mélange

"Great minds talk about ideas/concepts. Average minds talk about events/things. Poor minds talk about..."

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:38:00 -0400

“Great minds talk about ideas/concepts.
Average minds talk about events/things.
Poor minds talk about people.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt

(via bluepojo)

- http://www.fastagent.de/

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:17:44 -0400

- http://www.fastagent.de/

Eighth-Grade Education

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:47:01 -0400

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 the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal..

8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie,”play,’ and ‘run.’
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
8.. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’ (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last..
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks
and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete. Gives the saying ‘he only had an 8th grade education’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it ? !

TWEET.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:44:30 -0400

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 dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens. Screens of shuttering tag clouds and image thumbnails lightning in the mind surfing towards Boards of Canada and Guevara, illuminating all the frozen matrices of time between, megabyted solidities of borders and yesterday’s backyard wiffleball dawns, downloaded drunkenness over rooftops, digital storefronts of flickering flash, a sun and moon of programming joyrides sending vibrations to mobile devices set on manner mode during twittering wintering dusks of Peduca, ashtray rantings and coffee stains that hid the mind, who bound themselves to wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor, who sank all night in interface’s light of Pabst floated out and sat through the stale sake afternoon in desolate pizza parlors, listening to the crack of doom on separate nuclear iPods, who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, jumping down the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late 1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.

Poverty and the Environment

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:25:00 -0400

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 afford to build, change the environment, or destroy things. We’re the real polluters.

I couldn’t help but reflect on my own beautiful home in Arkansas, the Natural State, and the common, and mostly correct, association with poverty (“the poor South”) [1]. Although my professor was commented on Native American civilization, her words apply equally to much of the rural South.

More humorously, a friend and colleague of mine travelled to Arkansas on business; upon his return, he told me

Cody- Now that I have been to Arkansas, I am not sure if I should hug you (for getting out) or slap you (for leaving that beautiful state)

One of these days I’ll upload some pictures from my home state for you to see for yourself.. absolutely beautiful.

References

[1] - From http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/factors.cfm?state=AR:

At a National level, the poverty rate is 13.2 percent. Arkansas has a poverty rate of 17.3%.

"Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they people. Manhattan..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:34:06 -0400

“Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they people. Manhattan is, in my head, fast-talking, untrusting, well-dressed but unshaven. London is huge and confused. Paris is elegant and attractive, older than she looks. San Francisco is crazy, but harmless, and very friendly.”

- Neil Gaiman (for SIMCITY) (via threeneilsaday) (via neilgaiman) (via clockwatching) (via arcktip)

Where’s the Fail Whale? What is this Retarded Robot?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:30:49 -0400

Where’s the Fail Whale? What is this Retarded Robot?

I hope someone else notices the irony in this...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:29:45 -0400

I hope someone else notices the irony in this picture…

This company claims that what they “DO best” is Twitter Marketing… I wouldn’t want to know what they do worse than this.

1) They have only even posted to twitter (er, tweeted) twice.

2) That’s a terrible background: its not only hideous and distracting, but does nothing for their professional image.

3) They’re following 2000 folks, with only 170 followers in return.

4) And this is to say nothing to the content of their tweets: “hello world” and “we’re awesome, look at us”.

Can you say false claims and advertising?

Clifford Stoll: Why Web Will Never Be Nirvana

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:41:00 -0400

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 shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

How to make a lost cat poster if you're a graphic designer

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:18:20 -0400

How to make a lost cat poster if you're a graphic designer

"All new Zappos employees receive two weeks of classroom training. Then they spend two weeks learning..."

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:35:01 -0400

“All new Zappos employees receive two weeks of classroom training. Then they spend two weeks learning how to answer customer calls. At the conclusion of the program, trainees are famously offered $2,000, plus time worked, to quit. The practice, Hsieh’s idea, began in 2005, with a $100 offer. “Our training team had gotten good at figuring out who wasn’t going to make it, and we were thinking, How do you get rid of those people?” says Hsieh. Paying them to quit saves the company money by weeding out people who would jump ship anyway and allows those who remain to make a public statement of commitment to their new employer.”

- The Zappos Way of Managing in Inc

What the Internet was Made For

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:53:00 -0400

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 20-something girl from Oklahoma going by the handle ‘trjumpet’.) and see if it matched my own or contradicted anything I knew about our genealogy. What I found blew me away.

Not only was this genealogy spot-on, but it included information such as my family’s middle names (mine is ‘Arjay’, which isn’t exactly easy-to-guess), my parent’s anniversary date, shows a total of 7844 members of my very-extended family, and traces back my great grandfather’s male lineage (mother’s mother’s father) to 1678 in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland through three patriarchal surname changes. Amazing!

Surely, without such a collaborative and perseverant tool as the Internet, such a genealogy would be orders of magnitude harder to compile, and out-of-reach of those other 7843 people in the family who did not order the genealogy study completed. We’re moving into a time where the ‘novelty’ of the Internet is dying down to be replaced with true functionality that can bridge the real-and-digital divide, such as reconnecting generations-lost families together. Facebook can bring old friends together, but MyHeritage has the potential to connect people who may have never known each other but share a common, er, heritage. The Internet has the potential to reconnect us to our real-world roots that could otherwise be lost forever.

On another, slightly related note, I later stumbled upon Google Me (the Movie), which describes the adventures of one slightly-crazy man to meet, interview, and hang out with his counterparts (those sharing his name) all over the world. The goal of this movie is to connect with other people, even around something as small and “silly” as sharing the same name. The Internet provides the bridge to make these real-world connections.

Germanic English

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:42:44 -0400

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 first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”.

Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”.

This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”.

This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the language is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords containing “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Unt Ze drem vil kum tru.

"Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75."

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:09:47 -0400

“Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”

- Benjamin Franklin

BluePojo: My teachers sucked at knowing things

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:00:00 -0400

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…

bluepojo: fuckyeahgiantpanda: The 7-month-old Tai Shan plays...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:00:00 -0400

bluepojo:

fuckyeahgiantpanda:

The 7-month-old Tai Shan plays with mother Mei Xiang in February 2006 at the National Zoo.

By Shealah Craighead / GW Hatchet.

"I LOVE popcorn. It’s all I ever want to eat. I make it in a pot on the stove (not that..."

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:23:28 -0400

“I LOVE popcorn. It’s all I ever want to eat. I make it in a pot on the stove (not that microwave crap). Sometimes it’s my dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. Or brunch. Or linner. Or dessert. Or a snack. I love it. I’m growing some on my back patio. I love it.”

- Kate Lang

"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters."

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:00:00 -0400

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.”

- George Herbert

"My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it."

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:00:00 -0400

“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

- Clarence B. Kelland

World-wide population from 1800 to 2100 (UN estimates) This is...

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:25:40 -0400

World-wide population from 1800 to 2100 (UN estimates)

This is rather scary; if we maintain this trajectory, we’ll have 14 billion people by the end of the century. There’s no obvious sustainable way to support this many people; at first glance it appears that famine, poverty, disease, and maybe war will ensue. Let’s hope this isn’t the case.