Sunday Miscellany

2D Goggles: pure unadulterated awesome. Seriously. Make sure you read the footnotes, too.

(I <3 Steampunk. The only reason I don't have a full costume/persona is the distressing lack of free time lately, and well, Victorian-era corsetry is beyond my current skill point level in sewing.)

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This is a funny commercial.

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A 19th Century LOLcat.

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The more I read about late 19th century counterculture, the less I'm impressed by the Hippies. Seriously, your grandparents did it first, Boomers!

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SNARK

Right, so the kids are going to the Very Good Summer School (the one for which their Mother got up at the ass-crack of dawn and sat in the freezing cold line, not that I'm counting) and so far so good. They're enjoying it. Mostly, they're enjoying the swimming, but they're having fun (and coming home completely exhausted, which is a good chunk of the point).

But they are taking a few classes. And, for one of the Heir Apparent's classes, the teacher sent home a slip to be signed giving the teacher permission to give the kid pieces of chocolate as a reward. Entirely unobjectionable: I would not take the word of a nine-year-old when it comes to food allergies. However the choices were 1) the kid is allowed to have chocolate; 2) no the kid is allergic but may have something else, and, number 3:

I would prefer that my child not receive extrinsic rewards.

LOLWUT!?

Who *thinks* like that? Seriously? These are nine-year-olds, for crying out loud. Are you expecting them to find the innate beauty in parts of speech? Are they supposed to rejoice in the times tables? Get a real kick out of memorizing the important dates in American history?

Look, if you can get a kid genuinely interested in the process of learning, that's great. But at this stage of the game, you're not actually teaching them anything interesting. You're teaching the building blocks that will eventually lead to them being able to learn interesting things. Times tables will become calculus. Parts of speech will teach them what they need to learn to write, and to appreciate a well-turned sentence. You need to learn when the Civil War happened before you can read the fascinating accounts of the war itself. The cool shit comes later, and kids are notoriously bad at delaying gratification.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that some people just forget what it was like being young...

Monday Miscellany

A day late, a bit short and very random. It's been that kind of week:

A Boustrophedon is a type of text in which the lines are read first from left to right; then, on the next line right to left; then, on the next line, left to right - like an ox ploughing a field, hence the name. That's just amazingly confusing.

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A very timely (and funny) filk from Tom Smith Don't Tweet Your Weiner. Slightly ribald.

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In the interest of fiber nerdery, I bring you the table-top warp-weighted loom. OH how I covet it.

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Paul Krugman lands a zinger.