Adam’s just posted about how one student in Texas is wisely resisting state-wide standardized testing: Mia Kang stared at the test sheet on her desk. It only was practice. Teachers call it a “field test” to give them an idea of how students will perform on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. But instead of filling in the bubbles and making her teacher happy, Mia, a freshman at MacArthur High School, used her answer sheet to write an essay that challenged standardized testing and using test scores to judge children and rank schools. “I wrote about how standardized tests …
Month: February 2005
Banks on The Algebraist and Politics
Here’s Salon’s interview with Iain Banks. I think I nabbed this from Zarq, linked in the last post. If not, sorry.
Foiled, But I Can Point You In The Right Direction
I was going through my bloglines subscriptions again—must cull, must cull—and ran across a buttload of wonderful links of interest at Weird is Relative. I was about halfway through a post enumerating the best and funniest bits when Mozilla crashed. Apparently my installation doesn’t like playing certain video files. Gaa. But anyway, no point in reproducing the links… you should just go browse at the original page, linked above. I guarantee you’ll at least find one thing that makes you guffaw. I guarantee!
Old Money, and Some Trippy Korean Currency
Another link from Zarq, this one to an image gallery of old money. I’ve linked here to the South Korean money site, and would like to direct your attention to the P-11b Korea South 1953 One Won bill. It’s the pink one that has lettering on the back that looks straight out of the Old West, ie. it looks like cowboy money. That was a lettering style I never expected! The whole archive is cool, and worth a look if you have some time to spare.
Why We Never Seem To Meet Anyone Interesting
Just in case you’re wondering, the (relative, on cosmic timescales) abundance of events like this go a long way towards explaining why we never seem to meet anyone interesting outside of our own species, even if the basic building blocks for life are surprisingly common in this universe. I’m glad it wasn’t any nearer.