Shout Out to the Old High School
I've often thought over the years that the single strongest thing about my tiny Dallas magnet high school was the computer science program.
And what do you know, the
College Board has declared the
School for the Talented and Gifted (Dallas, TX) as the best small school in the world in AP Computer Science, AP Art History, and AP Human Geography! Go Griffins...
"Best" is defined as pass rate percentage of the entire student population on the AP test. "Small" is defined as less than 500 students in grades 9-12. "The world" is defined as mostly the United States, plus 760 schools in U.S. territories or outside the U.S. altogether.
The rumor is that the Griffins might also have been best small school in AP U.S. History, but they were pipped by some place called the U.S. House of Representatives Page School.
Other schools I notice on the list:
- Polytechnic School (Pasadena, CA) -- best small school in AP Calculus AB. This school is right next door to Caltech.
- Science and Engineering Magnet School (Dallas, TX) -- best small school in AP Calculus BC. Perhaps surprisingly, I only know one person who went there.
- Harvard Westlake School (North Hollywood, CA) -- best medium school in AP Physics B, AP English Literature, AP Environmental Science, and AP Human Geography. I used to have a roommate who taught there.
- Boston Latin School (Boston, MA) -- best large school in AP Latin, quelle surprise. I knew several people at Harvard who went there.
- Booker T. Washington School for Performing and Visual Arts (Dallas, TX) -- best medium school in AP Music Theory. I knew a couple of people who headed there and I don't think I ever saw them again!
- Phillips Academy (Andover, MA) -- best large school in AP Physics C and AP Music Theory. I had a college roommate who went there and may also have coached soccer.
- Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (Alexandria, VA) -- an AP superpower with large-school titles in Biology, BC Calculus, Chemistry, English Language, French Language, U.S. Government, Psychology, and U.S. History. I think quite a few Caltechers went there.
On Food and Cooking
I have not read
this book but the author was on
Fresh Air last night and it sounded very interesting.
Not that I need more reading material. Today I needed one or two of my technical books so I finally got around to unpacking some of the boxes from my old office. I have an awful lot of interesting nonfiction books that I would like to read some day.
A Christmas Carol
"A Christmas Carol" must be the record holder in adaptations as an episode of a television series. How many television sitcoms have a "Christmas Carol" episode? All of them?
Satellite Radio Sans Satellites?
I've never yet listened to satellite radio myself, but here are the selling points as I imagine them, in increasing order of importance:
1) you get radio reception even driving through the middle of nowhere
2) you can get radio whose main intended audience is located far away from you, e.g., baseball games from the old home town
2b) you can get radio whose audience has a low population density
3) you don't have to hunt for a station you like in an unfamiliar city
4) possibly better music quality due to digital broadcast
5) pay a subscription fee to avoid listening to commercials
6) [not yet, but eventually] traffic and weather data presented in map form, for better use by you/your navigation system
The thing that strikes me is that only (1)-(3) have the slightest thing to do with satellites or nationwide coverage, and (1)-(2) are more-or-less niche markets by construction, made even less compelling by the advent of iPods and Internet radio. (3) could be supplied by any radio with an intelligent program guide. And (4)-(6) are all about the digital encoding of data.
So why satellites per se? Why not a network or loose confederation of terrestrial stations with digital broadcasts? Satellites aren't cheap.
The (imperfect) analogy that keeps occurring to me is Iridium. With Iridium you could make phone calls from the desert, but people don't want to make phone calls from the desert sufficiently often for Iridium to win out over terrestrial cell phones with smaller, cheaper handsets.
But, the countervailing analogy would be to satellite television, which seems to be successful.
I guess terrestrial digital radio is being implemented by the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalradio/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/dab_review.shtml
The Day I Wanted a Hummer
When auto spec sheets tell you how tightly a car can turn, they usually express it as the minimum distance between two curbs, within which the vehicle could turn without hitting the curbs. Quite often this is miscalled "turning radius", although obviously it is more like an "outer turning diameter".
Today I was shocked and impressed to read that the original H1 Hummer was very nimble with an amazingly short turning radius of 25 feet. I really was amazed... My Jeep Wrangler has a turning diameter of 33 feet and I thought that was very good. My Ford F-150 has a turning diameter of about 43 feet.
Wow, I thought, maybe you really do get some amazing technology for that $100,000 price tag. For the first time ever, I actually thought I might want to own a H1 Hummer, if I had the money.
Well, that was for a brief while. Then I realized that this time they really did mean turning
radius, i.e., the H1 has a curb-to-curb turning diameter of 50 feet!
I was thrown by
(1) the prevalent confusion between radius and diameter;
(2) the quite prevalent Internet gushing about the turning radius as "amazingly short", etc. Reviewers talk about the Hummer being surprisingly easy to park, while trucks with smaller turning radii are berated as clumsy and awkward. A
googlism for "a hummer" is "a hummer is extremely nimble". Dear God, extremely nimble compared to what? A Winnebago?
Microsoft Word Hatred Update
In addition to the other things that it does not do well, Microsoft Word cannot be trusted to resize pictures without making them look terrible. I have to rescale pictures to the desired size using another program (Graphics Converter) before importing them into the Word document.
