On the 8 Spot

I wanted the Saints to win. This was because as chuck said when Peyton Manning gets his second ring its almost hard to not agree that he is his generations best. I’m not ready for that world. I love watching Manning play but not yet.

This has ruined the Star Wars reboot for me, read the whole thing if you dare. Damn didn’t think of that.

Damn reminds me of what a friend says about reboot Spock. Reboot Spock was an asshole counter to the original series spock where he was irritating not for being an asshole but for being sooo damn logical.

ty to Brad Delong for the pointer

Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie

Mitch Wagner

There’s a scene at the end of the movie—and I don’t think this is a spoiler, the movie has been building to this point the whole time—where Kirk has the bad guy on the main bridge viewscreen. The bad guy is defeated, his ship crippled, and Kirk offers amnesty. The bad guy proudly refuses, and instead dies with his ship.

Spock approaches Kirk afterward and asks if Kirk was really going to help the bad guy out. And Kirk smirks and says, no, of course not. Spock is happy about that.

It seems to me that one scene spits in the face of one of the greatest things about the original Trek. The show was primarily an action-adventure program, with plenty of fistfights and stirring ship-to-ship battle. But in the end, Gene Roddenberry and the rest of the people who created Trek were espousing a philosophy of peace and forgiveness. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise extended forgiveness to enemies many times, including the very first time they encountered the Romulans, in a sequence that the movie echoes.

The message of Trek: It’s better to talk than to fight. It’s better to forgive your enemies.

via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie.

I think I was born in the wrong decade.

The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating.

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges…Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

via Marginal Revolution: Supply and Demand.

This is sooo true nobody wants to make a decision. Make a decision and other people would criticize it or say that there is a better way. I think it’s easy to think of something better. I believe it’s esay to go one up when someone has already set the bar/base,  the problem is that few people do, few people accept the responsibility of being wrong. My take? if it’s really important to you then stand up and get yourself heard other wise don’t let other people pass the buck to you. It’s easier finding someone to blame than facing that blame so do it only when you feel it is important to you!!!!

The relentless search for “tell me what to do”

If you’ve ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: “If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I’m safe.”

When asked, resist.

via Seth’s Blog: The relentless search for “tell me what to do”.

O feel the same way. Powerpoints are superflous and in most cases unecessary. If you are just going to read stuff to me or tell me things I can read in the book, then why are you wasting my time ? I can read the goddamn book. If you really want to not be useless then teach me. Quiz me and find out what’s the barriers from me understanding something. What do I find unconvincing.

The surprising part is not that he lectures without PowerPoint, because many professors also avoid presentation software. The surprising part is that I prefer his chalkboard notes over PowerPoint despite the fact that his handwriting is almost completely illegible, suggesting that there is a quality of “chalk talks” that is useful to my learning style beyond just being able to read the notes. I have some ideas why this might be:

via Carolyn Blogs » Blog Archive » I Prefer My Professor’s Illegible Handwriting To Your PowerPoint Presentation.