therandomtexan
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Heads up guys, those are real bullets he’s shootin’
Texas Governor Rick Perry fires a $10,000 shot across the bow of the great fleet of Texas universities. They all say it can’t be done, except at three Texas colleges. Not to worry, the Legislature is planning to shut those 3 bad examples down, probably so they don’t make everyone else look bad. Unlike some Read more
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Vaguely speaking
Clark Whelton says “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness.” Taylor Mali talked about this, but nobody listened. But what in the hell is QUACK-TALKING? Tip from NRO. Update (19 February). I’ve come up empty on “quack talking,” but I did find this interesting story about ducks and eagles along the way. I think I’ll Read more
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Pocket squares!!
Yesterday was “Wear Red for Valentine’s Day” in my statistics classes; the students hit about 90% with reds, pinks, and plums. (Well…it WAS extra credit). To set a good example, I dressed up a black suit with a plum shirt, Queen of Hearts tie, and a bright red pocket square. Briggsy had raised my consciousness Read more
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Why Texans think Californians are stupid, #4
The City of San Jose has posted their salary data online. Standout entry: the retiring Police Chief at $534,576. Tip from Drudge. Read more
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Heresy in math education
Jan Nordgren pointed me to this dissenting essay. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the Read more
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I don’t think that word means what you think it means
Post Service warns of default… The USPS, a self-supporting government agency that receives no tax dollars, said it suffered a loss of $329 million in the first quarter of federal fiscal year 2011. That compared with a loss of $297 million a year earlier. Don’t worry, they’re going to raise rates, cut hours, and lobby Read more
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Don’t take that student loan!
…unless you’re damned sure you can pay it off. Good luck on that “Tell Congress…” jive. They’re broke, and definitely not in the mood to listen to your whiney crap when 25%+ of student loans are in default. Infographic by College Scholarships.org Tip from Boing Boing. Update (15 February). If you do take the loan, Read more
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Psych!
Jonathan Haidt stuns the audience at the annual conference of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology with a blinding glimpse of the obvious: He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made Read more
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Anybody got a sense of scale here?
30,000 pigs floating down the river in the recent Aussie floods? Didn’t that seem like…well…like a LOT of pigs? Sometimes quantitative literacy is really, really simple, if you just pay attention. Update (8 February). Maybe 30,000 isn’t too unreasonable a number! Read more
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Not quite ready for prime time
This sounds like a great innovation, using Raman spectroscopy to detect melanoma. But let’s look a little deeper at the preliminary results. First, the developers claim that in 274 known cases of melanoma, the device detected all 274 of them, which gives and estimated test sensitivity of 100%, which is patent bullshit; nothing in this Read more
The Random Texan 