Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.
240 things sfh likes Explore more popular stuff on Tumblr →
-
Making of the incredible A Boy and His Atom, the world’s smallest movie made by moving actual atoms frame by frame.
Meanwhile, Disney chief scientist Heinz Haber, born 100 years ago today, explains the atom in a 1957 Tomorrowland broadcast and a wonderful related illustrated book titled Our Friend the Atom.
Loading... -
Just made this plot structure for my 4th graders. I think I am going to model it with our read aloud book and have them complete it using their new lit circle books.
I will post on my TPT [for free] if anyone is interested.
Loading... -
A Quick Note on Gap Years and College
Several people have recently told me that I should write a book or a series of essays on the concept of the gap year and the growing business of college. I’ve certainly read up on it enough- taken my notes, ranted my rants, and built my arguments, but I can barely write a one paragraph post on the subject. The truth is, I’m tired. The topic wears me out. It has been the center of my world for over three years and suddenly I am realizing that it has been a waste of the enormous focus I have given it. I am sorry that I have allowed the need to justify my intellect and achievements with a piece of paper to swallow my self-confidence. I am sorry that I have discounted any sense of pride for the past two years as false affirmation, because it was not supported by a credit count. I am sorry, terribly sorry, that my generation is emerging, bright and beautiful, into socially approved financial enslavement- that many of their dreams will come second to their bank accounts. I am sorry that college is becoming a case study for the old adage “If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” I am sorry that people are angry. I am sorry that people are not more angry than they are. I am sorry that young people are feeling cheated by a symbol of hope that should transcend all class barriers, the promise of an education. I am sorry that we have reduced education to the size of a campus. I am sorry that my nation is vomiting out a disturbing number of clones whose brains are wired to mistake identical opinions as the most firm of foundations for unity. I am sorry if you are offended by that assertion. I am sorry that my high-school teachers are disappointed in me, that I have failed a test I did not know I was taking, that I have transgressed against the newest commandment in so horrible a way- Thou Shalt Not Think for Thyself. I am sorry that so many go to college because they are told it is the thing to do, instead of because they feel that they belong there. I am sorry that we have replaced logic with books, instead of using them as tools to complement our own natural abilities to think. I am sorry that when I tell people about the things I have done and seen, traveling the world for two years, their follow-up question is, “Yes, but when are you going to school?” I am most sorry that my answer is inevitably, “I don’t know.” I am sorry to disappoint.
But, you know, I’m getting to a place where I can stop apologizing for the way I have lived my life, where I can applaud and support my peers in their decisions, no matter what academic route they have chosen. If they have made the decision in an informed manner, if it is where their heart is, then it is the right one. I am proud of my friends in school, extremely. My heart is not with university right now and that’s perfectly alright. I am getting to a place where I can appreciate that the prejudices I have formed against institutionalized education should influence my own direction, but should never undermine the faith of my friends in their path. The support they receive on their way, from me or anyone, will be of a value as great as the way itself. I believe that. I am getting to a place where my mind can settle, where I can stop simultaneously approving of/hating myself for not going and disdaining/envying those who do. I am getting to a place where my life belongs to me again and not to an on-going existential debate over the value of my mind and the definition of “qualified”.
I am sorry that college is becoming what it is, but I am glad that every day I see proof of minds that will always seek truth and knowledge and find it, no matter their environment. If some people find this in academia and some people find this on the road and some people find it in their local libraries, then more power to them. I’ve gone to school on this subject for three years and have come out knowing one thing in particular- education is what you make of it. Knowing this, how can I be bitter? The responsibility is on me to become what I become. I cannot blame loans, I cannot blame the pressures of societal expectation, I can blame only myself if I fail to learn. College only becomes a threat when it suggests that it is the only route to improve our minds. I know that it is not and coming to this realization sets me at a new-found ease. I’ll do okay. You’ll do okay. We’ll all do just fine. It’s just a matter of doing at all and never substituting the confidence you have in yourself with a piece of paper or anything else.
Loading... -
The List Is The Origin Of Culture
Umberto Eco is one of my heroes.
Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world’s great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world’s most important museums. The subjects of your exhibition sound a little commonplace, though: the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. Why did you choose these subjects?
“The list is the origin of culture” - Umberto EcoUmberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
SPIEGEL: Should the cultured person be understood as a custodian looking to impose order on places where chaos prevails?
Eco: The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.
I love Borges’ list of animals in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins:
These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
Loading... -
“Every dollar spent at a locally owned business generates two-to-four times the economic development impacts as a dollar spent on an equivalent non-local business.”
— Forbes piece on the amazing power of spending locally. Loading... -
Plants moderate climate warming
As temperatures warm, plants release gases that help form clouds and cool the atmosphere, according to research from IIASA and the University of Helsinki.
The new study, published in Nature Geoscience, identified a negative feedback loop in which higher temperatures lead to an increase in concentrations of natural aerosols that have a cooling effect on the atmosphere…
Scientists had known that some aerosols – particles that float in the atmosphere – cool the climate as they reflect sunlight and form cloud droplets, which reflect sunlight efficiently. Aerosol particles come from many sources, including human emissions. But the effect of so-called biogenic aerosol – particulate matter that originates from plants – had been less well understood. Plants release gases that, after atmospheric oxidation, tend to stick to aerosol particles, growing them into the larger-sized particles that reflect sunlight and also serve as the basis for cloud droplets. The new study showed that as temperatures warm and plants consequently release more of these gases, the concentrations of particles active in cloud formation increase.
… While previous research had predicted the feedback effect, until now nobody had been able to prove its existence except for case studies limited to single sites and short time periods. The new study showed that the effect occurs over the long-term in continental size scales.
The effect of enhanced plant gas emissions on climate is small on a global scale – only countering approximately 1 percent of climate warming, the study suggested. “This does not save us from climate warming,” says Paasonen. However, he says, “Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models. Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better.”
The study also showed that the effect was much larger on a regional scale, counteracting possibly up to 30% of warming in more rural, forested areas where anthropogenic emissions of aerosols were much lower in comparison to the natural aerosols. That means that especially in places like Finland, Siberia, and Canada this feedback loop may reduce warming substantially…
Source: iiasa.ac.atLoading...
