Random links
- An open letter to college admissions committees
- "At one time, I suppose, grades might have been an objective and reasonably accurate measure of competence in a given subject. Not anymore. Today, they primarily measure how well a student can game the system. It is quite easy for savvy high school students to pass a course, and in some cases even to receive an A or B, without actually knowing or understanding any of the course content. Here’s how ..." Reminds me of why I tend to mistrust most online instructor views - in general I assume that to be a good instructor it's almost necessary to have a fair-sized fraction of negative ratings.
- The New Globalist Is Homesick
- "The global desire to leave home arises from poverty and necessity, but it also grows out of a conviction that such mobility is possible. ... This outlook was once a strange and threatening product of the Enlightenment but is now accepted as central to a globalized economy. It leads to opportunity and profits, but it also has high psychological costs."
- What can you do with supercomputers?
- A response to an article mentioning the horror that you can't really play video games on them. "What’s been done with supercomputers? They’ve made my car lighter, safer, and more fuel-efficient. They’ve optimized small-scale wind energy devices, hopefully one day cutting my power bill. They’ve quantified cradle-to-grave lifecycle responsibility for products, allowing cheap consumer goods with minimal environmental footprint. They were instrumental in developing new packaging that saves several hundred tons of plastic a year. And, yes, okay, a supercomputer did learn all about tornadoes so when one wandered through the city I live in the other day, the local weather people could talk about it for two breathless hours."
- Foodie Underground: It's not all food snobbery
- "Good food doesn’t have to be pretentious." This New York Times piece on what those in the food industry actually eat is worth reading alongside.