Archive for April 2005
April 30, 2005
Did You Know
3:45 pm | Culture | Comments: 18
Tom Cruise is only 5′ 7″? I saw some pictures of him next to that Katie Holmes chick and she was noticeably taller than him. This maybe is no issue for her (I think the guy made more than 100 million dollars by doing nothing - errrr making his last movie), but it looks pretty comical to me. Said Cruise about his new romance with Miss Holmes while at some shin-dig in Rome, “She’s an extraordinary woman. You kind of go through life and it’s beautiful and it’s something I feel really happy that she’s here tonight.” OK, Chief.
April 29, 2005
Funfzig Millionen!
4:14 pm | News | Sci/Tech | Comments: 7
View the official celebration page here!
Random Is as Random Does
1:34 am | Random | Comments: 12
James: ben, you are quite the smooth operator.
Brooke: Is that a total insult or a little compliment?
Mary Joe: OUCH, and I’m not even Brooke
Mark: I destroyed many a Shivan in my day…
James: FOR ME TO POOP ON
Ben: it all came down to the ‘n’ in the end
Brooke: Ben is a smooth as ex-lax
Mary Joe: THINGS ARE GETTING A LITTLE OUT OF HAND NOW
Ben: look, I am feeling tired…don’t ask me to make judgement calls
Mark: The situation is under control.
Spam: It’s What’s for Dinner
12:25 am | SIO | Comments: 0
I should mention that the 51 comments garnered by the post Schule is a modern-day SIO record, regardless of the fact that 50% of the comments are nonsense and 45% of them are pure spam. The other 5% are cool, though, so the record stands.
April 28, 2005
Semantics
11:08 pm | Thoughts | Comments: 4
During my top-secret activites today, I was discussing some matters with Kram. He’s an alien from outerspace. At any rate, we were talking about the matter of personal cash flow: how one balances income and expenses. Without really thinking I made the observation that I don’t consider buying stuff to be an expense. After recovering from the initial shock of the sheer absurdity of the statement, it occurred to me that the statement, in a sense, is true. I think of expenses as necessary things that suck your money away with only your begrudging consent; stuff like car insurance, gas, tuition, and highway tolls. You pay the money out, but you really don’t get anything back (for gas you do, maybe, but if you’re me, you don’t get to use it - your family does!). Buying stuff implies you’re getting some positive return on the investment, whatever that may be.
April 27, 2005
Boys of Summer
4:57 pm | College | Wisdom | Comments: 14
I suppose I should make an official school-is-over post. School is over. Let the peasants rejoice. In retrospect, it was probably the most fun semester I’ve ever had. I did the senior project/capstone course this time around, and the group I was with was totally hardcore. Great group of guys; really made things interesting in a class where most kids get totally swamped and stressed out. Remember the CJ101 class I talked about at the beginning of the semester (if not, check it out)? Well, I dropped that beast right before spring break because the prof was ridiculous. That was probably the best decision I ever made, since A) the courseload was way too high for an intro course - bunch of tests, random homework, a term paper, and a fieldwork assignment that was just stupid - and B) I thought I needed the class for a GenEd, but it turns out I had already fulfilled that requirement. A good thing to remember about college: don’t bust it when you don’t have to.
SIO: The Relentless Persuit of Cool
3:36 pm | SIO | Comments: 1
Ladies and Gentlemen, please note the latest cool stuff from Lanning Labs: RandomChat™! From henceforth and forever more, friendly hellos, music requests, and random and/or pointless comments shall go in RandomChat™, and all Post-related comments and replies will be reserved for the actual comments. Some basic rules: if I don’t like what you put in RandomChat™, I will delete it, ban you permanently from SIO, disable your internet connection, slash your tires, and possibly burn your house down. That being said, we encourage all manner of randomness. Have fun!
April 26, 2005
Schule
9:32 pm | College | Wisdom | Comments: 51
Tomorrow is officially the last day of the 4th year of my on-going college career. I’ve had lots of thoughts and experiences in that time, the extent of which would fill volumes. It seems there are several different approaches that professors take to giving out fair grades in a class, which is something which I personally feel is one of the most important parts of being a good professor.
The vast majority of profs use the old points system, although there’s always different variations of ways in which you can get these points. Then of course there’s the issue of grading scales, which I’ve seen all over the map (the easiest A I’ve seen at GVSU was 90%, the hardest was 95%). Depending on the class, you can get points for homework, quizzes, tests, papers, participation, projects, labs, fieldwork, the final, and extra credit. The classic system is to simply add all the points up and depending on the percentage you scored out of the total, you get your letter grade based on the grading scale.
An increasing number of professors make getting a good grade easier with the “weighting” system. Let’s say the class has 10 quizzes with 10 points each; so, if you miss 10 points, you should lose 10 points off the total score. Not so with weighting; in this system, the total “score” is actually a percentage, and those 100 points are weighted against a total percent of 100; so if the quizzes are weighted at 5%, you’re not actually losing 10 points, you’re only losing 10% of that 5%, which is what, like .05 points out of a hundred? Knowing this, you can prioritize what things to study and what things to let slide.
The best system I have seen at my school is called by the only professor that used it the “cluster” system. It’s a new twist on the old classic point system. All students’ total scores are compared to each other, and you look for Groups, which are separated by Gaps. Each group is a letter grade, and each gap is where the next letter grade begins. So pretend there are five students and the total scores are 99, 97, 88, 85, 56. The first two will get an A, the second two will get a B, and the last poor slacker will get a C. Theoretically, assuming all the students are doing equally well, everybody can get an A. Hopefully (if the prof is doing his job correctly and everybody is doing the same amount of studying), everybody will be doing equally well, and not poorly.
The reasoning behind this system is actually quite deep, and it’s based on something called the Argument of the Beard. Bascially, the idea is that you cannot say that 93% is an A, while 92.9% is an A-; it’s just too close to tell. Same way you can’t say that on Day 13 James has a beard, while on day 12 he did not. This is definitely the most fair way of grading that I have experience with, and I would certainly use it in my classroom, were I to ever have one.
April 25, 2005
Photos von Berlin
10:18 pm | My Life | Pictures | Comments: 15
I’ve wanted to do this since I got back from my trip to Europe in July of last year, and I have finally gotten around to it. Please note the new link on the top of the page entitled “Berlin 2004″. They’re a bunch of pictures from the trip. I’ve kept them to stuff that I thought would be of general interest. If I were to have put up a comprehensive run-through of the trip, it would have been both super boring and super long. Just trust me when I say that we did alot more than wander around the city, eat stuff, buy stuff, and look at stuff. Anyways, check check check it out now.
Decision-Making Skills
7:29 pm | My Life | Stories | Comments: 8
This post originally began as a comment on Ben Friedrich’s web log, but it got so long I thought I might as well post it.
As the story goes, my buddies and I used go to this rope swing way out in the sticks. It threw you out about 25 feet in the air over this little bend in a river that was really deep. Anyway, one time we showed up at this rope swing and a whole crew of college kids was there, drunk as can be. Having been exposed to intoxicated 20-somethings many times in the past and not fearing any harm as we were three stout young lads with our wits about us, we just said hi and started swinging. At one point, some kid whose swimming shorts were much too large for him totters up to the stand, swings out, drops in, and promptly begins drowning. We watched him for a few seconds, and eventually some guy behind us said, “hey dude, like, that dude can’t swim, man!” With that, my buddy and another guy jumped in after him and dragged him out. He was pretty shook up, but he survived. Apparently a brush with death is not worth a few too many Bud Lites, and within minutes the whole place cleared out; but not before a big huge drunk fat guy also tried swinging out, only to lose his grip too early and get shot straight into some very large rocks along the shallow edge of the river. He broke his knee, or so it is told.
Now this tale exists only in the lore of rope swings, to be told throughout the ages in the land of the Rogue River.
