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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about hubris. Man playing god, creating life, that sort of thing. Poor Things is a Frankenstein movie without a moral or message.
NYT Interactive Admissions Plotter
The NYT has this fancy, interactive plotter that shows how many Black and Hispanic students will be admitted based on different criteria.
Treating people differently on the bases of race for college admissions is found to be illegal because it is, by definition, racial discrimination. Universities are looking for legal ways around that.
While browsing the *Teachers* forum on Reddit, I read this post.
If you want to keep your jobs, and preserve the education system as it currently stands, VOTE in the 2024 presidential election.
The text of the post was a rant about how Trump promised to dismantle public education and collapse democracy in America. No one had commented, so I did:
The education system, as it currently stands, ain’t that great.
The original poster and a couple of dozen other people replied. A third were supportive, so I engaged the other two-thirds. Always be polite, but give no ground.
Several other people commented to disagree with the original post and started other threads.
After 200 comments, the original author withdrew her post. My comment has 28 up votes. I figured I’d be deep in negative numbers.
That’s a win. Not only did she withdraw, but many conservative teachers know that they aren’t alone.
Charter schools aren’t going to save education, but Classical Learning may.
Since Davy and I started working out, I wanted to encourage symmetry. Some machines allow for a different weight for each arm. It made sense to start with the highest weight that either arm could handle. I don’t want to develop a lobster claw, where one arm is much stronger than the other. That might be a fiddler crab I’m thinking of.
Working in muscle pairs seemed like a good idea. The row goes with the bench press and the pull-down with military press.
One idea was to workout with the same weight on all stations. It’s a dumb idea. Starting out, my shoulders were weak, bench was reasonable and pulling was strong. Also, with machines, you really don’t know what actual resistance force is required. Nobody is calibrating those things.
My strength workout is six stations. That doesn’t sound challenging, but after a half-hour of cardio, that is all the juice I’ve got.
Here’s what it looked like when we started:
- Military press: 20 lbs per arm
- Row: 100 lbs
- Twist: 100 lbs
- Leg Press: Who knows? It depends on the machine.
- Bench: 110 lbs
- Pull-down: 100 lbs
After six months,
- Military press: 80 lbs per arm
- Row: 140 lbs
- Twist: 140 lbs
- Leg Press: 430 lbs
- Bench press: 145 lbs
- Pull-down: 140 lbs
With the improvement in the military press, I’m tempted to workout with 140 lbs across the board.
Some of the improvement is due to using a different station with a more comfortable motion. For the bench, we are using the Smith machine, so that is a real number. The leg press is all over the map because some machines move body weight along with supplemental weights and all are on an incline. The 430 lbs is with actual weights, but is on an incline. The twist machine is doable with almost any amount of weight, so that’s kind of phony.
We do a solid half-hour on cardio. I use the bike, and average about 130 bpm. I go harder or easier as the workout progresses. I’m all sweaty at the end, so that seems good.
NY Post: MS Society fires a 90 year old
The National Multiple Sclerosis reverses it’s decision and apologizes. That’s not enough.
Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet. If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines.
When I was an RA at Ohio State my senior year, me and a few other RA’s got a bunny. We named him Travis. I don’t recall how or why we got a pet rabbit. Lisa, an RA in Barrett, was very sweet and loved animals, so it was probably her idea. Scott and I liked spontaneous dumb ideas, so we were in, and Barb liked being in on the secret.
A newly popular alternative to cigarettes is changing the way many Americans consume nicotine—and becoming a political flashpoint.
The product, a nicotine pouch, looks like a tiny tea bag and comes in flavors such as mint, coffee, berry and mango. It tucks discreetly into the cheek and doesn’t require the user to spit.
I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. Pulling hot smoke into your lungs always seemed like a bad idea. When I was young, I figured that lungs were moist, pink mucus membranes kind of like the inside of your mouth. Hot smoke would dry them out and damage them.
This was in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In movies from the 1950’s, cigarettes were occasionally referred to as “coffin nails”. Everyone knew that smoking was bad for you, they just didn’t care. When I was in high school, we had a smoking courtyard next to the cafeteria. It was mostly used by [pot] heads and burnouts. I don’t recall if people had to be 18 to buy cigarettes back then. I suspect they did, but nobody worried much about checking ID’s, and obviously fake ID’s were easily purchased from stores that took passport photos.
Both of my parents smoked. In health class, they showed us photos of a healthy lung compared to the lung of smoker. After telling my dad about how the smoker’s lungs looked like burned toast, he abruptly quit. No announcement or tapering off. He just stopped. My mom was always trying to quit. She tried hypnotism, acupuncture, listening to hypno-tapes while sleeping and every other approach that was offered. After a few days or weeks off of cigarettes, she’d wonder what a cigarette would taste like. She’d try one, it would taste great, and she’d be back to smoking. Mom got mean and nasty when she was quitting, so it was unpleasant for all of us.
Mom loved smoking. She didn’t quit until she had a heart attack resulting in a triple-bypass when she was 70. That didn’t make much sense to me. If she’d smoked for fifty years before needing medical intervention, she should be good for ten or twenty more years. That was more Mom’s logic, than mine, but I give her credit. She stuck to it.
Zyn has been on the U.S. market since 2014, but its sales have skyrocketed over the past year.
About a dozen years ago, I was looking for a new vice. Maybe if was a mid-life crisis. I wanted something mostly harmless and not too difficult that might change how I feel. After some research, I settled on Swedish snus. Scandinavians have been using snus for hundreds of years with little increase in any kind of cancer or other detrimental health outcomes. The only ingredients in traditional snus are tobacco and salt. The tobacco is steamed, and doesn’t produce the carcinogenic compounds found it cigarettes. It comes loose or in tiny pouches that are placed under the top lip and doesn’t require spitting.
Nicotine is addicting. Don’t care. I was in my fifties, and was feeling stressed, fat and fatigued. Nicotine gave a short little buzz and is an appetite suppressant. US health authorities hate the idea of nicotine, but there isn’t much evidence that it has any deleterious effects. Too much can cause nausea, but that’s it. Cigarettes are bad, nicotine is not. Perhaps because we could smoke in high school, I don’t worry much about students rebelling by vaping in school. Vaping always looks stupid and dip requires spitting, which is gross.
It made me feel a little sharper, and I liked the idea of doing something subversive while teaching.
At one point, my department chair came over for a chat and mentioned it in a clever way.
“One of your students thinks that you do dip.”
I was able to brush it off without admitting or lying, and I resolved to be more circumspect.
When I started, snus could be purchased online from Sweden. Because snus has a long tradition, there were hundreds of varieties. I enjoyed getting the variety packs to find brands I liked. I saw Zyn when it was introduced, but didn’t like the idea. It seemed too synthetic, like energy drinks compared to coffee.
After a few years, new regulations made it an expensive hassle to purchase nicotine products online. At about the same time, a few convenience stores started carrying a few General snus products. That’s a brand that I’d enjoyed, so buy it that way now. American tobacco companies also started making snus, but I don’t trust them.
The company [Philip Morris], which sells Marlboros and other cigarettes outside the U.S., acquired Zyn in its $16 billion takeover of smokeless-tobacco maker Swedish Match in 2022 and has expanded distribution of the product.
Swedish Match makes General snus, so I’m not nuts about them being bought out by Philip Morris. The optimistic view is that the Scandinavians will keep Swedish Match from getting corrupted by Morris and that Morris will get more traditional snus into stores.
Sin taxes are bullshit. I do my job better than the government does it’s job, so they should drop any effort to tell citizens how to live. Any danger that comes from people making imprudent decisions is dwarfed by the danger of government making those decisions for people.
Zyn isn’t a product for me, but it is much safer than cigarettes and you don’t look like a douche when you are doing it.