I’m running a simulation of the UN Security Council as part of the final exam in my undergraduate course on global conflict.
Flags: $40.
Table tent paper for placards: $5
Having a student remark about a final exam that, “you know, this is actually kind of fun”: priceless
Frogs (the second plague) made an appearance at last night’s seder.
And yes, I’m sticking with my rant about the passover dietary restrictions…
What’s less fun is the remaining dietary restrictions during the rest of passover. There’s just not a week’s worth of entertaining and tasty things you can do with matzah (aka: “the bread of affliction”). Frankly, I think the rabbis who came up with this might have it all wrong. Trying to recreate the diet of our people on the run in modern times actually makes for very time consuming meal prep, which doesn’t seem to fit. Instead, I think we should look more at process instead of product, and say… no meal that takes more than 5 minutes to prep and eat. Yes, take-out Taco Bell is, in my estimation, the perfect modern diet for a people on the run (”make a run for the border”… out of Egypt and enslavement). Just a thought.
Good news: if you’re reading this blog post, then I managed to (finally!) successfully upgrade the blog to the newest version of WordPress. Although the site has remained readable, for the post couple of weeks I have been unable to add content because of a prior botched upgrade attempt.
So, to celebrate the (fingers crossed) fix, here are some bright tulips I snapped a photo of this morning on my way out to campus.
Socrates’ observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a) just got some nice supporting empirical evidence, at least insofar that an examined life in dire circumstances might be far more livable.
Ok, in reality, the study seems weak. There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of self-reported attitude shifts that aren’t triangulated with other evidence of change, and it’s only a single case study/context. Still, I liked it.
(Photo was taken taken years ago while visiting friends in Vancouver.)
p.s. The skepticism about relying solely on self-reported accounts of attitude shifts reminds of an old behaviorist joke. What did one behaviorist say to the other behaviorist after sex? …. “Was it good for me?”
Several friends have been making connections between Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I dumped the full text of both into ManyEyes, and here’s another take on comparison, looking at the most frequently used words in each.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”
Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union”
Technically, spring doesn’t start until Thursday, but the crocuses have started poking and opening up. And, since I have a looming article deadline at the end of the week, I’ve picked up the camera again, naturally.
I’m not always my sharpest early on the weekends. Actually, it’s more like this…
(image courtesy of the brilliant garfield minus garfield site)
So I’m indebted to friend Eric, who wrote me this morning to let me know that the blog’s domain name had gone AWOL. Fortunately, a quick call to my host fixed things up, and … we’re back.
It’s nice to be able to run Windows-only applications without having to spend much time suffering the operating system. Since making the switch from SPSS to JMP for statistics work, there really is only one Windows-based application that I have to spend much time in: QSR’s NVivo, which is a tool for analyzing qualitative data. Fortunately, VMWare’s Fusion lets me run Windows apps seamlessly with my usual Mac tools.
To illustrate, here’s NVivo running atop Safari:
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