My mother was one of the first female programmers at Honeywell back in the `70s. Back then, IT companies recruited their programmers from the ranks of mathematicians (like mom).

Grace Hopper was a big hero to her, and one of the things I remember best is mom coming home with a short length of wire given out by Adm. Hopper at a speech -- sized to represent the distance electricity would travel in a nanosecond.

Mom is still coding, by the way, writing custom software for my dad's business in Python/Django/PostgreSQL. Dad complains that she's obsessed with the programming and won't do anything else. Sounds like me...thanks for the genes, mom!

Interestingnow that I reflect on it, my experiences are similar.

Perhaps it is because humans dislike change?

One reason lectures are so popular is that they are far, far easier for the instructor. Putting together a useful interactive activity is much harder than simply planning what to say. Even incorporating someone else's pre-designed activity is difficult to synchronize with one's own lesson plan. At the grade school level, I believe there is considerable room for improvement through teachers learning how to share and use activity plans.

At the college and graduate school level, it gets much harder on the professor as potential sources of planned activities thin out and specialization increases. Increasing interactivity demands much more time of these professors since most such improvements will have to be custom-designed for the class. Given the social structure of university compensation (research counts, teaching doesn't), I find it hard to see interactivity at the college or grad school level increasing very quickly.

That said, college and grad school courses are perhaps more interactive than they are given credit for. They often meet just a few times a week, reducing the boring lecture hours, and assign a lot of homework, increasing interactivity in a way that fails to appear in the studies cited.

For context, I am an adjunct professor (at the graduate school level). Based on this daily of studies I try to include some interactivity but it's really hard, so that mainly degenerates into a few intra-class status quizzes. My classes tend to meet for 2.5-3 hours per week, and have 5-20 hours of homework on top of that.

That's not a very bright statement. What you should wish to avoid is for something bad to happen. One way that can happen is indeed for a gun to fail when it needs to work, but there are others, for example having an unseen companion assailant seize the gun and shoot you with it.

It's all about the probabilities of various scenarios, and anyone failing to incorporate that that in their evaluation is not worth listening to. (For the record, I have no opinion about what those probabilities are, but live in such a safe place that I don't consider bothering with a gun.)

As a cyclist who commutes year-round in Chicago, I just want to give a little shout out to the motorists, who are almost all incredibly polite. It's human nature for us to notice and remember the jerks (and I recall a few) but the incredibly vast majority of motorists are accommodating, friendly, and (when paying attention) cautious.

If I have one request of motorists, it's to get off the cell phones, something I am sure every road user -- pedestrian, cyclist and motorist agrees with.

Agree!....I despair of ever managing to lay a good caulk bead.

You misread the quote...Haycock is agreeing with you.

Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class:

“I just keep wishing that the people who spend so much time trying to end racial preferences in higher ed would work to end the racial differences in the education we provide K-12”

      --Kati Haycock, Education Trust

I have such complicated taxes that I need to buy a "Premier" edition of TurboTax. It comes with "free" state, but what they mean is that the computations are free but they demand serious money to e-File.

Illinois website is so awesome that I simply use it despite the free state addin. TurboTax does the computations with almost no extra effort, so I use it for a sanity check, but there's never been a difference.

The K-1 definitely provides another order of magnitude of complexity beyond the forms you cite here. I would say that and tracking asset depreciation are the two big things that make spreadsheets unwieldy....particularly because values start to carry over from year to year.

I am not familiar with financial aid at 2-year programs, but find your account plausible. On the other hand, 4-year colleges tend to have considerable need-based aid available even for non-minorities; in many cases it's even grant rather than loan-based. I am curious -- why didn't you either choose one at the outset or transfer into one after your 2-year degree? I know of some superb success stories following the latter pattern.

Dumb question: it's about the actions of the believers. That's why the anti-vax kooks (whotends to skew left) gets a similar reaction to the creationists and climate wackos.

Granted that homeopathy stuff is ridiculous pseudoscience, but the difference is that nobody is trying to push it as a driver of public policy. When I shop at Whole Foods, it's for the tasty, tasty bread and local salsa and nobody minds that I walk right past the snake oil. I don't have a problem with creationism, I have a problem with it being forced on others. That's why we perceive it differently.

So, an even higher proportion of bitcoin owners are dishonest jerks than I had previously thought, having cleaned out a bunch of honest-but-naive Mt. Gox clients.

This makes me want to do anything in bitcoin even less than before -- why should I muck around with such counterparties?

This guy cost the government untold fortunes -- not only in dollars but in goodwill. He poisoned relationships with the international community, undermined the confidence of the citizenry in our institutions and ignored the democratic process. He should be in jail, no question.

Oh, whoops! I thought you were asking about Dick Cheney!