- Oregon allowing spell-check on written school exams? I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this, and I didn’t have the kind of knee-jerk reaction I might be expected to as an English major, writer, and editor. I think spelling is important, but not always critically so, especially on exams where spelling is secondary to whatever is being tested. I think spelling is less important, for instance, than reading comprehension and overall communication skills. Many great writers have been notoriously bad spellers; and outside of a spelling bee, crossword puzzles, and certain game shows, success in life rarely hinges on knowing when it’s “i before e” or the opposite.
At the same time, spelling is important. An over-reliance on spell-check can lead to laziness, and not knowing how to spell can impede communication. Spell-check is far from perfect — their, there, or they’re, anyone? — and a poor substitute for really understanding why words are spelled a certain way. Further, many of the standardized tests these students will later encounter — like, for instance, the SAT — will not allow them use of a spell-check.
I think, if the Oregon Department of Education really wants to help its students, it won’t just allow them to ignore spelling altogether. It will allow its teachers to grade spelling more effectively, more fairly; it will design standardized tests that weigh other, perhaps more important, factors, and look at spelling in a broader context. [via]
- First they came for the ignorant news pundits and I stayed silent… Glenn Beck is quite fond of quoting Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the rise of fascism in Germany. (As well as of crazy-as-all-bugfuck conspiracy theories.) It’s quite telling which parts of the poem he always leaves out. [via]
- Dubai’s archipelago of luxury islands, already something of a financial disaster, is sinking into the sea. [via]
- Robotic ghost knifefish is born. Somebody should totally start a band with that name. [via]
- And finally, Zack Handlen remembers Indecent Proposal:
Yeah, the movie where Robert Redford turned Woody Harrelson into a pimp and Demi Moore into a, ahem, lady of the evening. It was a ridiculous movie, all slick visuals with no real soul or character, but the concept was so intriguing that it didn’t need to be good to be successful. Everyone was just so fascinated by the moral question at the heart of the story that everything else was just gravy. Stupid, stupid gravy.
It’s all in the context of a Star Trek: The Next Generation review, naturally.
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Taking off on Wednesday is just weird.
I woke up at six this morning, only to learn that, yes indeed, we’d had a freezing rain overnight, and it had played havoc with the morning commute. The Long Island Railroad was running weekend hours all morning — albeit at the regular, weekday morning peak fares — and at my station, weekend hours means no more than one train every hour. They were also predicting ten to fifteen-minute delays, which itself usually means twenty to thirty-minute delays. So, after much deliberating, I decided to send an e-mail around to my group at work and take a vacation day.
After that, the day was actually fine, especially after I discovered that Groundhog Day was available for streaming over Netflix. It just seemed like the right choice for today. I spent the rest of the day mostly reading, finishing a couple of graphic novels (The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, both quite good). I also watched last week’s episode of Community, which I hadn’t seen yet, and the first episode of Quantum Leap, which I haven’t seen in years. It was really just a random, lay-about-the-house kind of day.
That said, I’m really kind of sick of snow at this point, particularly snow that ruins my morning commute. (Enough snow to close my office and keep me home without taking vacation? Well, we can talk.) I’m actually kind of looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. Taking off on Wednesday is just weird.
Wednesday various
- Your end-times moment of the day: chocolate drought predicted by 2014 [via]
- Did you know “the total literature of Iceland is [only] under 50,000 books”? Makes the idea of putting it all online not sound so far-fetched, now doesn’t it? (And is this the literary equivalent of a seedbank? A Canticle for Sveinbjörn perhaps?) [via]
- So Fringe might actually be safe from cancellation? We just have to hope a network executive wasn’t ly — oh crap, it’s doomed, isn’t it?
- Say what you will about Joe Biden, the man certainly has a sense of humor about himself. [via]
- And finally, the Zombie Tabernacle Choir. Some things don’t have to be useful or even particularly interactive to still be sort of strangely neat. [via]
Monday various
- Man admits mailing hundreds of tarantulas. Why do I feel like this is just a weird viral marketing campaign for the new Spider-Man musical? [via]
- Gail Collins in the New York Times on why we won’t miss having Joe Lieberman to kick around anymore:
He will leave behind a long list of achievements, from helping to consolidate the nation’s intelligence gathering services in a way that appears to make it more difficult to gather intelligence, to threatening to filibuster the health care reform act until it had been watered down to suit his own high principles.
- Well this is slightly disturbing to learn about Manhattan’s restaurants:
“The data suggests that when you visit an A-rated restaurant, the odds are that it barely made the grade,” he writes.
Related: state-by-state report cards on health department response to foodborne illness.
- Al Franken makes an unlikely friend in the new Senate. This is that “strange bedfellows” business I keep hearing about, right?
- And finally, Stephen Colbert on Sarah Palin:
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Mika Brzezinski Experiences Palin Fatigue Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive
Thursday various
- I don’t know why I find this particularly interesting, but I do:
The post office ignores the return address for Netflix DVDs and sorts them separately for a Netflix truck to pick them up early in the morning for processing.
Discs are shipped back to the nearest processing facility, regardless of the address on the return envelope; that address is there just for legal reasons, apparently. This seems like something I maybe sort of already knew, but it’s a reminder of the volume they (and by extension the post office) have to process.
- John Seavey’s Open Letter to Zombie Story Writers:
In essence, the human body is a machine, like an automobile. You are trying to describe the ways this machine can malfunction to produce a specific effect, and that’s good, but please stop explaining to me how it keeps going without wheels, gasoline, or a functioning engine.
He raises some interesting points, although I don’t think they apply to the “zombies” in films like 28 Days Later, as he seems to. At least from my recollection — and I re-watched the movie pretty recently — the infected population there a) don’t act at all like George Romeroesque zombies (i.e., no human flesh, no brains), and b) don’t continue acting beyond physically believable limits. Beyond normal pain tolerances, sure — there’s the one guy who keeps running even though he’s literally on fire — but into the realm of sheer impossibility.
- “What is, come with me if you want to live, Alex?” So you may have heard: a computer has won at Jeopardy. (There goes that Weird Al remix idea!) I’m still looking forward to the televised rematch next month, though perhaps not so much to the subsequent robot apocalypse.
- It’s worth it for Goodnight Dune alone: Five Sci-Fi Children’s Books. [via]
- And finally, Jeff VanderMeer on Everything You Need to Know to be a Fiction Writer.