Cox Crow

Bill Amend‘s Foxtrot had a sequence from March 1st to 4th where Jason sets up a coffee shop in the kitchen. He discovers that the demand curve is inelastic.

Joe passed on this critical information about the Waterfall 2006 conference in Niagara. I hope to see y’all there.

Rick mentioned this journal of a father who lost his six year-old daughter to meningitis.

…

What can I say? I’ve been crying.

John Gruber points to P. Z. Myers’s piece, “Richard Cohen, advocate for ignorance,” in response to this work of Richard Cohen’s. Mr. Cohen is disturbed that a young girl in Los Angeles dropped out of high school because she was unable to pass algebra — algebra is now required in order to graduate — and so attempts to argue that there is no need for algebra. But he provides no argument, only foolish assertions grouped in ungainly masses. One supposes that if Mr. Cohen were as trained in Rhetoric as he was in Typing, he would have learned how to construct a persuasive argument.

This is a shame, but perhaps he knew of no other way to avoid asking the value of a high school diploma.

Mr. Cohen titles his piece, “What is the value of Algebra?” Monday, while skimming through Sir Thomas L. Heath’s translation of Euclid’s Στοιχεῖα, I found this amusing anecdote.

Another story is told of Euclid which one would like to believe true. According to Stobaeus, “some one who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first theorem, asked Euclid, ‘But what shall I get by learning these things?’ Euclid called his slave and said, ‘Give him threepence, since he must make gain by what he learns.'” [Heath, 3]

Do we assume that because we have difficulty learning a thing the children will also have difficulty?

I bought this Listen & Read Uncle Wiggily Bedtime Stories for the girls. Turns out the 2006 Honda Odyssey does not have a cassette player. We hadn’t noticed.

One of the first things that children learn through instruction is to recognize shapes, both plane and solid, though they are not often given the names of the solids.

Now that they recognize the shapes, why do we not procede to the next phase and teach geometry? Geometry does not require arithmetic.

I picked out a couple of stories to read to the girls on this subject. I have Flatland and Euclid’s Elements, but I doubt they will be as engaging as Sir Cumference: no princesses.

You can’t get fired for buying Microsoft

I hear through the grapevine that there is evidence that the postulate is false.

So Google has a personal web page product, aside from Blogger. Apparently it’s a little over-loaded at the moment. Somehow I think the implementation will be much better than the rest of them. I know our page editors have been dead in the water for quite some time.

I found a tour.

Interesting show on the History Channel about the effects of the Little Ice Age.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has a disturbing collection of papers about the present situation.

I turned off auto-run on my Windows desk the other day. Auto-run is a feature which permits the operating system to start an application when a disc is inserted into the CD-ROM drive. Some discs use the feature to start the music player, or a demonstration, or to violate constraints start an installation process.

Annoyances.org notes

Windows will no longer be notified when you insert a new CD.

I don’t comprehend why AutoRun needs to be enabled for the drive ready event to fire — unless there’s no drive ready event.

The Eljer Patriot toilet has no power. It stops up — frequently. Unless you love plunging after each attempt to flush, and have a mop, avoid it.

We saw Curious George on my birthday. It’s funny! Roger Ebert doesn’t think it appeals to all members of the family, but I do. Maybe he needs a toddler. During the title sequence I was laughing so hard my sides hurt.

Expect to read the books when you get home.

Damn. I got caught; Rick tagged me!

Four jobs I’ve had

• Cashier
• Secretary
• Pre-Press Operations
• Sysadmin
• Dad

Oops, that was five.

Four movies I can watch over and over

Watching Groundhog Day once is not unlike watching it over and over. I don’t generally watch a movie more than once. But if I had to, I could watch these.

• Star Wars: A New Hope
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, except the dream sequence at the end The James Bond Å“uvre
• Mary Poppins
• A Room with a View

Four TV shows I love(d) to watch

• The West Wing
• Lost
• Desperate Housewives
• The Sopranos

Four places I’ve been on vacation

• North
• South
• East
• West

Four favorite dishes

• Cherry pie
• Bacon
• Pancakes — butter melting on each — drizzled with maple syrup
• My wife’s lentil soup

Four websites I visit daily

• Mine
• Yours
• Bloglines, which means I see n number of others
• Google

Four places I’d rather be

• Home
• Library
• Restaurant
• See vacation, above

Four I’m tagging

• Joe D’Andrea
• David Nesting
• Rick Ochoa
• David Parmet

David Parmet dodged, so I tag Matt Weyandt.

Larry, you ever going to get back on the web?

I ran across a blurb in the paper about Louisville’s new art museum, by the same firm which worked on Seattle’s public library.

It will be housed in a radical-looking 61-story skyscraper that’s … an eye-catching example of modern architecture.

You can see if for yourself at Museumplaza.net. The video shows the building’s impact on the overall mass of the city, but not the impact at grade. The impact at grade is supremely important, given the claims made for this building.

There will soon be a new, exciting place to live and visit in the heart of Louisville. Created by world renowned architects, it will attract tourists from around the country and the globe. It will transform downtown into a world class arts and entertainment mecca.

Have they given any thought to the Cincinnatians who have to look across the river at this thing?

Whilst reading the HTTP/1.1 specification for something else, I noticed that the Retry-After header may be used with 3xx redirection status codes.

This field MAY also be used with any 3xx (Redirection) response to indicate the minimum time the user-agent is asked [to] wait before issuing the redirected request.

David Nesting had the thought that this would eliminate the last good reason — other than not having control over your webserver — for using a meta http-equiv=refresh element in HTML. Support for Retry-After in in Mozilla has been requested. It seems also needed in Internet Explorer, Opera, curl, and wget, among others. The test is here.

Avoid Folgers French Vanilla. It has a smell I can’t place, but isn’t coffee. Perhaps ground wood chips? Perhaps an inferior bean? Perhaps unfair trade? Anyway, it stinks.

This quiz at Manor House doesn’t have my father’s profession. What? Clergy don’t have children?

If you’ve an interest in historical trivia, the United States Census Bureau has a very interesting series called Profile America [podcast]. Monday, January 30th, was Inane Answering Machine Day, in which I learned that Americans make 1.5-billion local calls and nearly 250-million long distance calls — not counting those dialed up on our cell phones.

World oil prices peaked in real terms in 1980 at about $90 per barrel. In 1977, U.S. imports were 6.6 million barrels per day. By 1985, imports had been cut in half to 3.2 million barrels. Why? Simple economics: Higher prices boosted domestic production and reduced consumption.

“Presidential Energy,” Ronald Bailey, The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2006; Page A10