Barack is my kind of guy

He likes plate lunch (along with 99% of the hawaiian population).

Recently i found a place a mile from our house that serves hibachi or teriaki meats (salmon, chicken, steak, etc), and rice. It's a far cry from a plate lunch, but its something, and the sauces are grinds.

Ten Things You Will Never Regret

Ten Things You Will Never Regret

By Bill Shuler
Pastor, Capital Life Church, Arlington, Virginia

Beyond having pulled your stocks out of the market before the crash, there are many things that you will never regret:

1. Giving more than you take.

2. Laughing with a child.

3. Taking a principled stand.

4. Rejecting rejection.

5. Investing in the next generation.

6. Honoring the last generation.

7. Reading the best-selling book of all time. (No it’s not Harry Potter)

8. Responding to hate in an opposite spirit.

9. Thanking teachers.

10. Building up treasure where moth and rust cannot destroy.

Some end life having made a living, others come to the end having fully lived. Dare to find out what really matters in life and to worry less about things that don’t. In the words of Scripture, “I have placed before you life and death, therefore choose life.”

random picts

Has it been that long?

Can't believe I haven't posted in two months. Well, things have changed somewhat, my poor 1997 car went the way of the dodo when i got into a very minor wreck. Was a great chance for an upgrade and I got a new Honda Civic. I love that car, its sporty, great mileage, fun to drive.

Career wise, things are changing. I"m pretty sure I don't want to be where I'm at right now. The market is simply horrible and overcrowded. Not only do we have to compete with all American PhDs but also foreigners. I've read alot of stats, i'll just paraphrase, but it's something insanely like 1/3 of all PhDs are biology, but only 2% of faculty are biologists. It's a very very competitive market, and it's just going to get worse, bail out or no.

So...i'm pursuing options. One is to teach somewhere. ANother is vet school. Another is IT.

Guess the dominant animal

In this youtube. (THis is a great video of a cat and two rats).

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2235731/rat_loves_cat/

What is the rat doing at the end to the cat? He/she is grooming the cat, by which I mean attempting to remove the cat's whiskers. In rodents, the dominant rodent will remove the whiskers of all subservients. I wonder if the cat will realize it could just eat the rat!

College as a value-added experience

This is a incredibly interesting post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. regarding the usefulness and value of college. I won't say much about it, go read it! I will just add I agree 100%.

Update:

Must be behind a subscription firewall. Here's some of the big points.

So, no surprise, in the latest annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, 44.6 percent said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life. Meanwhile, 43.5 percent of freshmen also reported "frequently" feeling bored in class, the survey found.

College students may be dissatisfied with instruction, but, despite that, do they learn? A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.

Unbelievably, according to the Spellings Report, which was released in 2006 by a federal commission that examined the future of American higher education, things are getting even worse: "Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. … According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade. … Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces."

How Saddam was really captured

Story here

Book here

Real interesting stuff. It was done by one guy (in his words), interrogated many low level flunkies, finally caught the head of the insurgency, who lead them straight to Saddam. I guess the rats couldn't wait to finger their boss so they would get executed.