Yeah, sure that plush Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacterium that causes Lyme disease) is playfully cuddling the plush penicillin now. But can their friendship last?
Author Archives: admin
Christmas wrapping.
Well, technically, wrappings for Christmas eve dinner: discos para empanadas.
It turns out, peeling them apart requires some patience and dexterity. Luckily, I had sufficient quantities of both.
An open letter.
To the young people wandering around Casa Free-Ride singing Christmas songs (not just the refrains but all of the verses):
None of the canonical reindeer is named Connor. And Santa does not have a reindeer named Nixon.
Love,
Dr. Free-Ride
P.S. The last batch of cookies will be out of the oven in one minute. But you need to let them cool before you sample them — just like the other batches.
A bad way to use your officially sanctioned cheat-sheet on an exam.
I am, as it happens, done grading. But I need to express my concern (OK, bumfuzzlement) about something I saw quite a lot of on the final exams I was grading.
You may recall that I let my students prepare a single page of notes (8.5″ by 11″, front and back) that they can use to help them on their exam. Sadly, not all uses of such an officially sanctioned cheat-sheet end up being helpful. Imagine the following exam question, which the students are asked to answer in a few sentences:
The elder Free-Ride offspring breaks into song.
Possibly related to the last post. The lyrics are original.
(For this, you need to imagine the younger Free-Ride offspring humming in the background as the elder sings.)
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
We’re sorry that we killed ya.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
At least we didn’t grill ya.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Our only Christmas casualty.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Be thankful we don’t “nil” ya.
The challenge of drawing principled lines.
The new piece by Natalie Angier at the New York Times may make things a little more ticklish for people who pick their food on the basis of the characteristics it has or lacks as an organism:
The solstice (in a two-sphere cosmos).
Here in the Northern Hemisphere (of Earth), today marks the Winter Solstice. Most people have some understanding that this means today is the day of minimum sunlight, or the longest night of the year. Fewer people, I think, have a good astronomical sense of why that is the case.
So, in honor of the solstice, let’s do some old school astronomy. Really old school.
Let’s consider the two-sphere cosmos:
Santa Claus and ethics.
It’s time for Dr. Free-Ride to have a chat with the grown-ups. If you’re a kid and you’re reading this, think how much the adults in your life would appreciate it if you got up from the computer and put away your stuff that needs putting away (or played with your brother or sister nicely, or folded some socks).
I’ll have a post with some neat-o pictures in it up in a few hours.
When the budget needs cutting, who gets to bleed? (Illinois edition)
Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette
State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois’ public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children’s tuition costs.
Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law.
“I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package,” said state Rep. Naomi Jakobsson, D-Urbana. “Taking away a part of their offer is not something I can support.”
Randy Kangas, director of the UI system’s office for planning and budgeting, said 942 of these tuition waivers were issued in fiscal 2009, totaling $3,981,600 of revenue the university never realized.
Most of those, 722 waivers, were issued for students at the Urbana-Champaign campus, erasing $3,254,800 that would have been added to the campus’ budget.
UI officials are saying they will need time to discuss the bill with state representatives before they develop any particular position.
How do you know they aren’t cheating?
In comments on and earlier post, I mentioned that I no longer take extraordinary measures in anticipation of students taking an exam in an earlier sitting passing on information or answers to students taking the same exam in a later sitting. Commenter Martin wondered if I wasn’t being naïve:
there has been no evidence of such answers-from-the-earlier-sitting cheating in the whole time I’ve been at this university.
Janet,
how do you know this, what do you do to look for this? I’m sceptical, because we’ve had incidents where students doing the same exam in different countries on the same day but in different time zones have passed on details of the exam, even though there is no formal contact between the students during the semester, so the idea that students at the same campus don’t know that they are getting the same exam seems unlikely