March 09, 2006

This worked surprisingly well the last two summers I tried it, so I apologize to readers for pestering them again with a self-serving announcement.

I'll be working in D.C. this summer, and therefore need to find an apartment to stay from late May to mid August. Ideally, it would be one-bedroom, have parking, and be on the red line. I know about Craigslist, JD Post and Attache Properties. Assistance is very welcome, serious gratitude is available.


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Mr. President

09:32 PM

The University of Chicago has nominated a new present to replace the outgoing Don Randel, who seemed like quite a nice guy and good president from my worm's-eye view. [Except that he never responded to the dinner invitation that co-blogger Sudeep, Friend of Crescat Kathleen, and I extended to him our senior year.]

Anyway, the new president-nominate, one Robert Zimmer, was once a mathematician at Chicago, with which I have some obvious natural affinity. My actual math professors were something of a mixed bag, of course, but he started as an L.E. Dickson instructor, and my L.E. Dickson instructor was my best math teacher ever.


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Is our children learning?

09:28 PM

Stuart Buck complains about the state of Illinois's planned laptop-handout. I am as skeptical of such gimmicky government giveaways as the next guy, but Mr. Buck seems to go overboard when he complains:

With $300 of books, the kids might actually learn something. It's possible that they might learn something from the computers as well, but not likely: They'll far more likely use the computers (for the most part) for such crucial tasks as email, instant messenging, looking up news about celebrities/movies/music, etc. What plausible reason is there to think that giving a seventh-grader a free laptop is going to improve the learning process in any way?

Now, I do not mean to argue that a cheap laptop is a better buy, from an educational point of view, than a pile of books. But it seems hard to deny that computer-users, even children, are likely to learn things from their computers. When I was in middle- and high- school I used the internet to learn about the interactions between objectivism and libertarianism, a lot of arguments about the moral character of Shakespeare's Hamlet, how (not) to flirt with girls, lots of poems, and more. Now it may well be that these things (and gossip about celebrities, which he mentions and derides) are not things that Mr. Buck values particularly highly, or not things that it makes sense for the state of Illinois to subsidize the acquisition of, but it seems hard, and indeed quite odd, to deny that they constitute learning of one sort or another. And I have not even mentioned that nowadays, these kids could read blogs!

UPDATE: While some snidely chide me for thinking that everybody else will share my own predilections, they miss the points. The points are 1, that even IM conversations, emails, and vapid gossip constitute "learning" and 2, that the internet offers a great deal of more enlightening material than those.

UPDATE TWO: Mr. Buck and I, however, appear to now be in agreement. One can indeed learn from the internet, although the depth and quality of this learning is clearly not uniform across individuals. And we both agree that so far as educational policies go, there are better places to spend that $300 than on a computer.


3540

She had me in stitches...

02:25 PM

Well, the bad news is my hand looks like the bride of Frankenstein, and my left pinkie is variously numb and/or throbbing. (Do not cut deeply into palm when pitting avocadoes, J, do not!) In more amusing news ("Tyrants Destroyed," Nabokov), the decline of Taliban era restrictiveness on female dress may lead to a long-term decrease in the amount of Pashtun low-status male homosexuality. (Or not, opinion is mixed.) [Hat tip, Sully.] Also, props to Postrel (for the whole moral confirmation of stated belief with principled action thing), and via her, an interesting Cato look at internalities.


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