The Internet Doesn't Make Us Smarter - Education And Shit

What do the best classrooms in the world look like? - By Amanda Ripley - Slate Magazine: "Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking. They look, in fact, a lot like American ones—circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard."

Education And Shit { background-color:blue; }

The answer is obvious: Just send up people we don't really like.

Solid Rocket Motor’s Future With NASA Is in Question - NYTimes.com: "Should it aim to build the safest possible rocket, at great cost, or is a rocket that is cheaper and still considerably safer than the space shuttles safe enough?"



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New Study: Masturbatory Insanity Most Common Cause Of Death For Tolkien Fans

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The Gospel According To Steve (Jobs)

Steve Jobs' Ego Watches Over Steve Jobs

Why should we care what happens to Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs is dead? The iPad is so much better than reality it's like not even funny.  If that in itself is not enough to assure immortality, I don't what the heck is.  


All iPad users will now be automatically enrolled in a lottery wherein each winner, with 999 other Jobs acolytes, will be entombed with Jobs for all Eternity.  Thereby they will be able to serve him in Heaven (for example, when he needs someone to scream at) where he will no doubt be a very very major demigod of some sort, with the ability to intercede on the behalf on iPhone users with dropped coverage, provided that the proper sacrifices and ritual offerings/oblations have been made to Him, The Great Steve.   { background-color:blue; }

iPad So Much Better Than Real Life Like You Wouldn't Believe

Feel me up, won't you?
It's okay, touch me,
I shan't tell a soul.

by Mr. Ipad
Have you seen a picture of a flower on an iPad? It's so fucking great you'll never want to see a real flower ever again. In fact you'll just want to fucking smash every flower you ever see because it'll be so fucking inferior.
And wait till you see iPad vaginas!
All subsequent vaginas will be agonizingly inferior!
You'll want to stomp those too! Yes, with the iPad, life will seem like a pale, dull, colorless sham.

So, um, buy an iPad and enjoy life. Because there is no life without an iPad.  So let's face it, you may as well be fucking dead.  Come on, just touch me, I want to be touched.

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My Dictionary: What is "Education Reform"? Or: Sink To The Bottom

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand - NYTimes.com

This article tells us exactly what education reform is all about, and has always been about: Breaking up the last remnants of organized labor in the United States (it's our country or whatnot)--ensuring that teachers will have to be kissing the respective asses of every parent, every administrator for every day of every week of every year of their career.

And as teaching becomes ever more unpleasant, unrewarding and insecure with ever lower and lower benefits and pay, 'reform' ensures that the 'profession' of teaching becomes more and more like that of the typical low-wage American worker--no benefits, no retirement, no medical coverage, no job security--but you will be secure in the knowledge that you are just a back-injury away from a lifetime of poverty and worse.

If this doesn't attract better people to the teaching profession, what will?

education

education reform

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When Your Parasites Have Parasites

Giant tab to sort through the Lehman Brothers mess - Mar. 12, 2010

When Your Parasites Have Parasites
by Professor Bobo
Inside every parasite, upon dissection, we will frequently find that it that Mother Nature has wrought another miracle: Through the miracle of evolution, we find that evolution discovered yet another niche. For example, as we slice open the corpse of financiers who peddled worthless tripe and fed off the renumeration, look at what we find when we open the body...we make an incision...and voilà! A huge gaggle of insidious parasites living within the parasite spill out, their repulsive wormy appendages held out for fees! Observe how they pad expense accounts and overcharge for the most menial of tasks! Truly the attorney is as miraculous and wondrous as any of Christ's miracles.

And that concludes our lecture for today. Remember, extra credit for anyone who can find an attorney living in their garden! { background-color:blue; }

Earliest-Known Writing Deciphered

The oldest-known cuneiform clay tablet has finally been deciphered, according to an article published in the current issue of Archaeology Bulletin.  The tablet, from the ancient city of Uruk, is more than 5000 years old, and is described by the author--Dr. C. K. Smith of Frottage University, Kansas--not only the very first written communication, but also the very first hate-mail.  Translated, it reads:

Dear Steve: OMG, you're such a dick! LOL!  I drew a picture so you would understand because I just invented writing.See, this is what you are--a giant dick. 

 May you die horribly and rot in hell,

     Ester

Many scholars, however, are hesitant to accept this interpretation, and Dr. Smith acknowledged that it could be many years before a consensus is reached on the "Ester Tablet".
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Things That Are A Total Crock Of Shit

Into the breach yet again, and we are up to our elbows in crap...

For example: This example from the New York Times Play Time Is Over.

Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.

Indeed, go into any school and what do you see at recess? Do children interact with each other? Of course not. They simply sit and stare at the sky and wait for someone to switch on youtube or Spongebob or what have you, as there brains have been lobotomized by years of Internet usage and cable TV. How will they ever experience the joy of sitting quietly in church, listening to a boring guy drone about whatever he feels like talking about? And what of the thrill of singing hymns and repeating prayers one doesn't understand? How deprived children are today!

Bullying has always been with us, but it did not become prevalent enough to catch the attention of researchers until the 1970s, just as TV and then computers were moving childhood indoors. It is now recognized as a serious problem in all the advanced countries....One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.

Okay, I was completely wrong. This is completely true. When we compare studies of bullying and thuggery from 1900 to 2010, we can see that rate of larger children abusing smaller children was at 0% in 1900! Versus 75% in 2010! And the same is true of rape, child abuse, homosexual relations, and in fact all sexual relations. Nobody had sex in 1900, and now everyone's doing it (except me). I don't think African-Americans or Latin-Americans existed before 1900 either, except as amusing caricatures.

For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.

Yes, you learned that no one gives a shit about other peoples' problems, especially school administrators, especially problems that involve one group of children punching out one child in an alley. (What exactly is their function? Other than to say, "That's not our problem." That probably is their only function.) Anyway, as a crisis counselor, my first response to a rape victim was, "Well, life ain't fair you know."
But let's not get carried away by nostalgia. The important thing to remember is that you should latch on to an idea, e.g. technology = bad for kids, and then just keep repeating that idea for as long as and as loud as you can. And maybe, just maybe, you'll get tenure and perhaps some people will be gullible enough to listen to you. And don't we really all want someone to listen to us--even it's someone as gullible, foolish and stupid as ourselves. I learned that on the playground because no one would fucking listen to me.
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Ye Newe Printing Press: Shall It Killeth Our Childrynes, Our Values And Our Civilization?

Gutenberg: Does He Want To Kill Thine Children And Thine Kine?

The greatest threat to our children since the invention of <i>paper</i>, the printing press promises to be an even more fiendish forme of devylrye. Rather than copying books in a monasteries under the supervision of a closely guarded hierarchy, there can be no doubt that our youth will be readily seduced by  the temptation to read, or even worse, write books, about all manner of ungodly things.  Whispers, even,  have I heard  in the dark of a man (or is he a demon who has taken the form of a man?) who wishes to write about “hobbytes”.

Speakest Prudence Goodwyfe of our village, “I am most afraidyste for thine soulyes of thee and thine. Trembleste doth myself, fearing the perils for more than a fortnyghte and a deuce now.”  If our ignorant, illiterate peasants are afraid, surely there must be something to fear?

Now there is talk of a ‘publycke lybrarye’, and of standardized spellings and pronunciations and Middle English and Suchwyse.  Soon our children wilth hath noth moreth spans of attention, for they mustwise find gentle gibes within leaves of paper rather than feeding pigs, wading in muck and poaching the lord’s deer.  Perhaps they will instead become lazy and fat and demand pen and paper and printing presses for themselves and no one shall no how to feed pigs, they shall forget the plow and the anvil and die in sloth and immorality.   
So please sign my online petition, “Keep the Printing Press Out Of Our Shores For Fuck’s Sake.”  God be with ye.

Technorati Tags: http://technorati.com/tag/technology

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Japan Invents Robot Sex Pests

Robot-Sex-Pests Attack Breakfast
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Cyberbullies Agree: Not As Good As Real-Life Bullying.

Minor thug Jack Smith, senior at James Whitlist High in Lost Pine Nevada, decried the loss of real-life bullying attempts after being expelled for trying to drown a fellow student in the toilet in the gym bathroom last December. "Wow, I haven't smelled the fear on a freshman since that day. Now all I get to do is tell people they're stupid on Facebook, but then they just block me. It sucks."
Winston Smith of Cranville University's Department of Psychology is also mourning the loss of real-life bullying opportunities. "My studies have shown, based on a sample of five or six students we interviewed, that shame and humiliation play important roles in human society and furthermore that such engagements are not mutually involuntary but in fact a reciprocal relationship of exchange of social value tokens which can later be traded for both tangible as well as intangible rewards--such as when a grad student gives me a blow job for a better grade."
Jack's mother, Larissa Smith, worried about the denial of his constitutional right to an education. "It's horrible, horrible," she bemoaned, "all because he tried to kill some jerk no one even likes." She let out a sigh as she looked out onto her front lawn, sobbing more than speaking, "He could have been...a locksmith."

Cyberbullying

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Not A Conspiracy, Just Good Business

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10Ablin.html

Evidently, for every man whose life is saved by treatment for prostate cancer, 47 are unnececssarily having their privates chopped out or burned out with radiation.  Fucking hell.  But if you make a test that's slightly better than useless, you can still make money!

(In other news, people not always morally moral.)





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An Open Letter To NPR

Dear National Public Radio Weekend Edition: First of all, let me thank you for the in-depth analysis of Tiger Woods' public humiliation*. That was powerful stuff and I really learned a lot of stuff. Apparently, this crazy Tiger Woods fellow seems to think he has some god-given right to privacy. And some people at NPR think this stuff is like really, really important, so important it can take 5-10% of the airtime on a given program. So now I know it's important. I tried to tell you this before, but apparently I used a bad word and my letter was never sent to you, because a computer somewhere says that the word "cock" might be read by someone at NPR, and what if "cock" and "Tiger Woods" were used in the same paragraph? For example: The image of a black man's penis could involuntarily manifest itself in the mind Steve Innskeep, or a female intern, and then someone's head might explode. So thank you for taking the time away from these stupid wars and stupid recessions and stupid corrupt and incompetent elected officials in order to justify our lurid, prurient fascination with the genitalia of the rich and famous. So thank you so very, very much. Yours Truly, DRT *Weekend Edition Saturday, 20-FEB-2010 { background-color:blue; }

Something from Somewhere about Someone or Somebody.

An obit of economist Paul Samuelson,regarding former pupil (and ex-Ayn Rand devotee) Milton Friedman: "You can take the boy out of the cult, but you can't take the cult out of the boy."
And they say scientists can't be funny--au contraire! In fact, Benny Hill was an MIT drop-out. In an interview from 2001, Samuelson recalled him fondly: "He was a very promising candidate, and his idea of employing 20th century topologies as a tool to incorporate human behavior into an all-embracing theory of market dynamnics and sociology seemed at one time to hold great promise, but his dissertation was never completed. Turned out the old chap was actually just sitting in his office for days on end, drawing nipples in the margins of academic journals and making obscene phone calls to Vassar.
http://deadrodentyping.blogspot.com

Benny Hill's little known days as at MIT.

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New Study: Funny + Sad = True

Technorati Tags: Science,Psychology

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Global Warming Climate Conspiracy?

First of all, you should never call a fool a "fool"--if that fool is boorish, self-righteous right-winger who will be put on Fox News 24/7 in order to prove how how not only are liberals rude, but also that all scientists you disagree with are cunts trying to get rich off the global warming scam give us all AIDS.

So FUCK YOU, science! FUCK. YOU. { background-color:blue; }

More artificial musings.

The problem with AI is that we will not know if we have succeeded until our robots start having pointless arguments about movies and masturbating. And by that time, who knows if what video format will be in effect? That's why we must immediately eliminate any and all government funding for all other issues until we answer this burning question: Will the sentient beings of the future wank over lesbian porn?

Yours In Christ,
D.R.T. { background-color:blue; }

Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond.

The problem with discussing Collapse, rather than pointless musings of affairs of the heart, is that the issues of the world seem so distant, out of one's control, and downright uninteresting when one is speculating about whether the the girl (okay, she's 43, but you know) the girl one has fallen for like some the protagonist in a badly written novel is ever going to return that affection--that seems like a burning issue so close and so powerful and so significant that it's hard to see what else matters. (Well. So much for detachment.) { background-color:blue; }

Science: Worth It?

Yes: science conquered polio but what of the soul? What good is it to have limbs you can use when just going to end up in the unprovable-but-certainly-exists Great Inferno? And think of all the time you can spend reading The Bible when
you're inside of an iron lung! True, very difficult to turn a page, but
Jesus will do it for you through mysterious means, such as a breeze coming through the window and flipping to the next page right when you're middle of a Hebrew castration metaphor).

Or maybe scientists will make a page-turner for you, you know, if Jesus commands them. { background-color:blue; }