Thursday, January 11, 2018

Our temperature so far this early morning is 34* or 36* depending on which source you cite. The prediction is for rain and around 50*. The January thaw will be short lived--only today and tomorrow. After that we go back in the refrigerator with the deep freeze probable for one day early next week.

Hardly unexpected. After the fires the rains have come, and the mudslides and floods as well. Death toll as of the latest report I found: 13.

Those STEM programs in our schools may be less valuable than their backers hoped. I don't know how many fads in education I have seen pass through from the first panic over our lack of math and science skills in the wake of Sputnik to the current push for STEM. Through all of it we seem to have become less educated. In a way Brin and Page were not wrong in their assumption that only technologists can understand technology--if you restrict the meaning of "understand" to the nuts and bolts of how the technology itself is constructed. They were totally off base when a broad definition of "understand" is used: as in knowing how to effectively communicate that technology both to other technologists and a broader non-technical public and in predicting how that technology would diffuse through and affect society. The article concerned the narrow area of "success" in careers but the lack of people skills is apparent in the wider areas of society and politics.

Anyone else sick and tired of all the election hype which has been ongoing since #45 announced his candidacy 16 months before the 2016 election? Now there is the speculation that Oprah will run for president in 2010 and there is solid behind the speculations beyond a dynamite speech at the Golden Globe awards. Frankly it looks like desperate Damnocrats hoping that a black woman can do what the white woman couldn't: win both the popular vote (which Clinton did) and the Electoral College (which she didn't). It also provides a way to avoid looking at the reasons why so many voters decided they would rather have a con-man plutocrat instead of a Wall Street Democrat.

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Our temperature might have reached the 50* yesterday but with the fog and mist it didn't feel like it. The weather site we check each morning say it is now 56*. But the snow is rapidly melting even from the patio which is totally in the shade until after the spring equinox.

This is funny. Don't people look at the cover (or the picture of the cover if it is an e-book) before completing the purchase? Honestly, I would find the Fire and Fury account of the allied bombing much more interesting than the Fire and Fury account of 45's White House.

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