I Don't Want to Receive These Emails
Greetings!,
Photo is from a collection titled "Dog Days of Summer" and is titled "Drs. Banting and Best In The Laboratory." I have questions.
Craig Barton is blessed with a lively and soothing podcaster's voice and an excellent webcam. On the other hand, my webcab is garbage and my voice can charitably be described as "unthreatening" and "high alto." We all have our gifts! There is a reason I like writing! Here is the podcast, the third tip is "Get used to asking “what if” after explaining something."
Here is Mark Roberts on Craig's podcast telling people to "Stop talking about grades," and I've been thinking about grades this summer (here). They take the conversation into intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, which makes sense, but you can also think about it in terms of feedback. Here is a recent meta-analytic study finding that grades sometimes are better than no feedback, but comments did better, and grades sometimes reduce motivation. That's why I don't really love standards-based grading, but you can read an alternate perspective here.
I have a new humor piece up at Points in Case, Reasons for Unsubscribing Besides "I Don't Want to Receive These Emails". I increasingly like finding ways to put stories into these sorts of things, and I also think those questions they ask when you unsubscribe are great, I mean there is really only one possible reason to unsubscribe, right?
By the way, I updated my website.
Basketball stats nerdery: "Pythagorean win percentage is an estimation of where a win percentage “should” be. It uses only points for and against...Bill James invented it for baseball. Daryl Morley is credited with being the first to adopt it to basketball, using the exponent 13.91. Basketball statistician John Hollinger applied it to basketball using the exponent 16.5."
Books: Old School by Tobias Wolff is truly awesome, here it is reviewed by Ted Gioia, who mentions (for good reason) another of my favorite books of all-time, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, and it just so happens there's an excellent essay on Doctorow's most famous book in the New York Times by Jonathan Dee. John Dee is also the name of a character in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, currently streaming on Netflix, mostly good-to-excellent though they stumbled I thought with the Doll's House material, which appears in Episode 6.
Let's talk aboub Rick Danko, alright? Twitter user HarryHew shares this haunting yet joyous solo Danko version of "Acadian Driftwood." ("Everlasting summer, filled with ill-contempt.") HarryHew then shares him singing "The Weight" on his own, along with everyone else in the club, here is Jason Isbell's song about Danko ("Danko/Manuel"), here's The Hold Steady singing "She said my name's Rick Danko, baby People call me One-Hour Photo, I got some hazardous chemicals, so drive around to the window." I have it on good authority that at least one of you don't mind getting music stuff in these emails, and that's enough for me.
"It's the attitude through which humor is told which I enjoy," says Rowan Atkinson at the start of this video essay, and I think attitude is an interesting thing to look for especially in writing. Attitude is hard in writing -- you know what I mean?!!!
Another wonderful geometry puzzle from Catriona Agg.
Summer is over. Long live summer!
I wish you the best,
Michael