July 2010
17 posts
“Great minds talk about ideas/concepts.
Average minds talk about events/things....”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
(via bluepojo)
Eighth-Grade Education
Doubt there are many college grads today who could pass this 1895 8th grade final exam
Take this test and pass it on to your more literate friends.
What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895… Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is...
TWEET.
bluepojo:
by Oyl Miller
- - - -
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected...
Poverty and the Environment
In my class on Native American culture, a random non-Math/Science elective I decided to take this term, my professor was showing some photos she took of a Native American Reservation (Pine Ridge, I believe). I commented on the beauty of the land after class, and she offered this pearl of wisdom:
The thing about real poverty is that it leaves things pristine. [Reservation Indians] can’t...
“Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they...”
– Neil Gaiman (for SIMCITY) (via threeneilsaday) (via neilgaiman) (via clockwatching) (via arcktip)
Clifford Stoll: Why Web Will Never Be Nirvana →
Awesome article from 1995 by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and author, in which he derides the Internet and says its a dead-end. Some great quotes:
“Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
“Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog...
How to make a lost cat poster if you're a graphic... →
“All new Zappos employees receive two weeks of classroom training. Then they...”
– The Zappos Way of Managing in Inc
What the Internet was Made For
This morning I found an email from MyHeritage.com stating that I had 5 “Smart Matches”. Clicking in the email, I discovered that this service had matched my immediately family with an existing family tree on their service. Okay, this is cool if its accurate, right?
I click into MyHeritage.com to check out the family tree belonging to the other guy (who I later found out was actually a...
Germanic English
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.
In the...
“Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”
– Benjamin Franklin
BluePojo: My teachers sucked at knowing things →
Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_misconceptions
There’s plenty of information there, take some time to poke through it.
Why is it that my teachers taught me so many of those things? Are their lives so full of other things that they can’t take the time to seek out real answers…
“I LOVE popcorn. It’s all I ever want to eat. I make it in a pot on the...”
– Kate Lang