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I Just Couldn’t Sacrifice My Son
This heartbreaking story of giving up on D.C.’s schools - public and charter - is a telling and worrisome sign for education in the District, and a stark reminder that even the most involved parents and significant funding can’t solve for apathetic administrators and overworked teachers.
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Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton
I like Obama; I really do. I just like Hillary more. So I’m wondering whether this “new”, more forceful Obama will be a detriment to Hillary, or a boon - by forcing her to fight back and come out stronger, which is something that both Clintons excel at.
Writing in The New Yorker a few weeks back, Adam Gopnik analyzed some recently released abridged editions of the canon - including that old terror of American Lit students everywhere, “Moby-Dick”. Some choice quotes:
[The abridged version] still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.
Books can be snipped at, and made less melodically muddled, but they lose their overtones, their chesty resonance - the same thing that happens, come to think of it, to human castrati.
And, my personal favorite:
Who was the mohel of “Moby-Dick”?
I’m wondering if there’s a theme here…
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Fema sorry for ‘fake’ conference
The US Federal Emergency Management Administration has apologised for having its employees pose as reporters at a hastily arranged news conference.
No actual reporters were able to attend Fema’s televised briefing on the fires in California on Tuesday because they were only been given 15 minutes notice.
Instead, press officers asked questions many described as soft and gratuitous.
Uh-huh.
Summary (with some editorializing by me):
Actually, SQL-99 and beyond only require functionally dependent columns (i.e. keys) to be in the GROUP BY, so we’re not as wrong as you think we are. We just settled on the other extreme - letting you do whatever you want and maybe getting completely arbitrary values once in a while; what’s the big deal? Hey, MySQL isn’t your mommy, so it’s on you to make sure your queries make sense. Besides, if you’re really such a baby, you can change the sql_mode server setting to include ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, which will emulate the behavior you expect (well, sort of - the bug tracker suggests some issues may be still outstanding).
Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh.
We’re Carboholics. Make Us Stop.
Notable because:
[The author] is chief executive of Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy Inc., a wholesale power generator.
Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm
There’s not one, but two reasons for outrage here:
1) The NSA punishing Qwest for not acceding to the warrantless wiretapping? Really?
2) The warrantless wiretapping that started a month after Bush took office, rather than in the “post-9/11″ world? Really?
Now, to be fair, this story is coming out as part of Nacchio’s defense in his insider trading trial, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to apply a generous helping of salt to these claims. However, the documentary evidence seems to suggest that he’s not lying - and the government’s zeal in resisting declassification of documents that could definitively prove the point isn’t helping the NSA’s case.
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Unserved by banks, poor Kenyans now just use a cellphone
This is exactly the kind of revolutionary, yet concrete, change that technology has promised to bring to development.
In short: traditional banks don’t see a lot of value in serving the poor, because the transaction and administrative costs tend to exceed potential profits. Along comes M-PESA, a cell-banking service run by Safaricom (Kenya’s largest cellphone company), and lo and behold - administrative costs are reduced to the point where the business model is economically worthwhile.
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‘Dear Abby’ says she’s for gay marriage
Good for her - I wonder how many of her readers will take this to heart, how many will suddenly boycott the heretofore-revered column, and how many will simply take the advice they like and leave the advice they don’t (which is, certainly, their prerogative).
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Democracy in a Chinese classroom
Those of you that know me personally are probably well aware of my ambivalence toward children. (Yeah, I said it - I don’t like kids; take that, social convention). My horror at this article, however, has nothing (well, little) to do with that.
After all, it’s not the intrinsic qualities of the kids profiled in the piece that make them such conniving little bastards, but rather the system that makes everyone want to be a corrupt bureaucrat. It’s not a long piece, so I’ll just suggest you read about the little would-be apparatchiks rather than reading my recap.