URLs du Jour

2006-09-14

  • It is possible to earn partial credit. Please make an effort to show the way you arrive at your solution.

    1. Professor Peter Ratener at Bellevue Community College writes a word problem on a math quiz featuring a person named "Condoleezza" dropping a watermelon off "the 300-foot Federal Building".

      1. How many seconds will it take a student to associate "Condoleezza" with our current Secretary of State?

      2. How long after that will the student remember that our current Secretary of State is black, and notice the linking of a watermelon with a black person?

      3. At what approximate speed will the shit hit the fan at Bellevue Community College?

      This is a self-graded question. Answers at Inside Higher Ed and FIRE.

  • Like some kind of cosmic law was being followed, just when I was feeling more disgusted with Democrats than with Republicans …
    Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is trying [to] use a bill authorizing U.S. military operations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, to prohibit people from using credit cards to settle Internet gambling debts.
    Via Radley Balko, who deems it, accurately, shameless.

  • Time has more on Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy, which Fox is assiduously trying to get people to ignore. ("Heh, he said 'ass.'")
    The problem is, Idiocracy is so aesthetically displeasing—its vision of the future so purposely, gaudily, corporately ugly—that even showing a second of it made people refuse to see it. Judge's unslick look might work for hand-drawn cartoons of hicks or a movie that takes place in poorly lit cubicles, but it's not so great for a sci-fi action comedy. It just doesn't look or feel like Talladega Nights or Dodgeball. Even though Fox probably made a million dollars' worth of trailers and ads, they empirically knew from testing that every dollar they spent on ad time for Idiocracy would be wasted.
    Mmmmkay, I'm gonna need to defer to that. Mainly because I have no choice. I have, however, found that the Idiocracy DVD is queueable over at Blockbuster Online. Even though they have the release date as 12/31/2007, I've put it right up at number one. Maybe they'll slip up and mail it to me early.