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A very cute video mixing images of one of my earliest Apple toys with advertising of my newest Apple toy. Keep your eyes out for the brief appearance of a wristband late in the video!
Edited to add: Another fun iPod add spoof: Real life iPod guy in Apple Store
More editing: The original link to the ipod nano commercial spoof is broken due to overwhelmed bandwidth, but you can also find the video at ifilm.com.
If you're in the greater Pittsburgh area, make your way to South Hills Village Mall Saturday morning for the grand opening of the region's newest computer shot: the Apple Store - South Hills Village! They'll open at 10:00 AM and the first 1000 people get a free Apple T-shirt! Maybe they'll even have some nanos in stock....
Don't miss out on the fun - today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Perhaps after work I'll dust off my copy of Pirates and play a game....
I think I am going to try out this Baked Egg Roll recipe this weekend; I am sure it is not authentic, but I like the lack of frying and the large quantity of cabbage, and it will hopefully make yummy, portable lunches for next week for me.
I will not be making All American Eggrolls, even if it is going to be Constitution Day. Polish sausage slathered with mustard, mayonnaise, and cream cheese fried in a wrapper is not an eggroll, and I'm rather disturbed that anyone thinks such a concoction is "all American". Some Americans actually like vegetables!
The Guardian has a weekly "Bad Science" column, mostly exploring a poor interpretation of an experiments results, usually on the part of mass media. This week's column, Don't dumb me down, takes on the question of why mainstream media coverage of science is so bad. At the expense of some potshots at humanities scholars - who are all lumped in with a particular type of anti-scientific mindset - Goldacre does put together a fairly comprehensive list of the classes of mischaracterization in science stories, making for a nice crib sheet for when to question a science story. The fault, which Goldacre only hints around at the end, is at the feel of both scienists who are not interested in making their work accessible and journalists who assume scientist's work cannot be both accessible and engaging. I've always believed you shouldn't be able to get a PhD without being able to explain, to someone from a wildly unrelated field, what you did and why it was interesting. I think that simple exercise, applied to more research projects, could do a lot to help things along. Because the underlying point, that mainstream science coverage is dangerously inaccurate, is definitely valid. [via Slashdot]
Moebius Stripper has a good post, and good comments, over in her weblog about shortcomings of traditional testing, particularly within mathematics. Given an entirely blank slate to work from, I think everyone would agree that testing should, in fact, be a trigger as to whether one is ready to move on to the next set of content. But with multiple students, limited time per week, and a set-length semester, simply changing the testing scheme only tackles part of the problem. When the entire end evaluation of a student is a single letter, there is an awful lot of meaning to be crammed into a single dimension. Two students might get a C, one by doing very well in the first half of the course and then not understanding any of the second half, and another by maintaining a minimal level of understanding across the entire course. Which one is more equipped to move on to the next course in the series? (Answer: it probably depends on the content of the course and its follow-up....)