FlaSoxxJim

Ah yessir, good times. :fthecubs :fthecubs

Safer from Lybia, sure maybe. I haven't seen the details of what you cited, was their missile program long range? Could they hit us? Of course they could have hit our overseas sites and interests but I woudl be surprised if they could target the US mainland. Safer against N. Korea? Same situation as above, really. Their fledgeling nuclear missile program doesn't put the US mainland at risk. Suggesting that relations between India and Pakistan are anything close to stable or even leaning that way is erroneous. As far as mainland US, our overseas sites and interests, and our world allies actually being safer OVERALL from terrorist threats as a result of our unilateral, preemptive, lie-predicated, war on Iraq, that is clearly not true. What did Spain get for supporting us? At the national level, we talk a good game and we demant state and municipal governments sheel out huge amounts of money for homeland security meaures, aned it is breaking the local governments because almost no federal assistance is being provided. Obviously we will have to stand down at the local levels sometime soon because local agencies and governments are not being given resources to keep the security level at full alert. Then think of the rest of the world that we have dragged into our war on terror (I am not suggesting terrorists shouldn't be ferreted out). They do not have teh kind of resources to throw into civil defense that we do, and they are not located an entire ocean away from the most volatile players liek we conveniently are. Spain was an easy target, and don't think the other US-friendly European countries did not see that. Our handling on things led to that attack and that government change-over by the will of the voters. Tony Blair's cooperation will very likely be the end of him politically. Every country that questioned siding with us on Iraq is in part vindicated, and every country that sided wityh us is wondering when they will be targets of terrorist retaliation. The world is less safe as a result of the administrations mis-handling of Iraq and the war on terror.

Yes, they are worth it. You'll love it.

Fair warning, Electronic Music is not quite that accessible. There is a reason some records were only pressed in short runs. And about that Badfinger sexcapade reference... *shudder*

Me too when I read the thread title

Now you need to get the Badfinger stuff with George, er..., "Mr. Mysterioso" on them, the Time Bandits soundtrack with a George tune on it, and the Ringo albums where he drops by - including, I'm more and more convinced, 1992s Time takes Time. While not including on the credits, there is some slide guitar that is either George or someone who has nailed his slide style. Also som bass that sounds a lot like Mac and backing vocals that REALLY sound like both of them. I dsmissed it at first as simply great immitations by some lifetime Beatlehead studio musicians, but each time I re-listen I'm not sure. At any rate, it was easily Ringos strongest outing in years and worth picking up if you son't have it (check those bargain bins!). Congrats on being the only other person I know who owns Electronic Music.

Ach, I don't buy it, Tex. Given the choice, I'd take the average 1950s high school grad over one today, hands down. regardless of WHAT they had to learn, they understood that it was their JOB to learn and that some EFFORT was actually required. Try getting the average (not the exceptional) student to do any real academic work these days – it ain't easy. While there are certainly better, harder, deeper MST (math, science, and technology) offerings for THE HANDFUL of GAP, AP, IB, or other select honors tracts in the public school system, that has no bearing on the lazy, low-grade morons being churned out by most public school curriculum tracts. I was appalled when I was part of the system more than 10 years ago (but I worked with primarily AP's and science research students so I was spared most of the horror). Now that I see my wife going through it, I'm just numb with disbelief. The average Florida 8th grader knows next to nothing and cares not to address the problem proactively (ie, actually putting in some effort). Parents in typical two-working parent families offer no help for the first 3 marking periods because they have their own stuff to deal with and have decided that the school system can function as a babysitting service and juvenile corrections facility even at the expense of the education they are supposed to be getting. But you can bet these same parents show up in the last marking period, after it has become mathematically impossible for many of these students to pass, wondering an d pleading about what can be done (500 points of extra credit?) to get Junior a passing grade. The worst part is the internal pressure the administration puts on teachers to give undeserving kids a free ride and let them matriculate through the system in spite of clearly being unable to demonstrate proficiency and mastery of any of the content and standards they were responsible for that year. My take is that it is the in-trench implementation of the ill-conceived Bush "No Child Left Behind" program. In actuality, no child is to be left behind while classmates advance grades and actually held responsible for doing the required work – let them slide, it' snot your problem, water down the material, and just do your job until your students' miserable performance on the state achievement tests dictates that YOU should be fired while the students and their parents remain blameless. A teacher at my wife's school told the administration she would teach to address the standards, no more and no less, and the students that didn't pass at the end of the year would not graduate. She kept her word and failed a large number of students. The administration threatened her with termination if she didn't pass them and she refused. Word of the threats got out to the other schools in the system and this teacher's peers voted her the county educator of the year knowing that the principal would look like a dick if he then fired her. This stuff is near and dear to me. 2061 seemed like a long way off when the NSF Project 2061 was launched (the goal is science literacy for all Americans by the date of Haley's Comet's return to earth in 2061). Now, I'm pretty convinced we won't make it unless there are sweeping changes in the American ecudation system, including remediating the s*** out of the students until they can perform at grade and not letting them go on until they can.

Payroll has a lot to do with any one SPECIFIC team having a better chance at a high winning percentage during the year (restricting the somments to high winning percentage rather than making or succeeding in the playoffs because of tthe confounding influence of geography and disparate divisional makeups). Sure, one or two teams will come out of nowhere to get hot and win more games than expected, but that is just the law of averages at work - with 25 low- to mid-payroll teams, one or two are statistically likely to break out. Pegging which one or two teams that will be is another matter.

You fall off the map when all your prospects turn into suspects...

I saw this and I am anxiously awaiting my institution's copy of this week's nature so I can read the entire report. Thus far the biggest criticism of this report is that it hangs so much on this single mutation, which is really not how modern evolutionary biologists would think a 3x increase in hominid brain size would come about. In conjunction with the reduction in jaw musculature (the gene the researchers found), there would need to be concurrent reductions in jaw and tooth structural robustness or else the single mutation would more likely be a detriment instead of a benefit. Not to say the findings are not wicked cool and quite intriguing, given that the jaw musculature reduction coincides with the rise of the first tool using hominid, Homo habilis, 2.5 million years ago. The suggestion by these researchers that a tool-capable animal could do much of its food processing (cooking, chopping, cutting...) before consuming the food and therefore would not need the robust jaw musculature is certainly sensible enough. Still, the explanation of what happened over the next million years of Homo evolution is lacking thus far. It's a common quandry for evolutionary biologists - how do small-scale mutational changes that by themselves are possibly detrimental and at best only slightly advantageous remain in the genome of the species and accumulate to the point that a major new system or function arises? The envenomation apparatus of snakes and the vertebrate eye are the textbook examples highlighting the issue, each of these systems arising only through the accumulation of several mutational changes. The neutralist arguments of Kimura and the arguments against absolute all-or-nothing benefits of mutations by Dawkins most notably provide some help, but it's still hard to wrap your brain around how these elegant and highly integrated multi-gene systems and structures arise.

It's the film that taught me never to trust the People's Front of Judea... or was that the Judean People's Front? Blessed Are the Cheesemakers!

Like money in the bank!

Teaching Math in the US, the last 50 years... Teaching math in the 1950s: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit? Teaching math in the 1960s: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit? Teaching Math in thw 1970s: A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100. Each element is worth one dollar. Make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M. The set C, the cost of production, contains 20 fewer points then the set M. Represent the set C as a subset of set M and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set P of profits? Teaching Math in 1980: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: underline the number 20. Teaching Math in 1990: By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? What's wrong about it? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the trees? (there are no wrong answers). Teaching Math in 2000: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Anderson determine that his profit margin is $60 and how many documents were shredded to achieve this number? Teaching Math in 2010: El Loggero se habla with the truckero y se ponen de acuerdo con otro driver de la conpentencia......

I'll go there if I want to, in fact I'll go there 24/7 if I feel like it because I'm thinking out of the box. I'm so outta here...

Damn, Mariotti has a big, fat head!

So which one is the Yoko of the group?

Apparently you have not heard that they recently DID find Hoffa. He was in a hospital delivery room of all places. Seems he was there to try to... organize labor! Thanks, I'm here through Thursday. Try the veal.

The Rover has mede it out of the hole, according to info on the mars rover jpl site:

Much of 'The Game' is also quite disco, especially 'Another One Bites the Dust.' I think there was a time when that was the ONLY song played on Chicago radio stations - man did they overplay that song.

The Stones' disco album being referred to is undoubtedly Emotional Rescue. It's stunning how much I hated that record as a kid in comparison to their earlier stuff when it came out, versus how I look back at the album as being pretty good next to most of the drek they put out subsequently. While I don't think there would have been a Beatles disco album, note that there there were very disco-styled cuts off of a couple of solo Beatle records. Paul's McCartney II has cuts like Coming Up, Temporary Secretary and the instrumental Frozen Jap (a poke at Yoko?) that are very disco beatbox. Coming Up in particular, was waaay disco, yet strangely catchy and seductive. The Lennon/Bowie/Alomar (Sandy, Sandy, or Robbie I'm not sure) anthem Fame is quite early-era (1975) disco too, as was a lot of Bowie's stuff from back then. In the height of the disco era (ca 1978) George was going the opposite way with compositions like Blow Away, but some of the more forgetable stuff on the early 80s Somewhere in England gets kind of beatboxy. Ringo was busy tagging Barbara Bach at the time, so he didn't have the time to put out any disco hits.

I love that facility at Disney too! Dodgertown is great for history and atmosphere, but the complex over at the Mouse is really nice. Glad you had a good trip.

Always interesting to speculate on that. Breaking up after only 6 years in the public eye certainly helped cement the mystique, but I would have loved that they stayed together and put out some more. Abbey Road shows no sign whatsoever of the creative fires dimming, so I don't think a followup album or two would have been lacking. At the same time, it's no doubt the case that lacking the urgency in making Sbbey Road the defining swan song album of any band from any generation, that album would have been very different if they knew it wasn't going to be their last.

Josh is a class act through and through. I'll be pulling for him to make the Halos' roster.

I've seen most of these before, and I got a smile out of many of them. But, regarding #69: "It is the God given duty of every man to assist any other man that may be in need of assistance in obtaining every guys dream (threesome with two girls)..." What would such assistance be, and how could it possibly be given by a guy to his buddy? "Well, I was doing alright with you, baby, and things were going great, but if it's really not too much trouble could you end up in bed with my buddy and another girl instead of me tonight?..." If that would have worked then my mis-spent youth was officially wasted. Heck, I could have done that and counted on the kindness of my fellow man every other night out...