The McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama, is getting a cool new invention, courtesy of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. My little sister wrote the grant application that landed McWane the exhibit. Way to go, sis!
Tag: learning
Every year, an updated list of things incoming college freshmen, or graduating high school seniors, know and don’t know circulate the Internet. Hugh points to the latest from Beloit College.
I won’t rehash the list here, but thought I would share some of my favorite points:
+ There has always been only one Germany.
Whenever I think about this historic event, I am always reminded of Dennis Miller’s (and there’s a personality a lot of these kids may be wholly unaware of) commentary on SNL’s “Weekend Update”, when he said, and I’m paraphrasing, except for the last line: “Today, East and West Germany announced their plans for unification. France has already announced its formal surrender.”
+ A stained blue dress is as famous to their generation as a third-rate burglary was to their parents’.
Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s much less so for them than their parents.
+ They have never had to distinguish between the St. Louis Cardinals baseball and football teams.
This has been true for a long while now, for many incoming/outgoing classes.
+ Milli Vanilli has never had anything to say.
Do they even know who Milli Vanilli were?
+ Reality shows have always been on television.
Unfortunately. Oh so unfortunately…
+ Being techno-savvy has always been inversely proportional to age.
I don’t believe this is something that is new to this particular class.
+ Most of them have never had the chance to eat bad airline food.
Since when is there good airline food?
+ Television stations have never concluded the broadcast day with the national anthem.
And that is a crying shame. It was something of a rite of passage in my childhood to stay up so late that you were still watching when the anthem came on. Though these days, it’s mostly because there is no end to the broadcast day.
+ They have always “dissed” what they don’t like.
Do kids this age still use that word?
- Thanks to the folks at Xerox, with help from Layer 8 Group, you can send a postcard, with original artwork by a child, to a member of the armed forces serving abroad: Let’s Say Thanks. I sent one, how about you?
[Via Susan via e-mail.]
- About.com has some good advice in its Back to School section concerning backpack selection for students. The first tip they offer, to get a bag with two straps instead of just one, to help balance the load across the body better, is why I’m a dedicated backpack guy.
- My new addiction is Armagetron Advanced, an open source 3D game of the lightcycle contest from Tron.
This whole “Numa Numa” thing is out of control.
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What swims at 20 miles per hour, can carve out hunks of human flesh, and will attack anything that moves? The Humboldt squid. Brace yourself for a dive with the eeriest beast in the ocean.
A fascinating read.
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Jeff has an outstanding parable of the recent Hezbollah attacks on Israel.
If you’d like a first-person account of the Hezbollah attacks on Israel, and the Israeli response, head over to David Dolan’s site and subscribe to his e-mail list.
David is a Christian pastor and author who has been resident in Israel for many years. Last year, David spoke at our church, and even for someone like me, who has followed the Mideast conflict, and the region’s history, for many years, it was eye-opening.
If only I had room in any of my bathrooms for one of these.
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Just when you think there might be some hope in this world that the tide of sexual immorality would take a turn for the better, something like the Shame On You Kit pops up. How about never putting yourself in the situation to have to have a “Shame On You Kit”?
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As a satisfied customer, I highly recommend KnowledgeNews, which today had a bit on the differences between viruses and bacteria. I loved this analogy:
Imagine it this way. If just one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in your body were the size of a baseball park, the average bacterium would be the size of the pitcher’s mound. The average virus would be the size of the baseball.