Not the best of Tuesdays, but it could have been worse.
Cleaned the rabbit cage last night, little though I wanted to. So at least I was responsible, at the cost of an hour's free time on a weeknight. And then I got some rows onto Mom's shawl and was in bed a bit past 11pm, not too bad all things considered.
Of course, now I'm at work and I have a half day up front -- the receptionist is supposedly coming in at 1pm, meaning it screws with my lunchtime (unless I decide to annoy my backup by having her come up front for an hour, which is pretty unnecessary and could be inconvenient all round since I can't trust the receptionist to actually show up when she says she's coming in), and I won't really know when to wind things up and reach a stopping place. Best get the Tumblr stuff out of the way quickly.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade -- "It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international tests is mediocre. Less well known are contrary facts. The black-white achievement gap, as a recent report put it, 'is as old as the nation itself.' It was cut in half in the 1970s and 1980s, probably by desegregation, increased economic opportunities for black families, federal investment in early childhood education, and reductions in class size. Another little-known fact is that American students have never performed well on international tests. When the first such tests were given in the mid-1960s, our students usually scored at or below the median, and sometimes at the bottom of the pack. This mediocre performance is nothing to boast about, but it is not an indicator of future economic decline. Despite our students’ mediocre test scores, the nation’s economy has been robust for most of the past half-century. And the news is not all terrible. On the latest international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, American schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan, and Korea. Even when as many as 25 percent of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of US schools drop."
A portfolio of sculptures made by cutting the pages of books, possibly done by the same person who's been leaving mysterious paper sculptures scattered around Edinburgh's literary areas (and also in a filmhouse).
A pair of livebloggings of the Tea Party debate -- on ThinkProgress ("9:21: Ron Paul the doctor says a 30-year-old who has an accident and needs intensive health care should’ve planned ahead and is responsible for himself. When Blitzer asks if society should let that young man die, some in the crowd shout in approval. Tea Party audience members heard yelling: 'Yeah!' 'Let him die!'") and on The Daily Beast ("9.34 pm. A tiny piece of reality peeps in: Latinos exist and they can vote. Perry gets booed for providing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. He stands firm. But it's obviously a problem for him. He has had to live in the real world in a border state so that this issue is not an easy abstraction. But it is for Bachmann and she takes another whack. Perry has a black eye, and Bachmann has had a stronger second half.").
Also, the latter piece linked to this at the end: Marijuana harvesting in Kyrgyzstan sometimes involves naked horseback riding, which might even be true.
Sidelinked from the above: What can this glow-in-the-dark kitten teach scientists about AIDS? -- "This picture of a glowing cat has not been altered in any way. The cat, on the other hand, has been altered quite a bit. A team of researchers has genetically engineered it to express green fluorescent protein (aka 'GFP,' originally found in jellyfish), which makes the cat glow green under ultraviolet light. But GFP isn't the only extra-species gene this cat is carrying - it's also packing a gene called TRIMCyp, originally found in monkeys. By giving the gene to the cats, the researchers hope to shed light on how they might combat diseases like HIV/AIDS - not just in felines, but in humans, too."
World War II: Women at War -- "For the nations who were deeply involved in World War II, the war effort was total, with women volunteering in huge numbers alongside men and filling traditionally male positions at home, in industry, and the military. Women took both active and supporting positions in factories, government organizations, military auxiliaries, resistance groups and more. While relatively few women were at the front lines as combatants, many found themselves the victims of bombing campaigns and invading armies. By the end of the war, more than 2 million women worked in war industries, hundreds of thousands volunteered as nurses or members of home defense units, or became full-time members of the military. In the Soviet Union alone, some 800,000 women served alongside men in army units during the war. Collected here are images of women involved directly in the events of World War II, and some of what they experienced and endured. A note: most of the captions are from the original sources from the 1940s, complete with the frequent use of the term 'girl' to describe young women." And to borrow the note from the Tumblr post I got the link from, it's also worth pointing out that these are women from many countries, Axis as well as Allied.
A friend linked to the page on planetary and satellite naming conventions with a comment directing attention specifically to Titan (which dips into Middle-earth and Dune for naming certain features). I think he may have linked it elsewhere recently, because I dimly recall a crack regarding dipping into Lovecraft for Pluto (whose only rule is "Underworld deities").
Oh, lovely -- the program I've been entering data into all day dropped my connection. And I can't get it to come back up, let alone to cheerfully inform me that my account is now locked out because I didn't log out properly. And I'm not at my desk with access to my e-mail to contact the help desk in New York (because the receptionist never came in at all, and happily my backup overheard our supervisor on the phone with her and sent me to lunch at 12:40), so I'm basically stuck sitting on my hands until it hits 5pm and I can head on out. Which I will, happily, though somewhat guiltily since I wasn't anywhere close to finished with this policy and I could have gotten a lot closer if I'd had the additional hour to work on it that I'd expected to be getting... (Still, getting out of here early on the evening I visit Grandma is a good thing.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
Of course, now I'm at work and I have a half day up front -- the receptionist is supposedly coming in at 1pm, meaning it screws with my lunchtime (unless I decide to annoy my backup by having her come up front for an hour, which is pretty unnecessary and could be inconvenient all round since I can't trust the receptionist to actually show up when she says she's coming in), and I won't really know when to wind things up and reach a stopping place. Best get the Tumblr stuff out of the way quickly.
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade -- "It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international tests is mediocre. Less well known are contrary facts. The black-white achievement gap, as a recent report put it, 'is as old as the nation itself.' It was cut in half in the 1970s and 1980s, probably by desegregation, increased economic opportunities for black families, federal investment in early childhood education, and reductions in class size. Another little-known fact is that American students have never performed well on international tests. When the first such tests were given in the mid-1960s, our students usually scored at or below the median, and sometimes at the bottom of the pack. This mediocre performance is nothing to boast about, but it is not an indicator of future economic decline. Despite our students’ mediocre test scores, the nation’s economy has been robust for most of the past half-century. And the news is not all terrible. On the latest international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, American schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan, and Korea. Even when as many as 25 percent of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of US schools drop."
A portfolio of sculptures made by cutting the pages of books, possibly done by the same person who's been leaving mysterious paper sculptures scattered around Edinburgh's literary areas (and also in a filmhouse).
A pair of livebloggings of the Tea Party debate -- on ThinkProgress ("9:21: Ron Paul the doctor says a 30-year-old who has an accident and needs intensive health care should’ve planned ahead and is responsible for himself. When Blitzer asks if society should let that young man die, some in the crowd shout in approval. Tea Party audience members heard yelling: 'Yeah!' 'Let him die!'") and on The Daily Beast ("9.34 pm. A tiny piece of reality peeps in: Latinos exist and they can vote. Perry gets booed for providing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. He stands firm. But it's obviously a problem for him. He has had to live in the real world in a border state so that this issue is not an easy abstraction. But it is for Bachmann and she takes another whack. Perry has a black eye, and Bachmann has had a stronger second half.").
Also, the latter piece linked to this at the end: Marijuana harvesting in Kyrgyzstan sometimes involves naked horseback riding, which might even be true.
Sidelinked from the above: What can this glow-in-the-dark kitten teach scientists about AIDS? -- "This picture of a glowing cat has not been altered in any way. The cat, on the other hand, has been altered quite a bit. A team of researchers has genetically engineered it to express green fluorescent protein (aka 'GFP,' originally found in jellyfish), which makes the cat glow green under ultraviolet light. But GFP isn't the only extra-species gene this cat is carrying - it's also packing a gene called TRIMCyp, originally found in monkeys. By giving the gene to the cats, the researchers hope to shed light on how they might combat diseases like HIV/AIDS - not just in felines, but in humans, too."
World War II: Women at War -- "For the nations who were deeply involved in World War II, the war effort was total, with women volunteering in huge numbers alongside men and filling traditionally male positions at home, in industry, and the military. Women took both active and supporting positions in factories, government organizations, military auxiliaries, resistance groups and more. While relatively few women were at the front lines as combatants, many found themselves the victims of bombing campaigns and invading armies. By the end of the war, more than 2 million women worked in war industries, hundreds of thousands volunteered as nurses or members of home defense units, or became full-time members of the military. In the Soviet Union alone, some 800,000 women served alongside men in army units during the war. Collected here are images of women involved directly in the events of World War II, and some of what they experienced and endured. A note: most of the captions are from the original sources from the 1940s, complete with the frequent use of the term 'girl' to describe young women." And to borrow the note from the Tumblr post I got the link from, it's also worth pointing out that these are women from many countries, Axis as well as Allied.
A friend linked to the page on planetary and satellite naming conventions with a comment directing attention specifically to Titan (which dips into Middle-earth and Dune for naming certain features). I think he may have linked it elsewhere recently, because I dimly recall a crack regarding dipping into Lovecraft for Pluto (whose only rule is "Underworld deities").
Oh, lovely -- the program I've been entering data into all day dropped my connection. And I can't get it to come back up, let alone to cheerfully inform me that my account is now locked out because I didn't log out properly. And I'm not at my desk with access to my e-mail to contact the help desk in New York (because the receptionist never came in at all, and happily my backup overheard our supervisor on the phone with her and sent me to lunch at 12:40), so I'm basically stuck sitting on my hands until it hits 5pm and I can head on out. Which I will, happily, though somewhat guiltily since I wasn't anywhere close to finished with this policy and I could have gotten a lot closer if I'd had the additional hour to work on it that I'd expected to be getting... (Still, getting out of here early on the evening I visit Grandma is a good thing.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.