Don’t Talk About My Friend That Way

When my daughter was four years old, she was a strawberry for Halloween. After trick or treating around the neighborhood, she picked out a bite size bag of M&Ms (about 12 M&Ms) to eat. She was enjoying the chocolate when she stopped and said, “I shouldn’t eat this whole bag, right?”

“Why’s that, Angela?”

“Because I’ll get fat, right?”

At the time my daughter weighed about 25 pounds. Where does a four year old learn phrases like “I shouldn’t eat this” and “I’ll get fat”?

She learned it because she heard it, more than once.

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A few reworkings of bits of metal and plastic

By Britta Gustafson

Here are a few ways that people have misused computer hardware for the purposes of entertainment. I like projects where people play around with boring components, make something new out of them, and show off the results. The following examples consist of pairs of repurposed hard drives, artsy keyboards, and edible circuit boards. (more…)

Where the rainbow gets complicated

By Britta Gustafson

On Monday I talked about different kinds of insect art: creepy-crawly and odd but good. Today I have a bunch of links about a few aspects of color vision that I think are cool: How many colors can people see and distinguish between? What happens if you have eyes that see colors differently from normal? What alternate ways are there to think about color? (more…)

The Three Commandments

Escape From IV: Extreme Edition

Yeah the Ten Commandments are great. After all, who can argue with the irrefutable logic of Thou shalt not murder? If you weren’t satisfied with that kind of rock solid logic (it’s a joke, get it?) here are a few more that a friend and I discovered while in Prague this summer

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Hiding From a Poor Economy in Graduate School

“I want to go to grad school, I just don’t know what in. I’ll go grad school, then look for work when the economy is stronger. ”

As the economy stumbles and shifts, students increasingly consider extending their stay in higher education with a quick add-on of another year or two of graduate school. Is this a good idea? (more…)

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