WoodenSpoon

While hanging clothes in teh forsty morning air, my str34m of conciousness flowed down familiar subterranean routes. Familiar to me but n3v3r publicised, hence their underground-ness.

The fissure in that hard rock may well be the shiny new cyberealestate ST33V.com. Why not make it a force for good instead of my usual bent of vapidity and irrelevance?

Why not indeed?

At the risk of shinining too strong a light on such as tender s33dling as this site and collection ideas, here are some examples of topics pedagogical and technological that could appear one day soon, if my muses can banish Queen Procrastinata.

• The colour of money: A participatory pedagogical exercise for school classes that examines the distribution of production dates for coins in the pockets of the class. A simple form would be to stick to five cent pieces and ask students to bring in as many as they can (up to a limit of course) which should not be a problem because they are almost useless and without value now, so parents would willingly let them go to school without worrying about their value (A side exercise could be to donate them to a worthy cause at the end of the session). The plan is that students, in small groups, record the year marked on each coin and then combine them to form a class-sized distribution. If each student had say 10 coins, and there were say 20 students in the class, that would be 200 coins. Enough to make a deent histogram. There would be plenty of talking points, such as the nature of distributions, frequentism and sample size vs bayesianism, and even the social aspects suchas the changing portrait of the Queen over time.
  The next step would be to upload this data (to ST33V.com of course) to compare it with a larger sample. More distribution theory and also the notions of long tails and extreme events.

  Which latter leads to decimalisation. The students will eventually work out that there are no coins older than 1966 in the entire sample set.

  I wonder whether you could map a theoretical distribution onto the sample to account for increasing rarity with age coupled with the rarity of new coins….

  Further exercises could involve $1 coins and $2 coins, each of which would mysteriously have later ’start’ dates than 1966. 1984 (from memory) for the $1 and about 1988 for $2. Opportunities to talk about inflation and the demise of the 1 and 2 c piece.

  And so on.

  Corker eh?!
  

• Use my new-found mad Skillz in SQL to code up a database to hold the data in the previous dot point.
  
• An exercise on parabolic motion, beginning with a fairly vaguely-worded assignment to find and discuss the video of an astronaut on the m00n dropping a peice of paper and a hammer (as I recall it, having seen it live as a child). I have not seen it recently but it must be on the webz.

  This could move into the counter-intuitive result that motion can be divided into orthogonal components and that for a breif moment, vertical motion ceases when a rock is thrown into the air. Calculus, Isaac Newton, Leibnitz and the planets and we could finally end with the quote made by an Apollo astronaut the ‘Newton was flying the ship’ as they headed towards the moon.
  

• and so on.
  

These are just reminders for me, but please believe that each has a fully formed idea beneath it. L3ts s33 what becomes of them…

Fowler on Betterment as an example of erroneous Saxonism in writing

Are there 9 billion ways to say ’sustainable’?

Here is my easter photo. Before I delved into my archive, I had formed a false memery that I had taken a photo in the Real (TM) Woolies (R) (i.e. Dickson), at teh deli, where there were stickers on the front of the seafood frisge saying (words to teh effect of) ‘Giving up meat for Lent (TM)? Why not take home some tasty prawns to bolster your flagging reserves of righteousness?’

This pic (taken at teh French store pronounced ‘tar-zhay’) is my consolation prize, perhaps even more bizarre? You decide.

Forget about the bunny, this is the new meaning of easter

What is this waxy corpse-pale thing?
Not what is claimed, that’s for sure.

Isn’t it against the law to make false claims?
Why are we not protected from this assault?

Sure, the lit match catches it in flame
And my fireplace is starting to warm me.

But its a matter of Principle.
Although I was not perturbed -
I’ve seen far worse
On the internet and in real life. But
Children may see this travesty;
Their fragile minds tricked into licencious promiscuity.

An egg may be called a sphere
Or, worse, a sphere a circle.
“Who cares, you know what I mean.
Chill out man:
People may call you a pedant.
Orthogonal triangles are so square.
And who says a cube must have equal sides?”

This is not a cube

On the 7.30 report last night Susan_Greenfield said that computer games are ruining children’s minds.

She sez that computer games alter children’s brains by replacing the real world - where events occur in a sequential narrative, choices are made and consequences occur - with an instant gratification shoot-em-up simulacrum [my word not hers but aint it a great one?].

Ho Hum. It seems to me that the brains of some grown ups must develop into a state that dictates that if they didn’t experience something when they were young, it must be bad. Look at Nicola Roxon, who thinks that alcopops are a dire threat to teenage girls. She has been silent on how her generation avoided certain ruin at the hands of Brandevino and Passiona.

As Hesiod is said to have said:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.

I was so disturbed by the interview that I immeadiately got online and started blasting away at anything that moved in Urban Terrror.

Susan, AYBABTU.

Last October I closed a phone account with Telstra. I’d paid the three month rental in advance so there was a credit. “The cheque will come in the post”, I thought. A few weeks later I got my letter from Telstra. It was a bill, whcih said I was in credit for $43.09. A dark suspicion began to grow in my mind that if I didn’t pursue the matter, neither would they.

I filed the bill in the too hard basket, and early this month it shuffled itself to the pile. I was feeling positive so I called the number. After telling my name and birth date to people scattered in call centres across the country, I was assured that a sum of $43.08 would be credited directly to my bank [Credit Union, actually] account. You may have noticed a one cent discrepancy in the two figures. That was what they said they had on their screens.The call had taken about half an hour, so I couldn’t be bothered arguing over it.

About a week later I got another credit bill, dated after my phone call. Not a good sign. Last night I finally checked my account balances and sure enough, presents from Telstra were conspicuously absent from the credit column. So…. this morning after bouncing around for another 30 minutes and some lovely chats about my birthday, I insisted that I be paid $43.09. Against protestations that $43.08 was what was on their screen, I said, “I have a bill from you saying you owe me $43.09 and I want you to pay that amount to me. These two phone calls have taken an hour. I think my time is worth one cent an hour, don’t you?”. My interlocutor agreed, glad to be rid of me. I was just as glad to be rid of them.

Recently I learnt that one could purchase steel-capped gumboots. Now it seems safety-conciousness has also emerged in the fashion end of the footwear market.

Steel capped KT26 shoes. Style and safety entwined in a perfect package

While scouring the net for an image of Jeffrey Smart’s “Container Train in Landscape” I stumbled on an old blog by someone called Mary Forrest. She can’t be famous; she hasn’t a wikipedia entry.

She gives Robin Williams a good shellacking, quite rightly, before turing her attention to James Bond movies with this gem:

I just take note of how brash and unreasonable and boob-like Americans tend to look in these films. I guess it must mean that that’s the way we like to see ourselves. Because we’re the ones these movies are being sold to, aren’t we? Are we missing something here?

Don’t forget, these are the people who say they could care less.