Man, I wonder if it's permanently scarring to be about seven years old and have your huge photograph on the cover of a book where the title is written in bold, capital letters: "NERDS."

In 2005, the state of Connecticut sued the federal government over the No Child Left Behind act. Their complaint was as follows: Connecticut already had a testing program in place, which tested students every other year (as opposed to yearly, as the federal law mandates). The Connecticut tests were of a higher quality than could be paid for under ( Read more... )

I haven't been following politics nearly so obsessively over the past few months --- since Obama won twelve primaries in a row, I've been busy with other things and have been paying attention only tangentially ( Read more... )

The IL meeting begins:

(8:01:45 PM) DanZaha: Greetings!

The IL meeting ends:

(12:34:01 AM) DanZaha: When shall we three meet again?

(although there were actually four of us for much of the meeting --- myself, Meta, David, and fMatt)

It was an awesome meeting. We changed everything, of course. But we might just have this written before camp

So, I have this "system" where I will partially write e-mails and save drafts to get back to and finish later. I put "system" in quotes because, well, it often doesn't work. My postponed messages folder has had as many as 60 messages in it at a time, and I rarely look at any but the last 2-3, so some messages have been sitting there for years. ( Read more... )

Some recent reading (which I'll post about soon enough) prompted me to muse about what makes a subject worth teaching in school. To be more precise, assuming we agree that it is valuable/reasonable to force students to learn certain subjects in school, what subjects should those be ( Read more... )

So this is the benefit of being reasonably wealthy and thus being able to design your own strange house.

Total number of e-mails sent during the month of March: 1213. Over 39 e-mails sent per day.

(And this does not count cc's as multiple e-mails; these are all e-mails I put thought into.)

And they wonder why I never get any math done...

This weekend, I am running the sixth annual Graduate Student Topology ConferenceSo, first of all, I am exhausted beyond words. And I will be glad when it's over. I'm enjoying running it as I enjoy running anything, and I think I've done a good job (although I was definitely a slacker at the start of the process), but I want to get on with other ( Read more... )

Thursday night: Othello. Pretty good production; the role of Othello was outstanding, but Iago not so much. Iago came across as pretty dimension-less, not a deep actor. Several times, I felt like the actors were obeying the director's instructions about where to move rather than doing what the character felt compelled to do; this got in the way ( Read more... )