I am quite sure that if you slow-baked, say, an oven glove and covered it sufficiently with ketchup, [my father] would have declared, after a ruminative moment’s chewing, “Hey, this is very tasty.” Good food, in short, was something that was wasted upon him, and my mother labored diligently for years to see that he was never disappointed.
A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline…. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus…. Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
Experiment and the scientific method can be taught in many matters other than science…. Want the students to understand the Constitution of the United States? You could have them read it, Article by Article, and then discuss it in class—but, sadly, this will put most of them to sleep.
Or you could try the [Daniel] Kunitz method: You forbid the students to read the Constitution. Instead, you assign them, two for each state, to attend a Constitutional Convention. You brief each of the thirteen teams in detail on the particular interests of their state and region. The South Carolina delegation, say, would be told the primacy of cotton, the necessity and morality of the slave trade; the danger posed by the industrial North, and so on. The thirteen delegations assemble, and with a little faculty guidance, but mainly on their own, over some weeks write a constitution. Then they read the Constitution. The students have reserved war-making powers to the President. The delegates of 1787 assigned them to Congress. Why? The students have freed the slaves. The original Constitutional Convention did not. Why?
This takes more preparation by the teachers and more work by the students, but the experience is unforgettable. It’s hard not to think that the nations of the Earth would be in better shape if every citizen went through a comparable experience.
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.
Since when is protesting a crime? The Republicans would be having a fit if this was being done to pro-life protesters. This seems unconstitutional to me. I’d expect this in some kind of police-state, but in the US?
My iPhone stopped working the other day. So I called Apple support, and a pre-paid package arrived the next day to send back the iPhone in. Apple received it the day after that, replaced it, and sent it back overnight so I had it the next day. That’s just incredible to me. My phone broke, but all I can focus on is what great and quick service I received.
Altogether, it has been estimated, the cost to the nation of complying with the full whack of federal regulations is $668 billion a year, an average of $7,000 per household. That’s a lot of compliance.
Here is a video showing Mozilla Lab’s new project, Ubiquity. It’s a mashup command line for the web. It’s really impressive — I’m sure this idea will go far.
Update: I installed it and it works pretty well for an alpha release. I created a simple “dg-search” command (now available from the DG homepage) and was impressed with how quickly development goes. I found a few bugs and reported them, but I think this is going to change the way people use their browser.
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