Category: Uncategorized

Gifts and choices – Bezos

“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the…

Thinking about welfare

Catching up on my Planet Money after returning from London—where there was less time, but more importantly less opportunity for wearing headphones to listen to podcasts.  Their coverage of questions about welfare Is Welfare ‘A Rational Alternative To Work’? (listen to…

Gamber’s Lemma

It’s time for me to put this one out there, although it has been brewing for years.  Guaranteed to get a laugh in class. Gamber’s Lemma to the Law of Unintended Consequences states that There are two possible worlds: The…

Walled gardens

While trying to transfer annotations from a book in the old B&N eReader iOS app (apparently it can’t be done), I came across this opinion from a couple of years ago. I’m Returning my Nook Tablet – Here’s Why (The Digital…

Ideation

What I like about the final step is that it’s potentially never-ending. Malcolm Cowley on the Four Stages of Writing (Brain Pickings) “Revision, revision, revision” and revision, revision, … until you have it good enough.  There is no perfect.  It’s also illuminating to…

Goat words

This week’s A.W.A.D. entries promise to be entertaining. A.Word.A.Day –tragus The picture (okay, with the caption) says it all.

Education’s Diversity

“first and second generation immigrants are, on average, better educated than the native population” Non-native English Speakers in Primary Schools in England “The study finds a modest negative correlation in the raw data between the educational attainment of native English…