This is a cool program - @JoshsFrogs is providing a free dart frog and assistance with vivarium setup to teachers. The goal is to put frogs in classrooms to help kids learn about amphibians and biology in general joshsfrogs.com/catalog/blog/2…
@JoshsFrogs I've got two of these guys and they're fun to watch and easy to take care of. Setup is easier than a freshwater aquarium, imo, and care and maintenance are much simpler.
NEW: Giving the keynote address at a GIS conference last month, former high school geography teacher Tim Walz talked about some of his favorite maps minnesotareformer.com/2024/08/06/for…
No, seriously
Here's a wild anecdote: while teaching high school students about genocide in 1993, Walz had them use GIS data to predict where the next one would occur. They said Rwanda. (the NYT verified this via interviews with some of those students in a 2008 story)
Oh dear: GOP-endorsed MN senate candidate tweeted out a map purporting to show "crime in Minneapolis... Out of control." It was actually a map of drinking fountains in the city.
He has since updated it to a different unlabeled map but the original is visible in the edit history
He's in the replies calling people "cucks" for mocking him about it. This is the man the Minnesota Republican party has endorsed to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.
The 100 most-performed symphonies at Carnegie Hall since it opened in 1891. It's a decent approximation of what you might call the Western symphonic canon and there's so many fun things to see when you slice the data this way.
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven account for one-third of the 100 works included.
On the other hand, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky account for 43% of the 8,683 total performances of these works.
You see a big gap around 1850, a visual representation of what Schubert said on his deathbed: "Who can ever do anything, after Beethoven?"
Then an explosion of creativity in the 1870s and 1880s.
Pretty clear that regardless of what happens in November we are barreling toward a Dianne Feinstein situation, but in the White House. Going forward we ought to seriously consider age limits (not term limits) for federal electeds and judiciary members.
Like what kind of shape do we expect either of these guys' brains to be in four years from now?
Infuriating datapoint on why American medical care is so expensive: a single New Mexico oncology practice spends $350,000 a year fighting insurance company coverage denials. propublica.org/article/how-to…
When we were on the Washington Post's dogshit insurance plan my wife spent *hours* every week fighting denials. Every single time it was due to fuck-ups on the insurance company's part. Absolutely infuriating.
And this was only possible because she worked in Social Security disability for a decade and had specialized knowledge of medical billing codes and the infrastructure around them. How many millions of people just give up every year because they don't have the same privilege?
Some personal news: got my final scans done yesterday and I officially beat stage 4 cancer!
It's been exactly 8 months since I went to the local ER for obstructive jaundice, and doctors started throwing the c-word around. But it feels like an eternity
Chemo's done and I've finally got all the hardware out of my liver so I'm starting to feel like myself again.