This is the part that gets me. I took the California Achievement Test when I was in elementary and (some of) high school, and not once do I remember the teachers teaching us the material on the test. They went through their regular curriculum during the year, and we were given a 2-3 day overview on how to fill in our boxes, how to spend our time on the test,

These days, teachers will spend up to 6 weeks (or more) actually teaching the material on the standardized test. Wait, what?!? If you aren't teaching the material that's on the test *all year*, then something is seriously wrong. What are you teaching that isn't on the test, and why isn't the test testing the students on that material?

Dollars spent per student matters - some - but isn't the end-all-be-all of measurements. Standardized tests are broken from both ends (they don't measure what is being taught, the teachers are forced to game the system by teaching *to* the test, and the material being taught is suspect if it doesn't match the test). Honestly, I'd like to see a study of school districts measuring this:

$ spent on administration vs $ spent on students directly

If they want to pull this type of crap, then they need to break down the following data:

1) How much of the sale price is licensing of the content

and

2) How much of the sale price is paying for the content delivery (disc)

Subsequently, how much would it cost to replace (2) if lost/damaged/etc? How long is the original company committed to / obligated for producing replacements, and what happens to the content delivery / lock system if the original company stops honoring the agreement within the aforementioned timeframe?

I think he just lost a bunch of campaign contributions with that blog.

"I suspect she's talking about it having never previously happened in a span of just a couple of centuries."

I understand that. I'm saying that there's no way that anyone can say that 3 billion years ago, there wasn't a 200 year timespan where CH4 didn't rise just as fast (or faster), because there are no sources of data that precise for that far back. So to make the claim in the first place is suspect.

Certain fields of science have started using poor word choices, like "unprecedented" and "never seen before", and now this + "in the history of the planet"... doesn't pass the smell test (please pardon the pun).

How about the fact that no one has ever been able to provide any sort of proxy for atmospheric methane measurement with 10 year (or even 50 year) precision for even 500 million years ago... much less 3000 - 4000 million years ago? The further back you go, the less precise the data gets. So to make a claim that requires data of such precision, yet it is obvious that such data doesn't exist over the timespan indicated (the history of the earth - ~4000 million years), makes the claim highly suspect of being more publicity and less science.

""The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times,"

I'm OK with her statement, until this:

"...and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.

So there's data for the last 4+ BILLION years with 10-50 year precision so that over a 100-200 year timespan, she can measure the slope of the line (rate in rise over the run of time) precisely enough to say that the slope of the line over the last 200 years is steeper than it has been in any other 200 year period in the last 4 billion years? Sorry, but I find that hard to believe.

This is actually one of the sticking points in the Penn State situation with Sandusky. The graduate assistant saw the coach allegedly doing something illegal (sexual abuse of a minor), reported it to his chain of command but didn't report it to authorities. But under current state law in Pennsylvania, the GA was not legally obligated to report it to police.

Expect state law in PA to be changed in the next few months to require people to report what they saw to police instead of just to their chain of command.

welcome our new tremor overlords

This was a cascade failure that affected multiple systems on multiple layers, with ramping race conditions that worsened over time. The engineer didn't hit the "Enter" key and suddenly the little green light turned red to tell him 1/3 of the grid was down.

You also should be careful not to impose a modern definition of a word when the actual definition at the time was COMPLETELY different.

A clock should be "well regulated", but that has nothing to do with laws or statutes or rules.

http://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm

=======

The following are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, and bracket in time the writing of the 2nd amendment:

        1709: "If a liberal Education has formed in us well-regulated Appetites and worthy Inclinations."

        1714: "The practice of all well-regulated courts of justice in the world."

        1812: "The equation of time ... is the adjustment of the difference of time as shown by a well-regulated clock and a true sun dial."

        1848: "A remissness for which I am sure every well-regulated person will blame the Mayor."

        1862: "It appeared to her well-regulated mind, like a clandestine proceeding."

        1894: "The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city."

The phrase "well-regulated" was in common use long before 1789, and remained so for a century thereafter. It referred to the property of something being in proper working order. Something that was well-regulated was calibrated correctly, functioning as expected. Establishing government oversight of the people's arms was not only not the intent in using the phrase in the 2nd amendment, it was precisely to render the government powerless to do so that the founders wrote it.