Something must have happened in the last 2400 years.

Well, it’s not as interesting as you might think to have a political party national convention in your town. I haven’t really written about it because there wasn’t a whole lot to say.

Perhaps in a more innocent age, it might have been fun. I imagined faking press credentials with Matt Shaw and trying to sneak into the FleetCenter. But somehow, it seemed like if they were putting snipers on roofs, that kind of thing wouldn’t come off as lighthearted prankstership.

Terri and I did go into town one night to see what we could see. All we could see was a lot of very heavily armed people in riot gear. Lots of them. But the only time we saw them actually doing anything was when a team of about 20 of them were escorting a team of about 15 black shirted anarchists away. The anarchists were chanting “This is what your taxes go for!”. At first I thought “I have no problem with that, actually”. But the more we walked around, and how far more security/military/police were on the streets than civilians, I do have to admit, it seemed like overkill.

We couldn’t find the protester pens. And we didn’t see any celebrities. The celebrity thing actually bugged me; people were ga ga over who saw whom where. Are we that provincial here? Maybe don’t answer that.

We ended up ditching the non-scene and getting dinner at a restaurant in the North End where we watched the Red Sox lose to the stupid Orioles.

I think the situation in the Sudan is really serious, and I like the point of view of this blog: “independent, non-partisan, all-volunteer community initiative to stop the genocide in Sudan”. Also provides tips on what you can do.

The UN has predictably wussed out, because of pressure from countries that for one reason or another have interest in letting the atrocities continue. The US realistically has little stomach for intervening on its own, given its current situation in Iraq. In my mind, one of the major reasons we should have let what was admittedly a suboptimal situation in Iraq continue was because it seriously compromises our ability to respond to situations like this. Not to mention engagements we weren’t really done with, like Afghanistan. There were just much better ways to use our resources.

Terri took me to task for that post on memorization a few days ago, because the author is kind of a conservative crank. I confess, I hadn’t really read it fully, and I do find that I strongly disagree with most of what he says. I posted it because I thought defending something as universally reviled as rote memorization itself was an interesting contrarian viewpoint.

I do think a lot about how humans use information technology, and by not needing to retain information in their actual memory because they can look things up easily, I can see people lose the ability to think in certain ways. I honestly think computers are a much bigger factor in people losing their memory than any educational ideology. And the shift happened well before 1970; I don’t know that most baby-boomers could recite any Coleridge for you.

And as an aside, I’ve never heard any educational philosophy that rang true. All I know is that the only purely positive educational experience I’ve ever had was CTY and it falls well outside any label of progressive or conservative.

Wikipedia article of the day. It’s a wonderful world we live in.

In Defense of Memorization