Quote of the day -- William vanden Heuvel quoting F.D.R.

Speaking about F.D.R., he said:

"When will we again have a President who says, Don't judge me by what I do for those who have much but for what I can do for those who have little?"

New Yorker Magazine, August 15 & 22, 2011 p. 34

Stay south of the Haimish Line

Good NYTimes editorial today by David Brooks.

Quote of the day -- Sun Tzu

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.

Grading Graders on a Curve

How do you correct for easy and hard graders? One suggestion is to normalize the grades of graders -- that way they can give whatever grades they want, then they get renormalized to reflect the fact that someone is an easy grader and someone else is harder. That way, an 87 in a tough teacher's class becomes a 92 before it goes on your transcript. Similarly, a 95 can become an 78 if it's the lowest grade that teacher has given in years.

Here's a link to the article describing this in more (i.e. eye-watering) detail.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Signaling/Countersignaling

Good article about countersignaling, which my friend Charlie Griffith described as "being cool."

via LessWrong

The Overlearning the Game Problem

What happens when a process becomes game-ified to the point where it no longer serves it's original purpose?

From Andrew on Everything

Quote of the day -- Sue DeRoos CPO®

Everyone gets organized at some point, they just might not be around for it.

-- Susan DeRoos CPO®

Information consumes attention: focus in the age of abundant stimulus

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson ponders economist Herbert A. Simon's 1971 thoughts on the economics of attention: "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

via BoingBoing

Quote of the day -- Leo Tolstoy

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

John Naughton via Boing Boing

Street Fighting Mathematics

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Mathematics.pdf

Where Children Sleep

From James Mollison

Westward Expansion visualized by Post Offices

Posted: Visualizing US expansion through post offices. from Derek Watkins on Vimeo.

I Heart Vi Hart

And you should, too. You can follow her:

on Facebook,

on Youtube, or

on RSS.

ROCK SCULPTURE ON THE BOULDER CREEK

Quote of the day -- Albert Einstein

In 1931, the pamphlet One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published by Philipp Lenard (1862–1947) and 99 others. As Einstein remarked in 1933, "If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

from Raganwald's Posterous

Slow. Motion. Owl.

Metropolis II by Chris Burden (the movie)

The Perfect Beach Vacation - Beach Angel Commercial by Travelocity

Since we're going to Cape Cod soon.