Stuff we're reading / watching / listening to

[Tally M.]

I just watched last week's Studio C episode, and the very sketch was definitely not funny. Actually, it was kind of sad. And put adoption in a bit of a bad light.

[Digit]

Pretty good dancer. It actually looks just like a guy I used to know.

[Digit]

12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free. I'm intrigued by Harvard Medical School Open Courseware. Teach yourself surgery?

[Dragon Lady]

I just finished reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and... I feel like I'm completely missing whatever social commentary he's trying to make. I really expected to just get a good novel with a good story (but maybe because I grew up watching the movie, A Kid in King Arthur's Court) and that is not at all what I got. The ending was tragic. On all sides. This is what I pulled out of it:

Having one group in charge of government is bad. Even if that one group is a church. Don't follow the government blindly. Be smart and reasonable. But... if you fight against the system, you and everyone you love will lose in a very tragic way. But you'll hurt your enemy in the process!

Umm... huh? Do you see why I feel I'm missing something? Help!

[Marduk]

I haven't read that novel in particular, but I have read a lot of Twain, and I'll just say, it probably isn't "even if that one group is a church" but "especially if."

[Dragon Lady]

True, Marduk. He does seem to have an issue with the church being in charge. His main goal in the book is to bring down the One Catholic Church and set up a variety of Protestant churches that are just churches and not government.

Which is why it kind of surprised me when he eventually fails in his mission (when it looks so much like he'd probably win) and dies a miserable, lonely death. (Sorry if that spoils anything for anyone.)

[Portia]

I liked this article about artificial divisions and how religious communities can (possibly) transcend them.

[Tally M.]

Via something Whistler liked on Facebook: Crickets sound like humans singing.

[Whistler]

it's like the harmonic series

[Dragon Lady]

I recently downloaded a Christmas album by both Andy Williams and another by Bing Crosby. It is making me very happy. I haven't been loving my Christmas playlist for a few years now (ever since I went through and made my library legal. And then downloaded some free songs to build it back up.) so these additions are amazing.

[Giovanni Schwartz]

I have a friend that said she made a Christmas playlist on Pandora. Any guesses on what the first song was?

Nope.

"Wrecking Ball" Miley Cyrus

[Portia]

I have a friend that said she made a Christmas playlist on Pandora. Any guesses on what the first song was?

Nope.

"Wrecking Ball" Miley Cyrus

Just did this. Got "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas" by Perry Como.

[Digit]

The Jabberwock. It has the nyms of two people here.

[Digit]

1979 SNL skit What if Superman's ship had landed in Nazi Germany?

[Emiliana]

I'm reading the novel Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel. It's about a boy in the 1970s whose parents adopt a chimp to try to teach it to use sign language. It's aimed at young adults, but has some interesting insights into the psycholinguistic theories of the time.

[Portia]

On the period encoding anger in texts and IM.

[Portia]

Reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. It's probably the best work of non-fiction I've ever read.

[Katya]

About Time (which was really good!)

[Digit]

Unschooling. According to this news video report, it sounds like the teachers in "schools" like this don't do a whole lot of anything, certainly not teaching. According to the reporter's paraphrasing, the kids choose what they want to learn for the day, and direct themselves at it, while the teachers watch. If that's really what happens, I imagine that when it comes to objective things like arithmetic, where there are definite right and wrong answers, then at best the kids who do eventually discover on their own correct algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division do a lot of reinventing of the wheel, and at worst, since most kids are no Carl Friedrich Gausses, they never end up choosing to stick to it until they come upon the correct procedures at all.

I think there are a few educators here if I'm not mistaken. What do you think of this let-the-kids-teach-themselves model?

[Dead Cat]

I can see that there are some kids that would benefit from this sort of free, figure-it-out-yourself model, but for most kids, it seems a really inefficient use of their time. The world isn't Aperture Science: we don't have to do all our science from scratch. We shouldn't avoid the tried-and-true methods unless there's a good reason and teachers wanting to be lazy is not a good reason.