I’ve been living with this for the last twenty years. It’s not so bad in these waters as long as you don’t stop swimming. Ever.

(Via .)

This video talks about the risk factors for melanoma (early sunburns, family history, moles, etc). I have just about every risk factor except red hair (who knew?). I also go to the dermatologist once a year and have had at least a dozen moles removed since mom’s diagnosis. I share this because keeping up with this has become easy, routine, and something that we budget for in our annual medical expenses. $250/year isn’t much to pay to make sure I don’t die from melanoma. It’s not fun or painless, but it just may be the difference in the future.

This is for you, mom…

Worth watching.

(Via .)

What I found interesting was this:

“I would hire 5 more guys right now if I could. However, it is virtually impossible to find anyone with skills anymore. The number one skill we are missing as a society is a work ethic. I speak to employers all the time and we all are looking for the same potential employee–someone who is honest, hard working, and who has reasonable intelligence. In other words someone who willing and able to learn new things and admit it when they screw up. Notice education is not on the list.”

Education is good, though I’m still on the fence about whether or not everyone needs a full 4 years of college. I’m grateful for my 3 degrees, though I still maintain that I’ve learned more in the 20 years since graduation than I ever learned in school. After all, 8 years of undergrad and post-grad is a lot less than 20 years of post college. If you’re not constantly learning, what have you done with the time since school? Reminds me of several people I’ve talked to who consider it a badge of honor that the last full book they read was in formal schooling. It’s just my opinion, but that seems like a real waste to me. Surely there’s something to be passionate about after formal schooling?

Some of the greatest minds of human history have been attached to autodidactic brains (and yes, I meant to write it that way). I think the #1 thing we could teach isn’t math or science or even logic. It’s curiosity. Teach a generation to be curious about everything and then watch out.

“I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood. How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long? . . . But what cannot go on will not go on — at least for most universities without the billion-dollar plus endowments. The present reckoning is brought on not by introspection, self-critique, or concern for our increasingly poorly educated students, but by money, or rather the lack of it. Higher education is desperately searching for students with cash, loaned or not. And it is, by needs, panicking and will ever so slowly start changing.”

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