Controlled Chaos

In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism – New York Times

What an amazing article about the societal benefits enabled by social networking.

Time for Supermarkets to Recycle Plastic Bags? – City Room – Metro – New York Times Blog

This is such a great proposal.  No joke: I have a garbage bag full of plastic bags in my kitchen right now, and I’m trying to find somewhere to recycle them.  It’s an amazingly hard thing to do.  Why should I find conservation to be the harder choice?

I found this image online and liked it.

This Time, No Laughing at the Witches – New York Times

We’re reading MacBeth in class right now.  Too bad we can’t go…

The Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction. The Pirahã people do not call themselves pirahãs but instead the Hi’aiti’ihi, roughly translated as ‘the straight ones’. Members of the Pirahã can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle.

Piraha is a language of whistles – who knew such a thing even existed? (linguists.) The Piraha example interests me because it seems to indicate that, in the absence of recursion and thus discreet infinity, a language loses a lot of its functionality – which I see as a cultural limitation. Wikipedia notes later in the same entry that “their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory,” presumably because they don’t have enough new terms to have said conversations.

The SIUE chapter of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), represented by Construction Management students Suzanne Shaffer and Oliver Coulson, competed in the 26th annual Concrete Cube Competition, held in conjunction with the ACI 2008 Fall convention, and received a final score of 93.014/100.000, earning them an overall finish of 5th place. They competed against 17 other teams in this international competition. The team has been preparing for this competition since last fall and achieved a 1st place overall finish at the regional competition held at the University of Missouri – Columbia in early October. The team is advised by Dr. Kerry Slattery. The objective of the competition was to produce a 2″ concrete cube that achieves, as closely as possible, a target design strength of 40 MPa and a target mass of 230 grams per cube. More details on the competition may be found at http://www.concrete.org/students/st_concretecube.htm.

STLtoday – News – Law & Order

A bag of weed for you and your girlfriend: around $40
Presents for her so you can stay at her place without paying rent: $10
Murdering a drug dealer so you only have to pay $10? stupid

Jessica is the little sister of a kid who was in my graduating class…

I generally try to produce on piece of art every day. Sometimes these are of low quality, sometimes high. Today, I was administering a final, and spent the down time in class to draw a beautiful tree on my dry-erase board.

I share a room with three other teachers (welcome to New York City!). The Spanish teacher has the last-period class in my room, and often uses my board, even though there is another in the room. On this particular day, she put up chart paper with instructions for the test, STARTED ERASING MY ART, and then said “I’merasing this” as she was half-done. I was dismayed, even moreso when I realized that she never had any intention of writing anything up there. When I asked her about it later, she said it clashed with her posters, and she thought it would confuse the kids.

So dies beauty.

When protected kids get out of their protective environments, they usually make big mistakes because they can’t temper their reality with any guided experiences from a childhood that allowed them to experiment.

I Wish The Wars Were All Over