Friday Stuff

The paper today had an article about how much money the DoE was spending on accountability software. These types of initiatives have a tendency to become their own self fulfilling bureaucracies sucking up huge amounts of money for increasingly less useful results.

I was talking about atomic radius today and a kid asked what the abbreviation "pm" meant when speaking of atomic radius. I did not know the answer but I asked if anyone had access to the internet on their phone. One kid pulled out his Sidekick and looked up pm (it means picometers). I mention this because apparently cell phones have a use. My current school works on a don't ask don't tell policy with almost no bad consequences.

If I want to talk about Bill Clinton I will discover that the name does not get a red line under it. Apparently the spell checker built into Windows XP or Blogger or wherever it is is comfortable with Bill Clinton. If I type in Barack Obama I see red lines under both names. I wonder how long it takes spell checkers to catch up with the world.

I see my old school got its second straight F. This has to do with two things, the moron who used to be principal and the fact that it is a zero tolerance schools. Almost all zero tolerance schools close down within four years of becoming zero tolerance. You could look it up.