Like a lot of people, I really like living in an urban environment. But I can also feel the pull of the suburbs, what with their extra space and, perhaps even more important, their YARDS. (We are currently contemplating a move driven largely by my wife’s desire for fenced in, outdoor space for the kids.)
Well, via Matt Yglesias comes a link to a proposal to… share yards. Which makes a lot of sense. Hardly anyone uses their yard all the time. So what would it hurt if someone else were using it from time to time? All of which would allow for denser communities, etc. Of course, it’s also illegal in most places. Go figure.
My only qualm about recommending this link is that the idea seems to have been inspired by the Backyardigans, a cartoon saddled with what I consider to be the most obnoxious theme song in the history of obnoxious theme songs. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
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So what to do if your kid goes to a school that does not offer AP Economics? Maybe you ought to consider having one of the students teach it. Because that’s what’s happening in Pittsburgh… with an astonishing degree of success.
It was a classic case of supply and demand. Entering his senior year at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School, Seth Weidman felt there was demand for an Advanced Placement economics class.
So he decided to supply one.
At least one night a week for nine months, Seth taught college-level economics to a group of his fellow Allderdice students, traveling from living room to living room with his dry-erase board in tow.
Fueled by Doritos, pretzels and the occasional homemade tiramisu, Seth’s students in the “Weidman School of Economics” numbered 18, with nine of them eventually taking at least one of the two AP economics tests offered.
Thus far, the results have been spectacular. The students took 12 total tests, and of the eight scores that have come in this month, six are 5’s — the highest possible on a scale of 1 to 5 — and two are 4’s. Depending on what colleges the students attend, those scores likely will qualify them for course credits or advanced standing.
Nationally, fewer than 15 percent of students who took the tests in 2007 scored a 5 and just more than 25 percent scored a 4.
Now, perhaps you might object to a economics teacher enthralled with Ayn Rand and Friederich Hayek. But hey. You can’t knock the kid for trying.
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What would it take to get you to have more kids? Several six packs and a few shots usually does the trick for me. But some people are a bit more… sober. Apparently. Check out this NYT story regarding plummeting birth rates and the policies designed to overcome them. Which must be something of a mini-trend. Kerry Howley has this very nice feature story about fertility panics over at Reason.
Still. I think airlifting six-packs of Miller Light into affected areas might do some good.
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Offsprung’s braintrust was shocked to learn this weekend that Strawberry Shortcake, the beloved doll from our youth, has been redesigned with a sexier edge. This obviously indicates that something is terribly wrong with The Culture. Because cartoons shouldn’t be sexy.
Or should they? Speaking of the early 80s, anyone remember Princess Ariel From Thundarr the Barbarian? She was my first crush. Largely because she was hot as balls. Lords of Light, check her out in the image gallery here. Or feast your sick, sick eyes on the first episode here.
Having just watched it myself, I realize anew that the opening sequence features, um, the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. On Saturday morning television. What kind of cereal did they advertise during this show? Torture-Os? Pain Loops?
Hmmm. Seems that the crassening of the culture is less new than some people are letting on.
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Via Gawker, this absolutely devastating video critique of some guy criticizing what you feed your kids.
It is so painful because we have all been victimized by this guy: Some super-parent off-handedly blasting our parenting skills. It is even more painful, I think, to realize that, to some extent, we probably ARE this guy. At least to some people.
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So my home state has finally passed a smoking ban. At the risk (or I suppose for the express purpose) of raising a ruckus, allow me to weigh in on this topic:
Smoking bans are big fat pile of rubbish. I hate them. And I suspect they might be the downfall of civilized society. And I don’t even smoke. I used to. But like most other people who engage in dangerous things as a young person, I quit.
There is plenty to say about this topic. I know that most people defend bans by arguing that they are really for worker safety. But I am not sure that flies. I think that even the most dire numbers indicate that the “relative risk” of working around secondhand smoke for 40 hours a week, for forty years, is something like 1.2. More specifically, for every 50,000 bartenders who work that long, something like ONE will die from SHS exposure. But almost no bartenders actually work that long. It is a notoriously transient business. Moreover, we allow many other workers to take far greater risks than that. We allow people to be boxers, for instance, and NASCAR drivers.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Eating locally grown food can be a great thing to do. Tastes great, after all. Besides, your family’s efforts to cut down on all those “food miles” will surely help reduce global warming. Right?
Well… maybe not. Some academic types here in Pittsburgh decided to actually look at all the data, and…
Did I mention it tastes good?
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Is it really that bad to marry your cousin? Does it really lead to kids with three heads? Is it weird? Slate has the goods.
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At Harvard, clinical psychologist Elizabeth Spelke is doing a lot of research about whether our prejudices are hardwired into our brains. Her work involves doing really cool experiments with babies. Here is a great article about it.
For instance, did you know that babies can do math and tell monkeys apart? Perhaps more ominously, babies are born without racial preferences, but within a few months prefer to look at faces that belong to people of their own race. But that’s nothing compared to other biases. From the article:
‘They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’
Weird.
Hat tip to Joel Kottke.
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Parenting is a high-stakes endeavor. Rumor has it that if you potty train your kid incorrectly, he’ll be an ax murderer. If junior doesn’t speak Latin by the time he’s three, his only career option will be wallowing in pig slop. And if you bottle feed instead of breast feed… well , God help your children.
But here’s a new one: If you screw up your job as a parent, your child will grow up and have really bad relationships with contractors. I’m not kidding. From a New York Times article about contractors who have to go to therapy:
Mr. Lupberger learned a few things. “He said there is something called parental transference that can take place in a large remodeling project; the contractor takes on the parenting role due to the dependency that can happen,” Mr. Lupberger says. “If someone had a bad parenting experience growing up and then the contractor upset the homeowner by not meeting an expectation or missing a deadline, all the negative emotion from that person’s childhood is transferred to the contractor.”
So… don’t screw things up.
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