08:09 – I should finish the lab session on simulated DNA gel electrophoresis today and get it off to the reviewers. Finish in the sense of finish writing it. I haven’t actually done the lab session yet. I’ll do it this weekend, when we’ll also be shooting a lot of images for it and other lab sessions. That leaves only the introduction, which is in progress. It looks like we’re actually going to make the 31 January deadline.
Not that things settle down much after that. In addition to a flow of of queries and edits, I have to get the kit contents finalized and purchase orders cut for components. The biology book hits the bookstores in April, and by that time I want to have 60 finished biology kits in inventory and ready to ship, along with components in the pipeline for many more.
The next project is a complete re-write of the forensics lab book that we finished a couple of years ago but was never published. I want to rewrite that book around a custom kit, which will make it much more accessible to home schoolers and hobbyists. I’d like to have that book complete, at least in PDF form, and kits available in time for summer session, although realistically it’ll probably be in time for autumn semester.
Farther out, but still on the horizon, I’d like to do a second edition of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, this one kit-based. Two kits, actually. One for first-year labs (the current chemistry kit) and one for second-year.
It’s going to be a busy year.
Yah, but think of the alternative. If you didn’t have anything else to keep you busy, you’d find yourself writing CSI: Miami fanfiction.
(I’ve
come acrosshad fan fiction rubbed in my face three times now. First when I was looking for the lyrics for the anime Noir because I couldn’t make out some of the words. Second when my wife found our then-preteen elder son reading a lot of “mature” stories and she wanted me to screen his reading. Third when I was helping a handful of non-Americans with their English and it turned out that they all wrote fan fiction, mostly Harry Potter fan fiction. I pray to the gods I don’t believe in to shield me from lame, hackneyed plots, cliches beaten into the ground, missing characterization, and endless, endless gay porn.)The largest maritime loss of life was not the Titanic, as many believe, but the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was carrying only civilians from the port city of Gdynia in what was then far eastern Poland, to Kiel via the Baltic. They were fleeing the advancing Russian army as Germany’s fate was imminent.
In a few days, it will be the 67th anniversary of the Russian torpedoing and sinking of the Gustloff. Today’s “Witness” program on the BBC World Service,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00n1j3r
interviews Horst Woit, now a Canadian, who — with his mother — narrowly escaped death when Horst was 10 years old. Just before leaving the home of his Uncle for the boat, Horst stole something from his uncle’s apartment that was crucial to the survival of everyone on his lifeboat.
In numbers, 1,500 died on the Titanic, compared to the estimated 9,400 who perished on the Gustloff. About 1,000 are estimated to have survived the Gustloff’s sinking.
Alternative podcast page — the Gustloff story is not up yet. Probably will not be until Monday.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/witness/all
Page on Woit from the website for the Gustloff.
http://www.wilhelmgustloff.com/stories_sinking_HWoit.htm
Chuck,
This is a notebook I’m sortof-kinda keeping my eye on. I’d want the UX31E-DH53 at $1349
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/asus-zenbook-ux21e-dh52/4505-3121_7-35033670.html
Homeschooling in Australia, or Queensland at least: legal if you register but homeschoolers say there’s too much paperwork involved so a lot of them have gone underground.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-28/thousands-of-parents-illegally-home-schooling/3798008
I love how our societies have made it illegal for parents to look after their children…
Bill
A registered homeschooler, as I do enough shit to attract the black helicopters, thankyouverymuch!
I kind of understand why the government is concerned about homeschoolers. I follow the Well-Trained Minds forums, which is frequented by all types of homeschoolers, from completely secular to real religious nutters.
There was a thread a couple weeks ago about what people were focusing on. Most of them were striking a pretty good balance of subjects. Some, of course, were focusing strongly on science and math or on humanities, but overall there seemed to be a pretty good balance. But some of these folks are really nuts. There were several who seemed to be focusing almost entirely on non-academic subjects, such as music or art. There were many who were spending entirely too much time on bible studies. (Of course, I consider any time at all spent on that to be of less than zero benefit, but I’m talking about homeschoolers who were actually spending more time on bible studies than on every other subject combined.) And at least one or two are teaching *only* bible (or Torah) studies. No math, no science, no reading or history or geography except biblical, no anything except religion.
Bill, you do more than enough to attract a squadron of black helicopters… 🙂
There are nuts in every Snickers bar, that’s for sure. And I agree that people who teach only a couple of subjects, or restrict it to religious studies are making sure their kids will live in a world of fiscal pain and suffering. Still, freedom means freedom to fail, as well.
The government should provide guidelines that it will accept as minimum standards in education, but not make it so difficult that people go underground, as they have done in Australia. Reading between the lines (9 kids!), some of those people are probably doing it for religious reasons, and not just laziness (Cindy, I’m looking at you). Those who find it too daunting to fill out paperwork, probably shouldn’t be taking on the task of homeschooling! Augean stables come to mind. Especially the pre-school age years!
I’ve pushed hard in the direction of math and science, and not hard enough on the humanities, save for music and history. Music is a crossover, anyway. It is an interesting mix of culture, art, emotion, science and math. We also realized our own limitations and never hesitated to hire a tutor when appropriate. After all, no-one can know everything about everything, and we all lead with our strengths. So my kids won’t be able to converse equally with the likes of OFD, and they preferred “Beowulf” the movie to the book. But then the book didn’t have Angelina Jolie as Grinhilda, either.
Please, I am unworthy of such attention. One helo is sufficient for my crimes…
“…at least one or two are teaching *only* bible (or Torah) studies. No math, no science, no reading or history or geography except biblical, no anything except religion.”
How does this work? I though that homeschoolers had to show that there kids met certain standards, or covered certain subjects? Is this not the case?
If I had it to do over again, we would have done the home-schooling, but yeah, the State makes it awfully hard to do so. And why should we give a rap about the State’s bullshit standards, anyway? Look at them now! A joke.
If I did it now it would be with Robert’s standards in mind, concentrating on maths and the hard sciences, but I would make the little buggers learn their damn ABC’s real good, too; by the time they hit junior high, we could have a high old time rapping about Beowulf in the original Old English and doing Latin translations like King Alfred back and forth. Yes, they would (hopefully) be doing AP sciences and maths in high school, but also what would now be considered, unfortunately, MA-level material in their own language, which, as we have agreed, is the Master Language of the Universe. Without that, they are lost in this world.
And I would have definitely cast someone other than Jolie for a Beowulf flick; why not Jessica Lange, who did a swell turn in Titus, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. I’d want an Amazon type for that role, certainly not some skinny little dame like Jolie or Glenn Close or whoever is the epic Shakespearean choice these days.
Vermont actually sucks for homeschoolers in terms of the hoops one must jump through. North Carolina is moderate. They do have requirements, but they’re not onerous. Some states, like Texas, have basically no standards at all. If you want to homeschool, you just do it, and do it however you want to do it. Some states don’t require even notification or periodic testing.
Yeah, Vermont also sucks in terms of what goes on its public schools system and the hoops they make just regular teachers and intern teachers jump through. One new guy described it to me; someone was on him like white on rice all the time and the paperwork was endless. Also, the supervision was done by what are clearly neo-Marxist cadre types and super PC all the way. No deviations or dissent allowed whatsoever, and self-criticism exercises like we learned about from the North Korean POWs back in the day. To be a teacher here is to be a fully committed PC drone. To give one example; the hierarchy is deathly worried about racism in the schools; this is a huge boffo laff because this state continuously vies for the Number One spot with Montana and Wyoming as the whitest state in the country. It is pretty hard to be a racist unless a kid wants to dump on another kid because he is Polish or French or Italian. Another thing that wakes them in the night with the screaming heebie-jeebies is weapons and the threat of weapons and violence in the schools, another laff-a-rama because we have no fucking gun laws here and the state is sinking to the molten core of the earth under the weight of all the ordnance, not the least of it being the artillery at the Fed and DOD testing ranges. Or the ordnance carried by the F16 fighter interceptor wing up here.
So you can bet that anyone attempting a home-schooling op would have to do so a la Delta-level secrecy and security, with safe houses and secret passwords and handshakes and all that stuff.
We got our guns but the State has our kids. I have to say, though, to their credit, some few teachers do what they can to subvert the system and run various Delta ops when they can, and lots of kids scorn the bullshit and poison they are fed on a daily basis.
All this is a real shame, though, and that we have let it get so far.
Don’t get me started here, but another idiocy in recent years was when they dropped French in one public school system and replaced it with Spanish.
This particular school district is roughly an hour from the Quebec border and quite a bit further from the nearest Spanish speakers, maybe Springfield, Worcester and Boston, MA. Not to mention Cuba and Mexico.
I probably also don’t need to mention that decisions like this are made all the time with zero input from us ignorant and undoubtedly racist, xenophobic, homophobic, fascist parents and none is ever solicited. And if any criticism at all is directed at these people, veins pop in their heads and they scream bloody murder.
I was pretty damned mad at the choices my parents forced on me as I was growing up. I had close relatives who spoke French, and I wanted to take at least a year of Latin (starting 7th grade), then French (which was not available until 9th grade). However, my parents forced me into Spanish in 7th grade, because Latin ‘was no language’ in their opinion (my folks were both highly literate and both well into the MENSA IQ range, could hold their own on most any topic, and had taken Latin themselves), and also because a girl I was very hot for at the time, would be in the Latin class, and my folks thought it was too early for me to have a serious girlfriend. That was the only class we could be in, together. I probably don’t have to add that this occurred in Tiny Town, where my parents were classmates with most of my teachers and the school administrators at that time. Things changed to my favor when we moved to Indy. I recommend raising children in large cities; it is much harder to get derailed by inconsequential minutiae, so important to people in small towns.
So I ended up with 4 years of Spanish, 3 of French (continuing into university), and a one-semester Latin and Greek derivatives course. I am still damned mad that I did not get to choose, because I believe to this day that I was correct in the choices for myself, and that my parents choices did me no good.
In spite of all that language, I cannot speak either Spanish or French, however, magically and mysteriously, after learning German fairly fluently, I can read both French and Spanish (and Dutch/Flemish and Italian), and just recently translated — while reading for the first time — a letter my cousin got from a friend of hers in France, who thinks my cousin can read French.
I am really leery of parents who force their own will on kids who are 12 or older ‘because they know better’. I allowed my own kids much more freedom than my parents allowed me. I have mentioned here before that neither of my kids came out of university with employable skills. I urged them over and over to get trained in an area where there are jobs — like accounting, computers, or graphic design. But I allowed them to choose (I only paid partial freight on their education — they paid most of it, themselves). What they ended up with — Economics and Art History — are degrees very, very few employers are interested in, to the point that neither has fulltime work in their degree field. Oh well. They would be as pissed at me as I am with my own parents, had I forced them into my degree choices, even if it made them employable. People with motivation do finally get around to getting the education they need, and both of mine are doing that — now that they know their choices produced themselves as unemployable graduates.
Why do I think that those kids home-schooled for religious reasons, are not AT ALL in charge of their own education?
Speaking of education, I stumbled across an interview with David Clayton Thomas by Kim Mitchell (both Canadians).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHSZWmjCJAE
(interview is 2 years old) where Thomas outlines what happened to music as the ‘60’s progressed. As he notes, music got more and more interesting as the decade went on, because it was being made by consistently more musically educated people.
Of course, the record industry no longer hires such education; in fact, they are such a dumbed-down mafia that I doubt there is anyone working there anymore who can even recognize a music education, let alone good music.
Before Blood, Sweat, and Tears, here in David Clayton Thomas and his Quintet with an exclusively Canadian hit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX_GnUQoE6o
And since I am the only US citizen who knows anything about Kim Mitchell, here is my favorite song of his from the mid ’80’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJqB4GTRB4
Mitchell is a DJ in Toronuh, nowadays. And he can no longer hit the high notes in that song. He sings it in a much lower register in live performances these days.
More Canadian music education. Another Kim Mitchell song well-known in Canada; unheard in the US.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymORCbgSyEA
Love the bit about Julian Lennon.
Chuck wrote:
“I am really leery of parents who force their own will on kids who are 12 or older ‘because they know better’. I allowed my own kids much more freedom than my parents allowed me.”
I have mixed feelings about this. Parents often do have a better idea of what’s good for the kids. They have to be alert to the kid’s needs and preferences, but kids have CRAZY ideas sometimes. I know from personal experience, I had some crazy ideas back then.
The worst choice I made subject wise was not doing two units of maths in Years 11 and 12. My results up to Year 10 were far from outstanding, even though my teaches knew I was a fairly smart kid (that’s what they told my parents.) At the end of Year 10 I told my counsellor (I’d known him for several years, a nice chap) that I wanted to do maths I, maths II, physics, chemistry, English (which was compulsory for everyone) and another “arts” subject in Year 11. In view of my record he suggested single unit maths, biology and either physics or chemistry. Since I hated biology I insisted on physics and chemistry and allowed him to talk me into doing only single unit maths – one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made. Anyway, insisting on fairly rigorous subjects got me into one of the top three classes in Year 11 at my school and that helped tremendously with my results. My parents were happy to go along with my choices.
I passed my matriculation exams at the end of Year 12 and chose to do a science degree at Adelaide University (I had also been offered a place in a high school teaching course, which I turned down.) When my “uncle” John (he was actually my father’s first cousin, but we used the honorific “uncle” with him) heard this he told my father he should *insist* I do teacher training, as it would lead to a job, unlike science. I was incensed when I heard of this several years later, and made me very cautious about proffering my opinion on what my nieces and nephews should do at school and uni unless they asked my opinion.
“I have mentioned here before that neither of my kids came out of university with employable skills. I urged them over and over to get trained in an area where there are jobs — like accounting, computers, or graphic design. But I allowed them to choose (I only paid partial freight on their education — they paid most of it, themselves). What they ended up with — Economics and Art History — are degrees very, very few employers are interested in, to the point that neither has fulltime work in their degree field.”
Sometimes employers are just looking for good results and intelligence. I’ve heard of poetry PhDs and dentists getting good jobs in completely unrelated fields because they were smart, not because of what they’d studied.
I hearby award a bar to Chuck’s Howard Kaikow award for replying to his own posts.
@OFD: I’ve never understood how Vermont can be so leftist, when – right next door – New Hampshire has a clue. Well, if one excludes the Boston commuters who have pretty much taken over the south edge of the state…
Re languages: I thought larger schools at least offered a choice? When I went to school, most kids took Spanish, but there was at least one class of French and German. That was in New Mexico, so it kind of makes sense for Spanish to be the usual choice. But Vermont? As you say, not all that far from Quebec, although Canadian French is quite a lot different from French spoken anywhere else…
– – – – –
“I am really leery of parents who force their own will on kids who are 12 or older ‘because they know better’. I allowed my own kids much more freedom than my parents allowed me.”
I have mixed feelings about this. Parents often do have a better idea of what’s good for the kids. They have to be alert to the kid’s needs and preferences, but kids have CRAZY ideas sometimes. I know from personal experience, I had some crazy ideas back then.
It’s a hard call. Our kids, at 14 and 16, are pretty much exactly in this situation. I think parents need to push the kids in useful directions, because we do have more experience on this planet than they do. However, you can only push so hard. If the kids are absolutely determined that they want or need to go in another direction – in the end, it’s their life, and their choice, and all you can do is make your viewpoint clear.
Our older one is a case in point: He wanted to stop school at the earliest legal point, and go into an apprenticeship in a field where starting jobs are really hard to find. We pushed, and pushed, but he was determined. So he did what he wanted, and we are doing our best as parents to support him in making a success of it.
I certainly wish I had had some guidance in college. I made very much the wrong choice of a field to study – I picked electrical engineering, which (for no reason I can explain) I have very little aptitude for. I should have picked computer science, and I did fix this 4 years later, but a bit of decent advice from my useless college counselor could have saved me the detour.
Hmm. I started a science degree in 1976 with no inkling at all that I would end up majoring in computer science, but it’s been an interesting profession until recently. Now all I do is push paper around. In the late Eighties I would have done my job for nothing if I could have afforded it.
I really really wanted to do electrical engineering, but I guess my grades weren’t good enough to get into that.
Why is Vermont so leftist (at least in the public perception)? In a nutshell, the early settlers were, as in the rest of Nova Anglia, Calvinist heretics and adherents of one or another dissenting Christian sect, fertile ground for the later radical abolitionist sentiments that sent so many tens of thousands off to the War Between the States. Last century, the state was inundated by NFAH’s. What were/are NFAH’s? People Not From Around Here. Within the lifetimes of most of the folks on this board, three-quarters of the state’s roads were still unpaved and there was still party line phone service and no phone service at all in some parts. But after the Good War, folks discovered the ski resources, the resorts got built, and it became a playground for the NFAH’s, who built second and third homes here. Then the lords of industry showed up, like the Watson family, who loved the ski areas around northern Vermont and put a gigantic IBM plant in there in 1957 so they could be close to their own playgrounds.
Naturally the Glorious Sixties brought more infestations of leftism up here, both from the granola-head hippie types fleeing ‘back to the land’ and the armies of lawyers and stockbrokers and banksters who eventually got control of the levers of political and economic power here and exercised their will on everyone else. They control the media and their writ extends throughout the Montpeculiar to Burlap (Chittenden Country) corridor and, of course, all the college towns like Middlebury and Bennington. And while our wonderful legislators are only part-time, they make use of that time to do as little useful work as possible and as much damage as they can, as they did a few years ago when they furiously rushed to get their faces on camera and ram civil unions and then gay marriage down all our throats, while jobs went south and the healthcare sector imploded, along with the national economy. Or they established nuke-free zones, you know, useful shit like that, and sister cities in El Salvador and Russia.
Travel off the beaten path to the hinterlands, however, and you may find actual, ‘real’ Vermonters, especially in what remains of the Northeast Kingdom and various other remote mountain valleys to the south, H.P. Lovecraft country. And Deliverance. And instead of corn likker stills, meth labs. And the “Take Back Vermont” signs, faded now. A few pot gardens here and there, which are rigorously sought out by mil-spec and law enforcement aircraft overhead, while rapists, hardcore drug dealers and pedophiles get a free ride, assuming they are even identified and caught.
But we still have our guns, despite the rare attempt to crack down on their ownership in places like the state capital, and a bunch of our kids coming back from multiple tours in the Sandbox (because no jobs here at home, natch) who are well-versed in weapons systems and combat tactics (except, of course, staying on highways and roads and making themselves wonderful targets for hadji bombers and snipers, and being loaded up with 100 pounds of worthless gear)
And as I think I have mentioned before, some of the kids know full well what a load of bullshit and poison they got fed in the school systems and laugh at it.
So there is hope. And as Jerry Pournelle says, despair is a sin.
I was out all night at a concert for my son’s band, and so have to catch up.
Kids: 12 may be too young for some of them to make up their minds, and too old for others. I tend to stay out of my kid’s final decisions, though I will argue my case with them to a point. After all, eventually they may be taking care of me when I’m old and frail.
David Clayton Thomas: I have a dim recollection of the TV show DCT and The Shays played Walk the Walk on. I would have been 5. Or maybe I just recall the song from the radio and imagine the TV? I preferred Al Kooper’s BS&T, but DCT has a great voice.
Kim Mitchell: Kim was a force in Canadian music, starting with the band Max Webster (there is no Max BTW), before going solo. I find it both funny and sad that Patio Lanterns is “unavailable in my country due to copyright infringement”. You would think that a Canadian could watch a Canadian play a hit Canadian song, but Universal has other ideas. Go for a Soda played fine, but isn’t quite as good, IMHO. Kim was famous for wearing hats, as he suffered from male pattern baldness. He’s finally grown up and shaved it off. Hell of a guitar player, that never got his dues.
I suppose this is nitpicking, OFD, but it seems unfair to associate gay marriage with economic problems. I guess your point is that politicians focused on the wrong stuff. But it seems unrelated. It’s not as if they were taking time out from somehow fixing the economy to work on legalising gay marriage.
Marriage is a contrivance of the church. Any two people of any sex or persuasion who want the legal benefits afforded to “marriage” as defined by law should have that privilege. What some guy in Rome says about it all, is of absolutely no concern whatever to me.
“It’s not as if they were taking time out from somehow fixing the economy to work on legalising gay marriage.”
That is exactly what they were doing. They focused on the civil unions and gay marriage legislation to the total exclusion of everything else, but I did not mean to imply that they could have or would have “fixed” the economy. There are a few things they could have done, however, that might have ameliorated the suffering and the necessity, such as it is, of youngsters joining the military because they have no other options. And their arrogance, up here, and down in Maffachufetts, has been such that they equate their narcissistic face time on-camera with the civil rights struggles of the Fifties and Sixties in this country. That takes colossal chutzpah. That said, I say, and have said before here, that I have zero tolerance for bullying and discrimination against gay people just as I have for everyone else, and I support the same legal and constitutional rights for them that the rest of us have.
“Marriage is a contrivance of the church. Any two people of any sex or persuasion who want the legal benefits afforded to “marriage” as defined by law should have that privilege. What some guy in Rome says about it all, is of absolutely no concern whatever to me.”
It was around long before the evil churches and evil religions. It is the law and the State that have no business defining or supervising marriages and the status thereof, or the issuing of licenses as if to pets and livestock. Folks wanna live together, get married by a JP, a minister, a priest, a rabbi, an imam, or a witch doctor can go right on ahead, or if they don’t wanna mess with it all, just fine and dandy with me. But Our Nanny the Almighty State can butt the fuck out. As for that guy in Rome, you absolutely should NOT have any concern what he says about marriage, especially, but I do, and in fact the previous Holy Father signed off personally on our marriage here, through the local Diocese’s efforts over two years.
So we can’t screw it up.
Chuck wrote:
“Marriage is a contrivance of the church.”
Man, you’ve gotta brush up on your history and anthropology.
I know the history of marriage in Western civilization, and it’s not me that needs brushing up; it’s you. Marriage started as a business convenience, which the church eventually butted in to legitimize, proselytize, and regulate. Civil authorities and the church have fought over it ever since. Society had it right in the first place; it is the church that screwed it up.
“Marriage started as a business convenience”. Exactly. The church got its nose into it, but it didn’t start as a church thing. Marriage was around for thousands of years before the church even existed and was largely about regulating inheritance of property, bloodlines, and controlling people, not fidelity or “love”.
Love wasn’t invented until something like 1538.
I thought you might have said 1983…
1967
Summer of