Last week, while picking up an exam written at an alternate time by one of my students, my brain went into music mode, as it often does. It ended up rewriting a good two verses of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All before I realized what had happened. I finished it up and, while I don’t have a gift as a lyricist, I thought I’d share a bit of dark humour (with apologies to ABBA). I don’t have good recording equipment, otherwise I’d make my own recording (although if someone wants to record this with me just for funsies, I’d be game). Instead, here’s a link to an unadulterated version.
Continue reading “The Students' Marks Will Fall”
It's not your limits that define you
“Peter Rabbit is this stupid book about this stupid rabbit who steals vegetables from other peoples’ gardens. 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82…” — Lucy, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown
It’s not your limits that define you but your attitudes towards them. While I could be writing about physical or mental limitations, my blog post this week is about one that almost everyone growing up in North America has faced: word limits.
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Who wants to buy tonight's test?
“Who wants to buy tonight’s test?” And what would you do if you heard someone say this? Oh, and if your answer is, “Raise my hand and say ‘I'”, please stop reading and go lick a lamppost. I was faced with precisely this dilemma three to four weeks ago. When I heard that uttered, I was at one of the University of Toronto’s suburban campuses that I shall not name, but only state that my high school, the University of Toronto Schools, is often mistaken for said campus.
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I like chicken, I like liver…
But I don’t like what I got in the mail. Last week, I received some unsolicited, bulk commercial mail. It wasn’t spam, but it was quite close. Yes, it came in a can but, no, it wasn’t delivered to my e-mail inbox.
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Recovering from more hard drive woes
Yes, I’m still using the same nonereliable hard drive that resulted in frequent beach balling. On Sunday, it had some more surprise alligators in store for me and decided to render my hard drive unbootable by corrupting the file system journal used to recover from sudden crashes/loss of power. My first instinct was to run the Disk Utility repair feature on the drive, but this was a no-go because, firstly, I was using Filevault 2, Apple’s full-disk encryption software.
Schmidt's on in China (and Hollywood)
Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposes new US copyright laws that requires ISPs to remove offending URLs from the Internet on the grounds that this is censorship. Would he say the same thing if someone leaked Google’s search algorithm(s) onto the Internet? Maybe not, considering Google’s support of censorship in China — at least until they were the target of cyber attacks had a change of heart.
In an ironic twist, he also supports the rights of Hollywood to fight against pirates saying, “Their business models are threatened by theft”. Why ironic? Last time I checked, large swathes of Google are powered by copyright violations. Hello, YouTube! Or even some of its digitization projects.
Edit: This post is short, but tangentially related to a long paper I’m writing that I hope will be interesting. Fingers crossed!
Life on a shoestring: Part III — Food
No, this is not a post about eating peanut butter and bread or becoming a vegan or freegan to save money. This was supposed to be a longer piece, but… well…
Canada, as a whole, is awash in food. Not only are we facing an obesity epidemic, but we have the luxury of eating more food just so that we can or ought to go burn it off at the gym. Yes, many of us are quite sedentary, but for those of us that aren’t, if you had to limit your daily physical energy expenditure to 500 “leisure” calories, what would you use them for? Taking a walk? Playing an instrument?
Trick or Treat, Mayor Ford!
I wish a large number of people would dress up as Marg Delahunty ((Would that make her Marg Delahaunty?)), Princess Warrior, and go trick or treating at the Mayor’s house. Those not wanting to go the whole nine yards could grab a video camera and film the ordeal or drive a black SUV carrying the faux camera crews and Princess Warriors.
I love pranks.
Life on a shoestring: Part II — Pedal for your Power
We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles. — Thomas Edison
I recall going to a science centre as a child and seeing a stationary bike hooked up to a generator and lightbulb. Museum patrons could do a bit of cycling and watch as the light burned brightly. Nowadays, cycling powers exercise bikes’ onboard computers and “regular” bikes can be hooked up to generators at the cost of a few hundred dollars. Now, before I continue, I must stress that the thought experiment proposed should remain as such — a thought experiment — and no more. It would likely fail on both an economic and environmental basis in the context discussed.
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Life on a shoestring: Part I — "Friends"
Dunbar’s number is the name given to a theoretical limit on the number of people one can maintain long-term stable relationships. This number has previously been pegged at values around one or two hundred. In this era of social networking, given that the number of on-line “friends” we have can run into several hundred if not thousands, it’s easy to believe that technology, through external cognition, has helped us overcome cognitive limits imposed by the zombie food sloshing around our skulls. Except it probably hasn’t.