Read This Now - An Impassioned Plea For Teaching Literature

Claire Needell Hollander made a great point, probably several of them actually, when she wrote about the importance of reading to middle school students and how our increasingly test and data driven education system is depriving kids of books...

We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them. 

Be sure to read the whole thing at the NYT site.

(via BYL)

On The Importance Of The Oxford Comma

The Oxford comma seems to be a dying breed these days.  The Neurotic Penguin helps explain why this is unfortunate...

We All Love Arcades

Caine's Arcade has been making the rounds on the interwebs this week, I finally took the time to watch the short film about the nine year who built his own arcade in his father's East LA auto parts shop and so should you...



There are some more links to follow on the vimeo page, and a website for the Arcade and film as well.

Read This Now - Chris Christie Can't Handle The Truth

In rather unsurprising news a(nother) Republican politician is having trouble with the veracity of his statements.  NJ Gov. Chris Christie was apparently less than truthful in his explanation for pulling the funding for that tunnel to NYC last year.  It seems the cost hadn't actually risen like he claimed, but that he wanted to siphon off the money to prop up the state transportation fund so he could avoid raising gas taxes.  The GAO did the investigating and the NYT drops the dime...

...found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the 

project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs. 

Nice to see an article that does less hemming and hawing around the fact that a politician was lying to the public than normal, it could probably stand to be even more declarative though. Check out the whole thing for some of the other details and the potential impacts of the report.

(via CP)

Plumbing The Depths

The best thing on the internet (aka XKCD) has tackled this issue before but this recent take on the depth of water bodies is pretty great...

It's even better if you click through and check it out full size.

Urban Fish Farming Going Strong-ish

Completely contained on-shore fish farming set ups tend to be better for the surrounding environment than the open net pen oceanic farming style that predominates the industry (especially for salmon, which end up polluting the crap, literally, out of the surrounding ecosystem).

Tilapia, unlike salmon, do well in closed tank systems and some folks have been tinkering with growing tilapia and veggies and other greens in an inter-connected system for a while now.  The latest try at growing fish and greens together is shaping up in Chicago, as this AP video (and story) detail...



This isn't a new idea or plan by any means though.  Brooklyn College professor Dr. Martin P. Schreibman has been chasing this dream since at least 2004, when he got a nice write up in the NYT (SEED followed up in 2006 and NPR checked in with Schreibman in 2011).  Enough other folks have jumped on board, in varying size and scale set ups, that there is now a Recirculating Farms Coalition dedicated to helping forward the movement, it sounds like you can probably start your own mini-farm in the garage if you want to.

Growing fish and veggies together is cool for it's efficiencies and hopefully for its tastiness, but projects like these all exist in the growing shadow of food security and supply issues.  As our global population continues to surge forward we'll have to figure out how to feed everyone and these types of urban farming projects may well end up playing a crucial role to that end.

(via SS)

(and we have a new version of the video sans auto-play, sorry about that)

Step Inside The White House

Thanks to the latest google street view expansion side project you can now get a behind the scenes 360 degree tour of the White House without getting off of your couch...



Just call up google maps and drag the street view man onto the White House to get started...

(via DCist)