Keith Pelczarski

Abe Froman perhaps? - Neal Krummell

I forget, is the Right to Video Games At All Hours the Eighth Amendment? - Stephen Mack

It's only cruel and unusual punishment if someone else forces you to do it. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

"Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording. How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting 'play.' You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. You would remember everyone's birthday. You would ace every exam. Or so you might think. In fact, a memory like that would snare mostly useless data and mix them willy-nilly with the information you really needed. It would not let you prioritize or create the links between events that give them meaning. For the very few people who have true photographic recall - eidetic memory, in the parlance of the field - it is more burden than blessing.   "For most of us, memory is not like a video recording - or a notebook, a photograph, a hard drive or any of the other common storage devices to which it has been compared. It is much more like a web of connections between people and things. Indeed, recent research has shown that some people who lose their memory also lose the ability to connect things to each other in their mind. And it is the connections that let us understand cause and effect, learn from our mistakes and anticipate the future. ..." - Keith Pelczarski

"NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously." - Keith Pelczarski

"School is out, and the warm weekends stretch before us, waiting to be filled. Of course, this creates its own pressures. Where to go? When? What to do? Is it better to try somewhere new and exotic, or return to a well-loved spot? Doze on the beach or hike the ancient ruins? Hoard vacation days for a grand tour, or spread them around? Time off is a scarce resource, and as with any scarce resource, we want to spend it wisely. Partly, these decisions are matters of taste. But there are also, it turns out, answers to be found in behavioral science, which increasingly is yielding insights that can help us make the most of our leisure time. Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations — what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it’s not necessarily what we would expect." - Keith Pelczarski

" 'Right Is Right' is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way right - between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a high standard for correctness: 100 percent. The likelihood is strong that students will stop striving when they hear the word right (or yes or some other proxy), so there's a real risk to naming as right that which is not truly and completely right. When you sign off and tell a student she is right, she must not be betrayed into thinking she can do something that she cannot." - Keith Pelczarski

"We had reached the point in the novel where its main character Bigger Thomas had committed his second murder and was hiding from police in Chicago’s tenements. I began that day’s class with a simple question: If you lived in neighborhood where Bigger Thomas was hiding and you knew his location, would you tell the police?" - Keith Pelczarski

Awesome! - Rachel Lea Fox

"Picture yourself sitting in space watching 2009's Atlantic Ocean hurricane season in fast-forward. That's what the latest animation from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows viewers. The movie is being made available on-line as both agencies prepare for the 2010 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, which begins on June 1 and runs through November 30." - Keith Pelczarski

"But he changed his mind after he took two of the women into a village elder’s home so they could smooth the way for a male medical officer to treat the Afghan’s ailing wife and daughters — again, from the other side of a wall. Sergeant Latimer said the favor was important, because the elder had become an informant about the Taliban. The sergeant said he could hear through the wall that the female Marines and the elder’s wife and daughters, who turned out to be only moderately ill, got along. “It was a normal, girls-just-hanging-out type of conversation, giggling and everything,” he said. Since then, Sergeant Latimer said, Afghans have been more receptive when his patrols included the female Marines, who hand out stuffed animals to village children. When male Marines try that, he said, “It’s just a bunch of guys with rockets and machine guns trying to hand out a bear to a kid, and he starts to cry.”" - Keith Pelczarski

At Halloween, Tater was terrified of the mask... like she would scream if it was out of the box. Today she was begging me to wear it. She wanted me to be Luke so she could be Leia and give me that line about short Stormtroopers. Daddy is so proud. - Keith Pelczarski

In somewhat related news, she went to a birthday party this morning, and even after a shower she still smells like PEZ. I was thinking that she also looked like the cutest PEZ dispenser ever. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

My favorite thing about this picture is that 3-y.o. Tater took it with my iPhone. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

""But all of these old conceptions of morality are based on a fundamental mistake. Neuroscience can now see the substrate of moral decisions, and there's nothing rational about it. 'Moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment,' writes Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. 'When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate ... Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other.'" - Keith Pelczarski

Take a walk on the moon. - Keith Pelczarski

The goldfish were a nice touch. - Keith Pelczarski