Zimbabwean $500 million bills. And another. There’s actually a 50 billion dollar bill too, haven’t seen a photo of it.
Things are so bad the country is running out of paper to print money on. The German supplier of bank note paper has cut off Mugabe off. If Mugabe can’t keep printing money, he can’t pay the outrageous salaries (trillions of dollars) that prop him up. The United States government, Queen Elizabeth stripping him of his honorary knighthood and his domestic political opposition haven’t been able to oust him. The surrounding African leaders refuse to try to oust him. So it’s up to a German paper maker to do it.
Inflation hell that a US child of the 70s wouldn’t even recognize:
The impact on consumers of the inflation juggernaut is now such that prices of basic goods like bread, when available, go up by 30-40 percent per day.
For example, the price of a loaf of bread on Monday which stood at 60 billion Zimbabwe dollars — one US dollar at the then black market rate but 400 according to the official exchange — had risen to 100 billion little more than 24 hours later.
A three-star hotel in the capital has been hiking its room rates by around 300 percent every three days and in the latest round of increases, rates shot up from around four trillion dollars to 10 trillion.
At a black market rate of 1 US dollar == 100 billion ZImbabwean dollars, A hotel room in Harare would still be $100 US. Not bad I guess.
LA Times:The price of the state-owned Herald newspaper has leaped from 200,000 Zimbabwean dollars early this month to 25 billion now. Before the crunch, a beer at a bar in Harare, the capital, cost 15 billion Zimbabwean dollars. At 5 p.m. July 4, it cost 100 billion ($4 at the time) in the same bar.
An hour later, the price had gone up to 150 billion ($6).
And you’re worried about the price of gas??
Followup on Oracle: Thankfully Oracle doesn’t price its products in Zimbabwean dollars. Maybe then companies would have to be even more accepting of open source databases.
It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes..
Sorry, wrong context. The IT market is hot, sources say. It’s just sizzling, but commenters out there are wondering where the steak is.
Interesting pricing strategy Oracle uses that I wasn’t aware of. They charge all customers everywhere the same, based on the US dollars. The dollar has been falling of course, so Oracle increases the cost of licenses to make up the weakening dollar. So Oracle has looked cheap in the Eurozone and elsewhere. But does the price increases mean in the US that Oracle has so much market share that it can just raise prices in spite of the overall economy?
Depending on the currency markets, it may still be better to purchase Oracle products in euros.
I was forwarded this article in the NYT looking at desperate mortgage holders taking in boarders to make the payments. People in cities have rented out basement apartments as a matter of course, but apparently the trend is hitting the burbs now.
Take the leap of imagination.. McMansions with 5+ bedrooms by the 1,000s in exurbia land, purchased with unsustainable loans. Many of the bedrooms are unoccupied anyway, since the average family size has been declining and many of the exurbers are DINKs. Imagine if the breadwinners of the household get laid off and ca’t find suitable work. You have 4, 5, 6 empty bedrooms. Go into the boarding house business. Potential borders include other ex-mortgage holders who don’t want to leave the area, inner city refugees, and those employed in the personal services industry. I could imagine that there would be legal issues, ADA, etc. but it’s a thought, maybe a thought whose time has come.
If you are in Asheville, North Carolina, you can tour a boarding house museum that has been preserved as a memorial to a (then) well known author of the early 20th century, Thomas Wolfe. His mom ran the house as a source of income. Get a taste of boarding house life there.
Around 8:45: Right now on cnn.com the link says
But if you click on the headline on the page is
Stocks set for modest uptick
Things certainly are volatile out there.
9:34: Stocks are now opening mixed.
