Comments on The Morning News
This lady's cute (especially picture #2 - meow) but not $1,000 an hour cute. What was the governor thinking?
China accuses U.S. of human rights violations. This is perfect. Our moral authority in the world has been so diminished by Bush that even the Chinese government has a claim against us. By the way... the Chinese have it right when they restrict religion. It's what we would do if we had any sense.
Re: Gone,Forgotten. Sad. So very, very sad. I'm really happy to know that Heath Ledger is more important to the average American than the fate of our fighting servicemembers. I'm so proud of my fellow Americans!
William Shatner, Rocket Man,...genius.
I love you so much.
In regards to China, I wasn't aware that the inability to solve poverty is a human rights violation... sad, perhaps, but I'm not sure it's on par with sterilizing thousands of women without their permission. Additionally, as bad as Iraq is, it's by no means the worst humanitarian expedition EVER. I think Vietnam was pretty on par... and who else was involved in that? Hmm... lemme think here... wait, I almost have it...
The Chinese are just looking everywhere else to draw attention away from their own disgusting country practices, and America is an easy target in the world. Has been since Teddy Roosevelt claimed we carried a big stick, probably always will be for as long as we have more resources and more avaliable land than any other country.
Re math: Come on, people, let's get real here - when's the last time you really used calculus or trigonometry? Everything I need to know about math I learned in grade school.
@7 Software Engineering involves plenty of calculus.
@8 Pull your head out of wherever it is and google 'gitmo'.
I used trig on Monday. I don't use calculus every day but without it I wouldn't understand what I'm doing. I'd be like a trained chimp pushing a button on cue without knowing what the button does or why.
Getting advice from experts hasn't stopped Eli Sanders from thinking his internet polls mean something. But if he had actually studied the math himself, he would know better.
In other news:
1. Before this week, many others have argued that Obama's racial identity is part of his appeal:
"What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. .... The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power ..... There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can." (realclear, Sullivan in Kaus piece today.)
2. Poll averages today from realclear show Clinton is better than Obama against McCain in 4 key measures of general election electability:
--National: Obama +1.2 over McCain, Clinton +1.5 over McCain
--Pennsylvania: McCain +1.4 over Obama, McCain +0.6 over Clinton
--Ohio: Obama +0.2 over McCain, Clinton +0.5 over McCain
--Florida McCain +9.3 over Obama, McCain +5.6 over Clinton
We still have a race that's pretty even and if your key yardstick is who will win in the fall, there's no hard evidence that Obama is vastly superior as some claim.
3. The real problem is both O and C ought to be 10-20 points up over McCain.
What's better than one William Shatner? Two William Shatners.
Oh hell! I spoke too soon. Make that THREE William Shatners.
The correct plural is Williams Shatner, if I'm not mistaken.
Keep your kids out of dangerous blighted suburbia! Shopping malls are no place for a child. Move into the inner city!
wait... what?
WTF is up with the PI's "Politics below the belt" headline today? It groups together Ferraro, Samantha Power, Spitzer's wife, and Spitzer's "Kristin". They say it's "four stories of sex, humiliation, insult, race" - but isn't it really that some dude at the PI noticed that there are a bunch of women in the news lately? Ferraro and Power are utterly unrelated to the Spitzer mess except by gender; why link them? Lame.
In regards to the Skittles story, I think my co-worker put it best:
"It makes me so very proud to live in a nation where not only is this story real, it has also been deemed newsworthy"
unPC - why are you writting those things when you know they hurt Obama - how could those numbers possibly be true when we have been told for months that Obama brings in Independents and Republicans. Now there is one major area that these polls could be off and that's whom they are calling. If they are calling off voter lists then it would skew against Obama.
But this is where the big state analysis comes in. In those states Obama was not able to get enough of the new voters out to compete.
So in November Obama needs to get out big numbers of new people nationwide and fend off much more serious attacks than Ferraro's. He has benefitted in the South by being black (as JJ did in 1984 and 1988, look it up he won like 18 primaries) and as you pointed out and his campaign has correctly pointed out, what a great thing it would be to have the first black president of a European Country - maybe the first outside of a mostly black nation.
I haven't used Calculus since college.
Total waste of time.
How'd you miss the Keith Olbermann special comment?
One argument in favor of calculus is that it makes you smarter. Even if you never use it, the rigor of solving many, many problems, and many many different kinds of problem, all within a small but growing corner of a logical system that explains the entire universe, makes your brain work better -- you read better, write better, have better sex, taste your food better for knowing calculus.
@ Math: There was a really interesting article a few days ago on what Soviet Russia (via the Singapore school system) is teaching USian kids about math: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-math9mar09,0,1449785.story
@ Waking up during surgery - that happened to a friend of mine during her caesarian - she was so traumatised she couldn't speak or nurse for days.
The problem with math (and other subjects) education is that in grade school, rather than drill and focus on mastery of basic skills, the focus is on "discovery" of math. And when kids fail to discover it, there is no remediation, and kids are passed along to the next grade level.
The problem isn't addressed until high school at which point the focus is on testing, and kids who don't do well are flunked out of the system.
Of course, this all hinges on an educational "system" which is debatable on its own.
@21 - no, Fnarf, it's all about the proofs, about doing what the Man wants you to do.
That part is ultra boring.
@22 There was an article a couple of days ago about a school in L.A. using the Singapore system as well. For a second I thought I saw it on Slog, but I can't find it now.
I got Hutcherson's faux-hip flyer for his new downtown church in the mail yesterday. Thanks to Slog, I identified it immediately and was able to throw it in the trash without reading it. Yet, I thought that maybe I should go there on Sunday... Whose a bigger asshole: Hutch or the Pope?
At least the Pope has gone green.
Fnarf, 21 - I though that's what crossword puzzles were for.
The great thing about the Singapore system is that it focuses on understanding and reasoning first and makes memorization and drilling secondary, for reinforcement. All of the countries that beat the pants off of us in math have systems that emphasize understanding over drilling. But unlike our systems they don't depend on the kid "discovering" on their own without help but rather guide them towards understanding in a very deliberate, step-by-step, structured way.
For our part, the new "tougher" math standards in today's article call for "children to be able to add and subtract whole numbers by the end of third grade."
I think we need help.
Calculus and sex, oh yeah. Every time I hear the word I pull my husband into the bedroom or just ravage him right where he is!
Integrals, derivatives and series expansion work every time!
Fnarf, you are a nut!
See, Will, that's what makes you such a special commenter: "@21 - no, Fnarf, it's all about the proofs, about doing what the Man wants you to do."
Because that just makes no kind of sense any way at all. It's impossible to even evaluate; is it supposed to be funny? Rebellious? It's impossible to tell.
"It's all about the proofs" -- this does vaguely resemble English, but it's not. The word "proofs" is in there, but it doesn't represent anything; it doesn't follow on from the abrupt "no" at the beginning. It's apparent that you have no idea what "proofs" or "solving problems" actually means. Further evidence is supplied by the fatuous resort to "the Man", which makes you sound like "Hippie #3" in a Dragnet episode.
MJ, it's not the math itself that's sexy, it's the exercise it provides to the most important sex organ.
You're still a nut Fnarf but I love, love, love you tons anyway.
Calculus is way beyond my simpleton brain though.
@30,
The proofs are in the pudding.
I'm surprised that you even bother reading Will's comments.
Fnarf has a special hatred for will
(and since the commenter's names are put below the post we can't skim over ecce's or daniel******kinear verbal diarrhea)
@33 - I take it more as 'spokesmanship'.
Calculus: not just for kinksters any more.
I totally agree with #21. I don't directly use calculus anymore, as my particular brand of software development doesn't require it, but I still see it in everything. Physics and statistics all use calculus heavily, and those tend to dominate my thoughts lately. Some pretty simple yet profound things come out of it, like the intregral of a probability distribution curve is 1. That leads to other nicities like margins of error (remember those?), and the proof of Tchebyshev's theorem, for example, and that proof quite frankly gives me a boner. This, in turn, also allows us to understand why Clinton has no chance to win the nomination.
@25: Uh, yeah, that's the link I provided, lol. I think it was on Slog a couple of days ago, now that I think of it.
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