- I was born and raised in Illinois, about midway between Chicago and St. Louis. I currently live in Minnesota and have for about a decade now. The only NFL jersey I’ve ever owned is one I received as a Christmas present from my parents on year. Guess what? It was one for the St. Louis Rams with “Gilbert” on the back. Yes, that’s why she bought it. No, we aren’t Rams fans. In fact, we’re not football fans. I never really have been and probably never will be. (Yep. I’m okay with that.) Okay, with that in mind, if I did become an NFL fan, it’d probably be for the Green Bay Packers, after reading this article and then doing a bit more digging on things myself. This is fascinating. No coercing cities and states to give you more and more money for bigger stadiums that you’re just going to sell naming rights for and get even MORE money for, none of which is going back to the public’s coffers? What a concept.
- This post is fascinating:
“There have been hundreds of equally alarming studies regarding stereotype threat and of similar identity-related conditions that impair performance. I don’t think we have time to recount every one in detail, but I’ll leave you with some more interesting findings. Regarding women in math: research at Indiana University found that females’ performance decreases significantly after simply watching a video showing ‘dominant’ male behavior, and at Harvard they found that Asian-American women perform better or worse on math assessments depending on which identity is highlighted to them. A 2005 study showed that girls score much lower than boys on an identical test when it was described as a ‘math test,’ but slightly (though non-significantly) better than them when it’s a ‘problem solving’ test. Another study suggested that female AP Calculus test-takers would benefit if the demographic bubble-filling were postponed until after the exam.” - This interview with Stephen Colbert explains a lot more about who he is and why he does and says what he does. He makes a very interesting point about the intersection of faith and intellect that sums up many discussions I’ve had in the past.
“…this is, I hope, the right relationship to have with your faith, which is to love it, but not to exclude it from your intellect. […] Faith ultimately can’t be argued, faith has to be felt,” continued Colbert. “And hopefully you can still feel your faith fully, and let your mind have a logical life of its own, and they do not defy each other, but complement each other, because logic itself, I don’t think, for me, and you know—Aquinas might say differently—logic itself will not lead me to God. And, so, hopefully I can use my mind to make my jokes, and not deny my love for God at the same time.”
- Let’s say you are taking a course on the codicology of medieval manuscripts, and you are creating a lesson about how to form parchment. You want to include a YouTube video of someone forming a quire, so you search for “form a quire.” Your results will not be what you think they should. I’m just saying… (And I love that YouTube doesn’t even acknowledge that it thinks you spelled it wrong. There’s no “did you mean ‘choir’?” or anything. It just sticks a bunch of choir music in your face. But now I really want to know how many people misspell “choir” that way, because if even YouTube doesn’t bat an eye and automatically thinks, “Ah, she meant a bunch of singing people,” then it must be a lot.)
- This might be the funniest thing I’ve seen in my life:
I have this thing about goats yelling in a weird way. Neal and I watched this thing over a dozen times via someone’s Vine account and about fell over each time the goat yelled. (There’s another one out there of a little goat yelling, “Yeaaah!” in a deep voice, which cracks me up every time, too.) Here, look at a compilation of goats yelling like people and tell me that it isn’t hilarious. (And more goats yelling. You can never have too many yelling goats.)
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