Hey hey! Danielle Milam has some good educational ideas. I knew her when.
February 23, 2010
February 22, 2010
Quoth
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
-Benjamin Franklin
February 14, 2010
February 8, 2010
Hans?!?!
Star Wars, by someone who hasn’t seen it.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
This is the Only Level
Clever little game! My stats: finished in 8:19 with 36 deaths. Can you beat that?
February 6, 2010
The More Things Change
“Dear Dumb Dad”
By W. W. McClintock
Ca. 1935
My father, poor misguided gent,
Wasted his life — a life misspent
By working hard and working late
From 6 A.M. till way past eight.
Poor Dad! He’d fume and fret and toil
And burn the blooming midnight oil
For nothing but a little cash
To buy the daily beans and hash.
Poor Dad! He was so mild and meek
He’d work six days in every week
And 14 hours every day
To try to keep the wolf away.
Now father, meaning well, but dumb,
Amassed a rather tidy sum
With which he planned to buy some beers
To brighten his declining years.
Then the NEW DEAL came; simple Dad!
Who worked so hard for all he had
Awoke one morn to find that he
Was now a public enemy.
A louse, a Scrooge, a national cyst!
An economic royalist!
So Dad, industrious but dumb,
Is now the source from which will come
The coin to buy the gasoline
For some poor underdog’s machine.
To bring the more abundant life
To every loafer and his wife.
From Dad will be extracted sums
For radios to ease the hells
Of all the chronic ne’er-do-wells:
For booze, so labor’s little Nell
Can tell the boss to go to hell.
Poor Dad, a faithful, trustful goon,
Was born just 30 years to soon.
A moral lurks along the hall
In all this fancy fol-derol,
And it is this: That any cheat
Who says you ought to work to eat,
Is simply nuts, out of his head–
Sit on your tail or stay in bed,
The government will see, by gad,
That you get yours from chumps like Dad!
Newbie
A friend of mine, a fabric artist… back in the 80s, entered a weaving contest in a fabric arts magazine. She’d never done any weaving. She got some books, borrowed a loom, and decided to weave the fabric to make a seersucker shirt. It quickly turned into a nightmare. The seersucker threads kept breaking as she wove them. It quickly became a huge exercise in frustration, but she kept at it. She thought her difficulty was due to the fact that she was a newbie. Finally, after much struggle and heartache, she finished the weave, made the shirt, and submitted it to the contest. The magazine called a month or so later and said they were stunned by the piece, especially because you “can’t” hand-weave seersucker. She’d won the contest, and a ginormous, gorgeous Swedish loom that consumed most of a small room in her house. This is a perfect example of how you can do things when you’re ignorant of (or ignore) the common belief that you can’t. Sometimes ignorance is a huge advantage.
Via Makeonline, who is having a series on Maker “failures”.
February 5, 2010
Gross
February 3, 2010
Sing Stats
It’s done! After months of work, I’ve finally finished all of the music for my part of Sing 2010- the arranging, recording, charting, and assembling is complete and the show fills an entire legal sized box. I just spent a day and a half assembling all 600 pages of music into musician folders (which takes that long because each card stock page has to be hole punched, taped, or cut so it’ll fold and fit into the folder so the musicians aren’t wrestling with loose pages during the show). I’ve also recorded and mastered the 59 minutes of music track that’ll be underneath the live band on the necessary songs. Here’s a picture of the sheet music stack before I put everything together (iPod for scale):
Stats from this year-
Total pages: 594
Total measures of music: 4224*
Total “Active Frames”: 14268**
Approximate time: 123 minutes
*measured “left to right” without any regard for systems or additional staves. If you played all of the music straight through and counted each measure as it passed, you’d get to 4224 as the show ended.
** this includes every measure that I touched. In other words, if a single measure of music includes the rhythm section, two trumpets, alto sax, tenor sax, and trombone, and each measure has notes, this counts as six “active frames”. It’s a good way to measure how much actual work went into the scores.
If you’re coming to the show this year, expect a great one. I’m incredibly proud of the months of work and prep that have gone into it, and I think it’s going to be the best show ever. It’s not too late to get tickets (though they’re becoming very scarce).
Rehearsals start in 10 days!
February 1, 2010
January 29, 2010
That’s One Smart Bear
My friend Jason Cohen has some good thoughts on entrepreneurship and feeling like a fraud. Hey, that quote at the top looks familiar.
January 28, 2010
Hand it Over
Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.
Municipalities have come to rely on confiscated property for revenue. Police and prosecutors use forfeiture proceeds to fund not only general operations but junkets, parties, and swank office equipment. A cottage industry has sprung up to offer law enforcement agencies instruction on how to take and keep property more efficiently.
via Reason magazine
January 27, 2010
January 26, 2010
I’m All Thumbs
Q: What’s worse than smashing your thumb with a hammer?
A: Two minutes later, smashing the same thumb in the same spot, with the same hammer.
Ouch
(signed- Jason, the temporarily one-thumbed musician)
January 25, 2010
Big Tent
You want a big tent? It’s fiscal conservatism. The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it.
You offer that, you follow through on it, and you get the Republicans, the moderates, and a sizable chunk of disaffected Democrats.
Everything else is beside the point right now. You lose the fiscal conservative fight now and allow the United States to head deeper into Statism, and it’s over. If the government controls healthcare, it will “[redefine] the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists.” You can kiss freedom goodbye in the longterm.
So instead of utterly failing our future generations, leaving them to toil under the yoke of an obscenely powerful government, we should make our stand now. Embrace fiscal conservatism. Leave the rest to federalism.
It’s easy. It’s a no-brainer. It’s even Constitutional. People are sick of the spending, sick of the debt, sick of the bailouts, sick of the handouts, sick of the back room deals, sick of the taxpayer funded bribes, sick of the bureaucrats. They want unyielding, unapologetic fiscal conservatism.
Fiscal conservatism is the big tent.
via Freeman Hunt (great name)