encouraging kids to have short attention spans

I just read about one of the dumbest pieces of legislation I’ve ever heard of. A couple weeks back, the California Assembly voted to ban school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages (link). It is being heralded as to “force publishers to condense key ideas, basic problems and basic knowledge into 200 pages, then to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information.” But I’m sure the more likely reason for this bill, as mentioned further down in the article, is that “it could reduce the cost…of textbooks”. Publishers of course are opposed to the bill saying it would force them to publish multiple volumes of the books in order to cover all of the state-mandated material. Not to mention, I’m sure, that publishing books specfically for California would raise prices due to the loss of economy of scale.

Way to go California. Sometimes you come up with very forward-thinking legislation, but then you go and do something idiotic like this. Just pick an arbitrary number and say all ideas should fit inside this space. Must have been a slow legilslative month, eh? The best quote from the story “don’t give students a predigested version of what U.S. history is, let them explore the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress”. Oh ok, I’m sure at least .001% of the students will go ahead and do just that.

Secrets of the A-List Bloggers

I ran across this link today about the “Secrets of the A-List Bloggers”. It basically does a word count of entries on some of the most popular sites and notices a simple trend: brevity is the way to go. I would agree that in some cases this is indeed true, but usually when I blog I’m trying to give my opinion or add something to a debate instead of simply passing along a link. There are plenty of sites that just list a bunch of interesting links they grabbed from another site and don’t really add any substance to them.

I know I’m just one person and don’t have that many readers, but I still like to put my spin on things and give my perspective. If you just want links, go somewhere else (like Fark, the motherload of quirky links).

Vegas Vacation

Yes, I have returned from my week long trip out west. I ended up going to three new states: Arizona, Nevada & Utah. That brings my states visited total up to a nice round 30. I had a great time and was able to get a nice mix of nature (Grand Canyon & Zion National Mark) and commercialism (‘The Strip’ in Las Vegas). I’ll talk more about it another time, but here are some pictures for you to enjoy in the meantime with some captions to narrate the tale. Most are in chronological order of my trip.