70F and 90%RH. I suppose it doesn’t have to get hot today, but I bet it will….
Inventor camp for the kids is even less inventive than last year. The kids really like it, but they are not inventing, or even really ‘making’. They mostly use junk to decorate other junk. No electronic tear downs at all this year, and no electronic or electro-mechanical work at all.
Some discussion about teaching the last couple of days. My feeling is that for kids from traditional western culture (basically white middle class kids with parents) we know very well what works. We put a man on the moon with slide rules and skull sweat (as the old SF writers would say.) Repetition to learn facts. Algorithms to apply a problem solving method using those facts. For the kids with an interest and aptitude, teach the theory that powers the algorithms. This results in some small but not insignificant fraction of kids who can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ and develop NEW theory, applications, and new facts.
The issue in modern schools is that liberalism won’t let them believe those traditional methods will work with brown people (see Jaime Escalante’s story for example), and they don’t work without the social and cultural foundation of middle class western civ.
Kids from chaotic cultures need MORE structure in school, not less. But almost all of the ‘new’ methods reject structure (because the liberal hippies rejected it *as adults*). The ‘noble savage’ mythos and the ‘natural man’ mythos feed into the problem too. Since so many of the children of the 60s culture think of themselves as unacknowledged geniuses, and have been told they are full of potential just waiting to be unlocked, they believe that all they have to do is remove “barriers” to learning and the kids will express their inner Einsteins without teachers having to teach them- they just guide them on their ‘learner’s journey’…
This flies in the face of everything we know about humans. Half are below average. Few are geniuses. Chaos breeds chaos. Entropy increases without localized energy expenditure. Most humans will do “just enough” to get by (and this might be an inherited survival trait in a resource constrained world.)
We as a society need to figure out what to do about it. Never mind the 2/3 that don’t speak english, or the ones who are already criminals, or the ferals who are only there because they are forced by law… the kids who can learn and want to learn are the ones we need to find and encourage because those are the ones who build the world.
But I’m late getting the kids up for their camp, perhaps more later.
n
Re: new math. Agreed it is a joke. My son was exposed in 3rd or 4th grade to it. Grouping numbers. It made no sense to me. Luckily, that only lasted one year, and then it was back to the traditional ways.
Speaking of my son, he is a rising high school Sophomore. He is more than happy to stay home and goof off, and I don’t have a problem with that. He will be working enough for the rest of his life. He is beyond the age of weekly camps, but he does have a weekly activity. The local botanical garden has a very robust volunteer program. One program is for kids 12-16. They volunteer one day a week, and help with garden tasks and with the little kids day camp classes. We gently encouraged him to sign up, and catches a ride with a couple brothers from the neighborhood who also volunteer. There was a little grumbling when we told him he was signing up, but after the first day last week, he is enjoying it.
I’m going to take Friday’s off this summer so the boy and I can do some things – even if its just play computer games. He is a great kid, but he isn’t immune to moments of teenage moodiness. We’ve lucked out though, as the worst we get is just some minor sulking. I seem to remember I was a little worse…
As a public service, several gub sellers are offering AR stripped lowers for <$50. I'm not sure I see the appeal, as you are still required to do transfer paperwork, and then you own an inert lump of metal, but it's a way to potentially build up a (potential) armory for small money. 80% lowers are about the same cost, and come w/out the paperwork. I'd think that if you wanted to build up a [potential] armory, then 80% lowers would be the way to go. (or buy a polymer kit and a bucket of polymer) With prices for complete ARs where they are now (higher than the lows, but still way less than the panic) you aren't saving any money building your own from parts, and you get a known good rifle. n
Ebola has crossed out of DRC…
The headline SHOULD read ” THREE cases of confirmed Ebola in Uganda, with 3 more likely”.
The family crossed into Uganda after fleeing custody in DRC. 6 made it, 6 likely sick are still in DRC.
So, it’s not as bad as if unknown cases showed up in Uganda, but it shows that border surveillance isn’t going to catch someone willingly crossing while sick.
The takeaway is that it has spread outside of DRC, it CAN spread outside of DRC, they DON’T have it locked down in the DRC, and it very well could get MUCH MUCH worse for the world.
Got preps???
n
Ebola has crossed out of DRC…
From today’s Drudge Report:
U.S. Cities Overwhelmed With Numbers of Illegal Migrants Arriving From Ebola-Stricken Countries
From the article:
“The migrants are then being transported to other areas of the United States, including Portland, Maine, where officials complained they were incapable of processing any more.”
This is unlikely to end well.
ADDED: Would an Ebola outbreak in the USA result in the government finally closing the borders? I suppose miracles DO happen …
Last time T tried to close the border, the commie judges overruled it, and the prog SJWs were mobilized to embrace the invaders.
n
From the linked drudge article above, and regarding my previous assertions about Catholic Charities profiting from the invasion…
“The charity Catholic Charities of San Antonio is helping to fund the transportation of the migrants to other areas of the country.
“We’re looking at roughly $14,000 a week on bus tickets alone,” the group’s spokesperson, Christina Higgs, told KENS 5. “We’ve been asked several times if we’re worried if the money will run out and we are. It’s obviously a finite resource.””
These two YouTube videos pretty much sum up the millennial attitude on education:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hesuHm2Z4
These two YouTube videos pretty much sum up the millennial attitude on education:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hesuHm2Z4
“I wasn’t taught how to get a job
but I can remember dissecting a frog
I wasn’t taught how to pay tax
but I know loads about Shakespeare’s classics”
Looks like they did not teach him how to rhyme either.
He does have a point that school should be teaching basic principles of citizenship and how to survive a wound, etc.
“The charity Catholic Charities of San Antonio is helping to fund the transportation of the migrants to other areas of the country.
The Mayoral runoff on Saturday proved that the Progs run San Antonio.
“Federal Spending Tops $3 Trillion Through May for First Time; Deficit Hits $738 Billion”
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/federal-spending-tops-3-trillion-through-may-first-time-deficit-hits
“(CNSNews.com) – For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government has spent more than $3 trillion in the first eight months of the fiscal year, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.”
“The record $3,013,541,000,000 that the federal government spent in October through May of fiscal 2019 was $181,157,920,000 more than the previous record of $2,832,383,080,000 (in constant May 2019 dollars) that the federal government spent in October through May of fiscal 2009.”
Makes a drunk sailor look restrained by comparison.
The outlays chart is simply amazing, the $1.15 trillion on Social Security and Medicare are scary as the final wave of the baby boomers (me !) has yet to hit both. Income Security (SSI) of $385 billion looks like a large scam.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
That’s rampant in rap (aka Hip Hop). There’s even a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_and_imperfect_rhymes
That which cannot continue will not continue. We’re broke.
The outlays chart is simply amazing, the $1.15 trillion on Social Security and Medicare are scary as the final wave of the baby boomers (me !) has yet to hit both. Income Security (SSI) of $385 billion looks like a large scam.
Social Security benefits are not guaranteed. Several court cases set the precedent that (a) the “contributions” are taxes, not savings, and (b) the system is just another Welfare program like Food Stamps.
Heck, there’s probably more guarantee with Food Stamps because things would get sporty shortly after the EBT cards stopped working and the community organizers met to discuss the situation.
Congress is free to decide who gets what, and many areas of the country depend on that SSI to stay afloat economically. The adult non-participation rate in the labor force was 37% in SW WA State when we left Vantucky. God only knows what it is right now, and that is a semi-urban area, part of a West Coast tech hub.
Looks like they did not teach him how to rhyme either.
That’s rampant in rap (aka Hip Hop). There’s even a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_and_imperfect_rhymes
He ain’t the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, M C Hammer, or Taylor Swift. All the others suck.
That which cannot continue will not continue. We’re broke.
I was amazed that the interest on the debt was only $269 billion. No wonder Congress does not care how much they spend.
“Sailing coach gets 1 day in prison in college admissions scandal”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sailing-coach-gets-1-day-in-prison-in-college-admissions-scandal
I wonder if he has to take a shower ?
“Sailing coach gets 1 day in prison in college admissions scandal”
I wonder if he has to take a shower ?
I’m sure the coach knows where more than a few bodies are buried on the Stanford Campus, maybe even literally.
ok so, windows weirdness.
Media Player has stopped d/l’ing song info for me. When I try to do it manually, I get a ‘can’t connect’ message for this url…
fai.music.metaservices.microsoft.com
All the google tells me is about an old problem where something added 0.0.0.0 redir.metaservices.microsoft.com to a hosts file. My hosts file is virgin.
There’s a possibility I broke something with internet permissions while I was trying to get video off my camera and IE wouldn’t let me…
Can someone try ripping a disc in Media Player and see if it gets the disk metadata?
Anyone have any idea where MEdia Player stores the url for its music metadata service?
thanks,
n
Social Security benefits are not guaranteed. Several court cases set the precedent that (a) the “contributions” are taxes, not savings, and (b) the system is just another Welfare program like Food Stamps.
Heck, there’s probably more guarantee with Food Stamps because things would get sporty shortly after the EBT cards stopped working and the community organizers met to discuss the situation.
Oh man, I can see one million grandmas marching on Washington DC with walkers, canes, and grandchildren pictures. Congress would do anything to stop that from happening.
Media Player has stopped d/l’ing song info for me. When I try to do it manually, I get a ‘can’t connect’ message for this url…
fai.music.metaservices.microsoft.com
>ping fai.music.metaservices.microsoft.com
Pinging fai.music.metadata.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net [40.113.76.66] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 40.113.76.66:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
Oh man, I can see one million grandmas marching on Washington DC with walkers, canes, and grandchildren pictures. Congress would do anything to stop that from happening.
Again, the dilemma my generation faces is either pay the taxes into the system and finance the T bill redemptions to pay benefits, even if we don’t think we will see a dime in 20 years -or- our mothers, mostly pre-Boomer and very early Boomer women, the mother in “I, Tonya”, move in, complete with pets, cigarettes, and bitterness.
About 1/3 of the states have some kind of laws making offspring responsible for parental well-being. The statutes are in the Keeper Of Odd Knowledge section of the law books, next to the sodomy restrictions, but they are there none the less. The only element missing is enforcement.
Think a bankrupt state government … say IL … is going to ignore the possibility of unloading pensioners on the kids?
Gah, I dislike Microsoft. (Okay, not exactly a new sentiment around here, of course.) Paint used to be really good for simplistic graphics, like say take a jpg and shrink it down to a size of Y mm x Z mm. I’ll be darned if I can figure out how to do that in the Paint that’s on my Win10 machine at work. I can get it to shrink by the pixel, but not just to a particular width x height. Maybe it’s there, but MS keeps rearranging things such that I can’t find them any more. So I emailed it to my home machine, where GIMP was perfectly happy to do what I want, and then LibreOffice was able very quickly to drop the newly resized picture to a template of name tags.
Again, the dilemma my generation faces is either pay the taxes into the system and finance the T bill redemptions to pay benefits, even if we don’t think we will see a dime in 20 years -or- our mothers, mostly pre-Boomer and very early Boomer women, the mother in “I, Tonya”, move in, complete with pets, cigarettes, and bitterness.
My neighbors mother moved in with two rat terriers. They bark all day long. And their barking gets louder when our cat sits on the fence between us and bathes himself. You think that he is doing that on purpose ?
Duh, he’s a cat. Of course he F’s with the dogs….
n
Seems to me that I’ve done that with Irfanview (free pic viewer that lives on any of my machines) easily enough, but it has been a passel of time since.
There was a video a few years back showing that Paint was the only program essentially unchanged since Windows started.
I guess current management took it as a challenge.
The new version is unusable, I just use Gimp across Window, Mac and Linux myself.
P.s. Nick, or whoever, the email address input field is auto-capitalizing the first letter, not really a good idea…
Browser issue. Unless JavaScript is involved. Browsers like to think they are smart. Look for a setting for auto capitalization.
And in other news the old place of employment is having issues with some code. It has been 2.7 years since I was there and they are asking for help. When does one cut the chain entirely and tell them I no longer am interested?
On the other hand I hate for there to be issues in my carefully crafted code put together over 14 years.
Are they offering a consulting fee? If not, cut them loose if you can’t fix it over the phone in half an hour.
n
And in other news the old place of employment is having issues with some code. It has been 2.7 years since I was there and they are asking for help. When does one cut the chain entirely and tell them I no longer am interested?
Free help or paid?
I still got emails from the Death Star *three years* after I quit, when they really needed to update our embedded Python interpreter. The management line was that my contribution to the embedding effort wasn’t all that significant … but it was. Just using the pre-compiled Python.org DLLs was asking for trouble, and they had to be compiled from source in Visual Studio, complete with OpenSSL compiled statically and linked.
It was voodoo, and I knew all the right incantations and blood sacrifices involved. A lot of big companies still don’t get it right, especially game developers.
At first I balked at the “opportunity”, especially since the young’n wanted gratis assistance. However, since he was a nice guy, I gave him a gentle nudge in the right direction along with the advice to find a new job while he still had something to offer another employer.
A month later, the young’n quit and took his buddy with him. Compensation enough. YMMV.
Scanner just had one team spotting a truck surveilling their target, and they learned it was another agency also watching their target.
Thick on the ground in some parts of town…
n
These two YouTube videos pretty much sum up the millennial attitude on education:
Funny, but I remember learning about the Constitution, stocks and bonds, etc., in grammar school. ‘Course, that was before JFK took office … 🙂
So, assuming that those two young gentlemen are of at least average intelligence, what is stopping them from learning (as opposed to being taught) what they need and/or want to know?
Are they offering a consulting fee? If not, cut them loose if you can’t fix it over the phone in half an hour.
n
I second that.
BTW Rick and everyone, why is Bob’s pic replaced by the WP’s as a favicon?
There was a video a few years back showing that Paint was the only program essentially unchanged since Windows started.
I guess current management took it as a challenge.
The new version is unusable,
The dadgum ribbon menu in Windows is absolutely worthless. I have hated the ribbon menu since Excel 2007. I can never find the stupid autosum icon !
@dkreck
The RBT favicon is back.
Forget that post I made about the favicon. Seems it is a Chrome issue.
See here
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/5384377?hl=en
Bob’s pic is back.
Thanks for pinging that MS site. From the googles, it looks like MS breaks that functionality fairly often and then fixes it. I guess I’ll just make a stack of CDs and wait it out.
n
Nightraker, I’d love to put decent software on my work machine (my kingdom for a better text editor than Notepad), but it’s set up such that only the Office Manager has authorization to install software. And she knows I don’t need all that fancy software. She knows all about computers, having taken an introductory class while studying Criminology in college. Ironically, both the people in the accounting department have IT degrees.
My rate that was agreed before I left was $100.00 an hour portal to portal, no fractional hours. Thus a ten minute fix would be $300.00 as it takes an hour each way to get to their location. I know I should have quoted more but money is not the issue, in fact it is a problem as it affects my taxes adversely. The IRS thinks I am self employed for any 1099’s I get from the organization.
So I emailed it to my home machine, where GIMP was perfectly happy to do what I want, and then LibreOffice was able very quickly to drop the newly resized picture to a template of name tags.
I keep ImageMagick installed in my Cygwin environment and Linux, but I believe there are non-Cygwin compiled binaries around for Windows.
convert input.jpg -resize nxn output.jpg
Command line, lots of options
There was a video a few years back showing that Paint was the only program essentially unchanged since Windows started.
I guess current management took it as a challenge.
The new version is unusable
Isn’t paint “enhanced” for 3D/VR or some such BS?
@pcb_duffer: If you aren’t allowed to install software, you can always resort to web services. There’s a service for just about anything, some paid services, some for free. For editing, Google docs comes to mind.
I use paint.net as a replacement for paint. It’s very capable and straightforward.
n