Odds and sodds

My list of bookmarks waxes and wains over time. Many things are items that I had planned to turn into full posts but just never could find the time or voice to write into a full post. When the list waxes enough to overcome my patience, I sacrifice my list to you as an offering to appease my tolerance of unkempt lengths.

• Berkeley Pit - In our summer material science courses, the topic of Berkeley Pit, a now closed open pit mine in Butte, Montana. The site is a Superfund clean-up site and one of the more polluted sites in the United States or the world. It's also the site of impressive findings in extreme lifeforms and of the death of 342 geese that died when they landed in the waters filling the pit. Link and link
• Things you really need to learn - The idea that we are teaching students facts, trivial things rather than larger concepts, how to think, how to learn, how to understand consequences for their actions is a great failing in our educational system - of which I am a complacent part. I don't have any idea how we can change something as large and with as much momentum as the educational system and the socioeconomic problems that lead to many of the problems in our educational system, but I continue to think that what we're doing isn't working for the vast majority of our students. Link
• A Town Divided Against Itself - In 1982 Sports Illustrated wrote an article looking at the rivalry in Hamilton, Ohio between Taft and Garfield High Schools. Sometime after this article the two merged to form Hamilton High School. Link
• WVQC - I'm a big fan of community radio. I've started listening to WVQC from time to time. The nature of the schedule is such that there are entire shows that don't interest me so it's hit or miss. Link
• Superman 2000 - Apparently Mark Wait had a proposal for a major overhaul of the Superman franchise a few years back. It's the kind of thing that pops up on the web from time to time, like Alan Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes that I posted a while back. Interesting to see what writers want to do but don't get to do a lot of the time. Link and link
• Missouri Bans Student/Teacher Facebook Relationships - The shifting sands on which teachers stand in terms of social media and communication with students in almost any format make our job just that much tougher. I don't blame states and school districts for trying to provide guidance. I don't know, however, that this is the right choice. Link
• Best Running Music - The Girl gave me a project sometime last fall: put together a good one-hour running mix for her. I initially made a few suggestions, but they weren't right for various reasons (mostly because they weren't songs she liked). I've found that putting together a running mix is a weirdly personal task because everybody has their own tastes, their own paces, their personal hope for the ebbs and flows of a workout. Here's the best resource I've found. Link
• The shame of college sports - If I had everything to do over, I would completely divorce sports from education - at the high school level as well as at the university level. I don't have any idea how to clean up the dichotomy between the alleged amateur status of college (and to a lesser extent high school athletes) and the huge amounts of money that are generated by their play, but it's something that needs to constantly be guarded against. Link and Link
• Riders on the storm - This is a terrifying/fascinating story of a military pilot who ejected from his fighter plane into the middle of a storm where he fell and caught updrafts, fell and rose for forty minutes. The post is one of the many lengthy but somewhat infrequent posts on Damn Interesting. Link
• All My Books - A friend of mine has cataloged all of his books, cd's, and movies in a single program on his Mac. He used a program that isn't available on a PC system but that used the Mac's webcam to automatically grab the items from just the ISBN/barcode. I'm looking for a similar PC-based program. Link and Link and Link