"Do you want to teach Social Studies again?"
I get asked, by students and colleagues alike, if I want to go back to teaching Social Studies (or like… any ‘real’ class) again after five years of being out of it. And I do wonder if maybe it would be a nice change of pace from people burning cookies all day or whipping each other in the ass with towels.
Then I hear about how AI is running amok in schools (or read the article that interview was based on) and I just think “well, maybe cookies aren’t so bad!”
Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.
Sound fun.
OK --> AC?
I moonlight as an (incredibly) amateur etymologist so anytime I see something that looks into where words come from my interest is piqued.
So, lo and behold Vox pops up on the ol' YouTube with a brief video on where the word “OK” comes from.
I dunno, I figured it was short for “okay” and never really thought about… “well then where did OKAY come from?!”
Turns out it’s a shorthand for “oll korrect”, itself a deliberate misspelling of “All correct” from the 1800s when apparently making acronyms for everything was deeply en vogue (I just ‘fr fr’ isn’t just a zoomer thing).
So, I need this (but it's a cool article too)
Wasting a bunch of money on Lego is kinda my jam, and wasting my money on THIS PARTICULAR kind of Lego is especially my jam.
Used to have one of these around when I got married, bought some *very* expensive "Impossible" film to take have people use the Polaroid camera to take pictures but ended up with the much cheaper FujiFilm camera instead.
Anyway, the article by The Verge is interesting in a bunch of ways, but one I didn't realize was the limited new piece budget sets get... which explains why sometimes they have to do a lot of mangling to get a bunch of little pieces to make somewhat that seems like it would be easier to just have as a single new type.
Lego’s picker system requires each printed piece to have its own unique storage bin, so rather than continually opening more warehouses, Lego limits how many custom parts designers can introduce each year.
“We can’t make everything decorated. We can’t change every brick into every color,” Scott says. “Otherwise the portfolio would just explode in complexity, so we have teams that manage the complexity level.”
And those teams came up with one simple idea to stem the tide of complexity: “frames.”
Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too. Every year, design leads like Scott are given a limited number of frames that they can spend on their entire portfolio for physical pieces that aren’t readily at hand. “If I have five products or 10 products coming out, I need to allocate where those frames go,” says Scott.
https://www.theverge.com/c/23991049/lego-ideas-polaroid-onestep-behind-the-scenes-price
“Frictionless” society
Not to get all philosophical but I found this podcast from Vox really interesting. Activist and author Naomi Klein talks about a lot of issues but the final 7ish minutes of the episode hit me most. Basically she argues that Covid really exposed that the “frictionless” nature of our current age is just an image we like to believe is real. That behind stuff like skip the dishes or work from home are man, many people who are the victims of widespread inequity in society. Not a new thought, but something interesting. There’s an exposé behind the moderation of Facebook that I can’t find but this from the BBC touches on a similar vein that behind things we take for granted, like social media, there’s a huge human cost that’s invisible to us.
'Virtual Insanity' ... the room moves
aka Jay Kay without a hat is weird.
Anyway, one of those videos I used to watch a lot on MuchMusic (when it used to show music videos) and I had *ALWAYS* figured the floor was moving.
But no.
It's the ROOM AROUND HIM THAT MOVES!!! WHAT?!
Worth a watch, both the original video and the retrospective.