Two great music videos today: a 10 year old Japanese (I think) girl covering Carry On Wayward Son on a keyboard, by herself and Will Ferrell and Dave Grohl performing a duet, live. The videos are below the fold.
I love articles that agree with my opinions:
[H]ousing is not an investment. It's shelter. That is all housing has ever been.
To clarify a bit, since Seth called me on this: Don't buy a house as an investment. Buy a house because you want to own a house.
Paul Lockhart wrote a fine indictment of math (and, by extension, science) education:
By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the "truth" but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity -- to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs -- you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I'm not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I'm complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.
April 18 is Poop For Peace Day:
Side by side in a public bathroom, any two human beings are stripped of their differences and reduced to their most basic essence: a pair of feet sticking out below the stall, and a pair of butt trumpets performing a greasy symphony to lament humanity's non-negotiable deference to the call of the vile.
Penny Arcade has a comic commemorating Gary Gygax today. Give yourself five points if you don't know who Gary Gygax is. Give yourself five more points if you don't understand the comic's caption.
Marc Andreessen makes his case for Barack Obama:
What about foreign policy -- should we be concerned that you just don't have much experience there?
Think about who I am -- my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it's going to mean in many parts of the world -- parts of the world that we really care about -- when I show up as the President of the United States. I'll be fundamentally changing the world's perception of what the United States is all about.