Links for 2010-07-16

"Burundi. Sounds more like a movie soundtrack than a national anthem - a really awesome movie, though, about African cowboys looking out over the savannah as the sun sets over the elephants, and then maybe they fight evil white people from some European country bent on exploitation, and of course there would be a good white person, possibly played by a Baldwin. But, yeah, this anthem is not very anthemic. Nice, though. 67"

"Journalists! Do you think your readers are too dumb to understand '5 kilograms'? Do you want to add some useless, confusing analogies to make your article much harder to read? Having trouble thinking of something that doesn't revolve around the height or weight of an elephant? Well, worry no more! The Analogizer is here to save the day!"

"Oh Funding Reviewer, on whose hands
Rests the destiny of full many an experiment:
Be true to yourself, and bias not
Thy sober judgement through the browsing
Of tricky sites or malicious magazines."

"[W]hat struck me was that even these guys, mild as they are, display a key feature of the kool-aid drinkers: The science was secondary to the educational philosophy. The science promises to be really interesting, but they couldn't bring themselves to lead with it. They had to lead with the philosophy. As I continue to think about what it is that really marks somebody as a "kool-aid drinker", I think that it's when the subject matter no longer comes first. When the primary factor that drives them as a teacher is no longer a deep passion for the subject, but rather a commitment to a theory of learning."

"On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.

Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)

"They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship," said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction."