Who knew you could structure an entire blog around breathing More helpful for sports (or at least more concise) is Breathe Right and Win. Very useful for me, as I do way too much breath-holding when working out. Related, and unfortunately incurable by Googling alone, I’m also too stupid to count my reps and breathe at the same time, if the reps and the breaths aren’t synchronized one-to-one. (via jeters)
A buddy of mine encouraged me to hit up YouTube for some Roberto Carlos clips, and I’m glad I did. First up is the physics-defying free kick against France HQ. It must have been disbelief that kept the goalie pretty much pinned in place. That post should not have been fair game. This top 10 goals compilation is also pretty good (alas, not in high quality). I think the goal at 2:57 is actually more impressive than the free kick, and if the soccer itself isn’t proof of his athleticism, check out the air on his celebratory leap at 0:40.
I always loved Bud Luckey’s Sesame Street cartoons (even if I didn’t know who Bud Luckey was until Boundin' came along):
You can search YouTube for more (or for the inevitable day when those particular copies are pulled).
Beaker performs Ode to Joy as only he can (via kottke). That led me to Danny Boy, sung by a true Muppet dream team: The Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker.
Twitch has some details on an upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie. Directed by Guy Ritchie, who hasn’t exactly been on fire since lighting it up with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes is killer, and Jude Law as Watson ain’t bad either.
Twitch has a fine lookin' trailer for The Broken. Great cast.
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes:
Let us cut out their living guts one inch at a time, and they will know what we can do! Let no man forget how menacing we are. We are lions! You’re like a big bear, man!"
(via waxy)
Just Like the Movies is a short film (~20 minutes) by Michal Kosakowski which uses pre-9/11 movie clips to convey the events and feel of the day, accompanied by solo piano. (more details, via kottke)
Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee discuss gay marriage. “We protect religion, and talk about a lifestyle choice!” Stewart wins.
Jeff Atwood on Swoopo:
I just watched an 8GB Apple iPod Touch sell on swoopo for $187.65. The final price means a total of 1,251 bids were placed for this item, costing bidders a grand total of $938.25
How is that possible? Well, each time you bid you pay a $0.75 fee, which raises the the auction price by $0.15 and extends the close time by up to 20 seconds.
So I’m looking at a Nokia phone right now (picked at random off the Swoopo home page) where the bidding is up to $880, which means so far bidders have collectively paid well over $4,000 in fees to Swoopo.
Evil. Genius. I’m agape, and vaguely nauseated.
Two of my New Yorker heroes, Malcolm Gladwell and Hendrik Hertzberg both recently wrote about fixing public schools, and came to two different conclusions.
Gladwell, in his article Most Likely to Succeed:
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hertzberg, on the other hand, writes in his blog post, Size Matters:
Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.
This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.
Hertzberg also notes that his way has the important advantage of being objectively measurable. True, and I do hate to throw money at stuff that isn’t measurable, but in my 16 years of school and however many teachers and professors that is, I only had four great teachers (four!), and it was obvious who they were. The subject and the class size were insignificant factors, they made the material great. Bad teachers, on the other hand, could work one-on-one with the most interesting material on the planet and still suck the life right out of the learning experience.
(To be fair, I probably had as many truly sucky teachers as great ones. The rest were in between, scattered along the curve.)
In short, in my experience a good teacher can overcome a large class size but there’s no redeeming a bad teacher. Teacher quality is everything, and good teachers are rare. If a genie popped out of the lamp and said to me, “you can either bump all teachers up a notch in skill, so sucky to poor, poor to average, average to good, good to great or you can keep the current teacher bell curve but halve all the class sizes, but you can’t have both,” it’s such an easy choice it feels pointless to even frame the hypothetical. Give me better teachers any day of the week, and on Sundays too.
(Besides, you know genies: you say you want to halve class sizes and suddenly half the students in the world are dead or worse, inevitably including your own, and then Rod Serling comes out and says something pithy.)
Brightcove has clips from the new Wallace & Gromit short, “A Matter of Loaf and Death.” I like the new morning routine. (via twitch)