Floating-point arithmetic is the arithmetic performed on real numbers by computers.

Yeah, yeah, I updated the ICONOMICON!  You know, the iconomicon, where I post all the icons I make. Uh huh. Yeah. Thought so.

Family photos are turning digital! It's a perfect way to protect images of your ancestors forever.

I will turn twenty-nine this summer. For those of you who are quick with the arithmetic, you might notice that I was born waaaay back in ultra-hip 1977. And for those of you who don't remember, the 70's bled right over into the 80's.

Trust me, I'm building toward something.

When I was about about four or five, my sister Angela was in the three to four range, and my half-sister Candice was chillin' out around a year or so. My father had recently gotten married, his second wife, Vicki.  This happy household was living in southern Indiana, in Columbus to be exact. I was soon to start kindergarten at Fodrea Elementary.

In a moment, I am going to show you our family photo from this miraculous time period but first I want to know; are our children going to look back on the haircuts and fashions of the 2000's and shudder, crying out, "Why, oh why, dear mother, dear father, did you dress me like that?!"

Because what we wear now doesn't seem terribly wrong or embarrassing in retrospect. But when I look back at this, I wonder what they were thinking back in winter of good ol' 1981.

You kids don't know how easy you've got it.

If anyone is qualified to intelligently analyze the institution of modern schooling, it’s John Taylor Gatto. While teaching in the public schools of Manhattan for 30 years, Gatto was named New York State teacher of the year as well as New York City teacher of the year three times. Then, at the height of his teaching career in 1991, he published an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled I Quit, I Think… and promptly quit.

The primary objective is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose) and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.

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( x-posted to thelunarsociety )