And I think I’m done with grad school.
From the Lynn Item’s Controversial course sours Christmas for some students: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. That is unless you are in Irene Dalton’s sixth-grade English class at Swampscott Middle School. A number of parents are upset with a lesson plan taught by Dalton in her English class. Parent Diana Travascio said she was caught off-guard when her child came home last Monday and informed her there was no Santa Claus. ‘She came in and said Mrs. Dalton told us there is no Santa Claus and what else have you been lying about,’ she said.” [Hat tip to Mark Schwartz for the link]
From my friend Dana’s Reflections on a Screenwriting Life: “As I sit in my back yard next to the glamorous $300 blow-up pool that took us five weeks to get level, I reflect on my life as a screenwriter. Not because I necessarily have a life as a screenwriter, but because I was asked to reflect on my life as one for this article. When asked what I do, I often laugh as I say, ‘A New Hampshire-based screenwriter; absurd isn’t it?’ I’m also a full-time mom of two teens, but rarely do people want to hear tales from that harrowing occupation. And while I have written more than a dozen feature scripts and at least double that in short screenplays, I have yet to support me and mine with my profession that I so aspire to and absolutely adore.”
From Nature’s Time to test time: “The predictions are based on a lower-dimensional view of spacetime: two spatial dimensions, plus time. Spacetime would be a plane of waves, travelling at the speed of light…The third spatial dimension of the macroscopic world would be encoded in information contained in the two-dimensional waves. ‘It’s as if, in the real world, we are living inside a hologram,’ says [Craig] Hogan[, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory]. ‘The illusion is almost perfect. You really need a machine like GEO600 [in Germany] to see it.’”
From the Washington Post’s Obama Positioned to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions: “Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration.”
From NY Times’ In Vermont, a Bank That People Still Trust: “While many of the nation’s large and midsize banks are staggering under the weight of bad mortgages piled up during the housing boom, the First National Bank of Orwell, Vermont’s smallest bank, founded in 1832, is having its best year in recent memory. Loans are up 22.6 percent from a year ago, and deposits are up 7 percent in the same period, Mr. Young said. The bank has $36.5 million in assets.”
From Salon’s Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic: “As I see it, to date there have been three American republics, each lasting 72 years (give or take a few years). The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004.”
From NY Times’s Keep Your Euphoria to Yourself, Soldier: “In a stroke of self-satire, Pentagon officials tried to block Stars and Stripes — the military’s respected independent newspaper — from covering the troops’ plain and honest reactions to the election night news about their new commander in chief. The Department of Defense once again made news by smothering news….The good news is that Stars and Stripes found commanders in the Middle East and Europe that ignored the foolish directive, as if it were a premise for a M*A*S*H episode.”
M.E.J. Newman has put together a bunch of maps that give a more realistic interpretation of how the country voted on Tuesday. He’s got a bunch of maps to check out, but I like this one the best.
It’s the 2008 presidential election results as a population cartogram, which is a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants.
[Hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link]
From the Onion’s Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress: “Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama’s victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American. Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday’s election.” [Hat tip to Danny Pellatier on Facebook for the link]
Now Hearing
