From an ad for an anti-drug campaign for parents of teens:



To quote Willy Wonka, "I can think of a worse one."

Moms and Dads of America: if your adolescent son is acting cagey about a dirty gym sock... it's not a drug problem.

spacemanlove and I went to the Yale planetarium to see the weekly show and hear a talk on the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The planetarium show was pretty neat--it's a very casual setup, which is not what I expected. Imagine a conference room with the projection screen on the ceiling, and you've got it. Very cool tech. The docent presented a an overview of local astronomy for the date, and then there was a produced show about the telescope... clearly geared towards the K-6 set.

The school district that formerly employed me was thinking of building a planetarium rig like this, which would've been impressive, but last night I heard how much the projector and lens cost, and it retroactively pisses me off.

The LHC talk was pretty great. The presenter was a postdoc who worked on the ATLAS detector side of the project. I had heard much of the content in fragments, but having it all put together for the advanced layman was very helpful. I finally get how one detects a particle leaving the dimension, or what the Higgs boson actually does. (The Higgs Field is like a crowded party that selectively responds to someone walking through--an unpopular chap passes right through, whereas a celebrity is mobbed.)

Fortunately, no LHC Doomsday cranks were in attendance, though the speaker admitted that the lawsuit to prevent universal annihilation did a fair amount for CERN's publicity. As for the particle collisions themselves, several billion of the same particles are bombarding you, randomly, from all directions, at all times. There's going to be a few (million) collisions every day that have yet to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

(Also, going to a particle physics lecture before Lost = awesome. It's a philosophical speedball.)

Hearing the story of the universe is never boring, especially the parts we don't understand yet. I don't understand how so many people can be literalist, Young-Earth Creationists when Deism makes your god seem like a much more clever guy.

Let's talk Lost. Spoilers behind the cut. (Remember to be a sport and do the same in your posts, won't you, gentle reader?)
( seriously, spoilers behind the cut )

Fifty years ago, this happened: four black men went to a diner and asserted that they were entitled to pay for and eat lunch there. This was controversial at the time. People who had no trouble receiving service at restaurants debated this matter at length, and activism both pro and contra was a motivating political force on the national stage.

Again, plainly: 50 years ago in the United States of America, the right of a black person to have a seat, coffee, and a sandwich was a divisive nationwide legal and moral controversy.

The average age of a U.S. Senator in 2010 is 60. The average age of a Representative is 56. The Constitution has been amended only 17 times since the Bill of Rights (and at least five of those are essentially procedural, rather than enfranchising.)

All of which is to say: fuck tradition. There's plenty of it already, by choice and through inertia. Politically we are barely half-a-generation removed from "agreeing to disagree" about segregation. We have not changed enough by any measure. The past is a crummy muse for policy, and moderation is a jackassed way to move to the future.

This is a late entry, but it's because I intended to write nothing on the matter, but it wouldn't stop bouncing around my head.
( j.d. salinger: a belated apologetic )

Happy birthday, ankh_lee! Hope it's amazing.

Happy birthday, atrocity_sunset!

Hope it's full of everything you enjoy.

I'm watching a behind-the-scenes puff-piece docu about the Miss America pageant, and one of the vignettes was "talents you won't see in the talent competition"--goofy party-trick stuff like yodelling, contortion, reciting pi to 100 digits, etc.

One of the contestants said she could name "all fifty states and their capitals," and of course my mind immediately went to "Wakko's America". And sure enough, when they cut back, that's what she was singing.

This means that two strange things are true: Animaniacs has entered and survives in the American cultural zeitgeist, and we've reached a point where Miss America contestants--college age people--were watching Animaniacs during their formative years. That's a show that name-checked Bill Clinton in the theme song.

I am old.

Also, I am old in a time when no piece of mass media I can remember is ever exactly lost, so I will probably be reminded I'm old until I cease to grow older. A mixed bag, I think.

Did you see the big event yesterday where after years of build-up, the CEO revealed an expensive new product that's remarkably similar to several old products, except in a fancy package and always connected to the internet?

I hear Apple also had an event of some sort.

Madame Speaker, the 2010 State of the Union Drinking Game!

I'll be bowling and thus in need of my parietal lobe, so I'm counting on someone out there to take up the torch (and bottle) for me this year.

My father learned an interesting thing about himself the other day.

The backstory: Under a recent donation revision, Dad can now donate blood. (Nothing serious--previously he was barred as he has a severe egg albumen allergy.) When he went to donate for the first time, they ran the customary battery of typing tests, and some weeks later he got a letter informing him he had a rare donor class; i.e., his blood had some special factor that made it especially helpful for certain recipients. He got a fancy card to present at any future donation. Pretty cool already.

Well, this week, he gave blood, and there was a small kerfuffle about the special donor thing. They had to look it up, and it turns out that his rare characteristic is... a red cell factor peculiar to Pacific Islanders.

My Dad has Tiki-factor in his blood. This explains so much about me.

Dear Sandra Sing Loh: No, we all do not "want a wife"--not absolutely, and certainly not on the terms you set down.

I understand you are vexed that shared resonsibility is occasionally a source of conflict. But it's not because of some deep sociological phenomenenon that demands you mind our business. The modern domestic situation is quite simple: on the whole, home routines like chores and bills are necessary but not fun, and because they are ubiquitous and we are busy humans, we sometimes lose sight of good manners. Sometimes we forget to say thanks; sometimes we're critical of the other person's competent efforts; sometimes we put our better half on blast in the paper of record... well, that last one is just you.

Don't get me wrong: our time outside of work is valuable, and it sucks that some of it has to be spent cleaning, shopping, raking, etc. It also sucks that the laws of physics prevent us from doing housework while we're at our jobs, regardless of how we're paid. But if you see supporting and listening to someone you love as another household chore, that's probably a root cause of the conflict.

I don't need to fantasize about a Mad Men-style wife, because both parties in my household know how to communicate and compromise, and because we are friends, we don't keep score about life. Shocking, I know.

Happy birthday, doraphilia!

Enjoy it thoroughly and in the manner of your choosing.

Our newest kitty, William, is shameless, even for a cat:

Not only does he beg for chicken and paw helplessly at the air.... but he does so during those heart-rending Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercials. Manipulative little thing! If he weren't so cute I'd get cross.

Idea for a party (which you should feel free to steal, duplicate, remix):

"No-Talent Show": Everyone brings to the party a hobby--preferably performance-based--that he/she loves but knows he/she isn't especially good at. Breakdancing, singing, magic, juggling, parkour, your terrible band, your maudlin performance poetry, whatevers. Everyone gets lit and then the show starts. No apologies, no booing, no consequences. Prizes for all. People who feel emboldened after the main event can keep the party going.

The only forbidden hobby is cooking--nobody wants to grit his teeth and smile while eating something awful. THough if you wanted to try an amateur Benihana chef routine, I'd have to allow it... from a safe distance.

Good luck getting the toothpaste back into the tube, Randi.

Every decent teacher wants teachers to deliver real, practical, and observable learning. But only a sap would trust a bargaining process to define what makes "an effective teacher."

Like so many Big Plans to fix the educational system, the proverbial squeaky wheels aren't parents, teachers, or students--they're "outraged taxpayers" with a meaningful number of administrators on their side. But they're ostensibly "concerned for the kids," so it's not just selfish power/money-grubbing. Well, if they're actually outraged and actually taxpayers, I have bad news: performance-based retention is going to be a lot more expensive in the long run. Even in the fairest possible scenario, two costly truths will out:

1. Very few people are willing and able to do a good job teaching for very long at the present pay rate.

2. If teachers are judiciously held to account for their students' objective progress, the solution for the worst-performing schools is more money, not less.

To grossly oversimplify, if you commodify teacher talent, it'll reveal some overvalued teachers, but also some undervalued teachers. That isn't a truth that tax-stingy folks want revealed transparently.

Go ahead, incentivise performance by contract. You'll see new teachers acting like draftees, and veteran teachers acting like free agents. Don't treat someone like an employee and expect them to sign a saint's contract. If you had an incentive-heavy contract, would you rather be on the Yankees and play the Royals every day, or vice-versa?

Administrations will scramble to dodge blame when they can't or won't place good teachers with at-risk cohorts. All this will do is speed up a costly vicious cycle of savage inequality. In ten years, there will be fewer unqualified teachers, but there will be fewer qualified teachers, too. And most kids, of course, will have to go to school every day and lump it with whomever they're assigned.

24 is back! In New York!

I'm looking forward to the impossible version of the City, warping time and space around the event horizon of the ridiculous plot.

We've already got some old 24 chestnuts, including "Middle Eastern country whose name will never be mentioned," "weekday city traffic mysteriously disappears" and of course, "suspicious white lady."

And there's our first soft Jack/LOUD JACK! appearance. And now Chloe's annoyed with everyone. That's the anthem, folks, put your caps back on and let's play ball! We'll be up to a quadruple-cross in no time.

In the spirit of QB Drew Brees, an All-Pro who can throw more accurately than an Olympic archer and still find time to write an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court, check out this article on the origin of the Saints' "Who Dat?" cheer.

Like many things in the Crescent City, Who Dat has a complex relationship with race, music, and what-the-hell fun. I like the fact that New York is also profoundly caught up in the story, from Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to New York Mets hero Ron Swoboda.

FlipFlopFlyball's latest awesome inforgraphic: A-Rod's 2010 salary visualised as a stack of pennies.

Just for comparsion to the 3,178 mile stack of pennies:

Mt. Everest: 5.5 miles high
Mariana Trench: 6.8 miles deep
Approximate dimensions of Alaska: 1,400 x 2,700 miles
Diameter of the moon: 2,159 miles
Diameter of Mercury: 3,031 miles

Next week: A-Rod's ego, measured in AU, compared to distances to habitable galaxies.

No doubt you've seen the clips from the world's least entertaining Punch & Judy show, i.e. yesterday's Glenn Beck interview of Sarah Palin. He calls "bullcrap" on her generic, beauty pageant answer to which Founding Father is her favorite.

That said, I'm curious: who's your favorite Founding Father?
( mine is below the cut )