Scratch- You know, for Kids!

SCRATCH is a modular programming language for kids (or beginning programmers with no background in program logic). Their main site was dugg and newspapered but they are working on bringing it back up. Looks pretty neat though. Ive played with it for about 20 minutes and lt looks pretty powerful though its appearance is misleading. Obviously you won't be tracking weather patterns with these projects, but my son LOVES legos online-I can see him attacking this pretty enthusiastically.

Downward spiral in Education

SO, LPS (Lincoln Public Schools) recently fired a reacher for showing Baghdad E.R. While I know little of his history with the LPS administration, I have respect for his teaching methods. Reverse chronological history? Peace Studies? Wow....but to read the comments in the LJS regarding his teaching Here you'd certainly think he was the end of the world. How dare he teach outside the approved curricula!I certainly wouldn't call Socrates, Plato, Descartes,Benjamin Franklin, or Newton intellectual slouches. In the last 150 years with invention of public schools the intellectual level of students as free thinkers has dropped. Education is supposed to be messy; our country's founders thought of education as a basis for social cohesion and personal liberation and many were self taught. I hardly think that Jefferson or Adams would make it in a school today with what is packaged together as education. LPS only reinforces this idea with their removal of a teacher that broke some intellectual rules, bucking the cookie cutter public school tradition in the same way that Jaime Escalante did when he taught advanced math to students with little administrative or parental support. Their argument, " when are they ever going to use this..." ring now even as they did then with parents and LPS questioning Mr. Baker's reverse history teaching. Being exposed to some ideas you don't like is the purpose of learning. Homogeneous education is cheap yet looking at my line items on my tax form I should be getting Socrates.

yay for expensive gas my A**

So, 'Yay for Expensive Gas' thinks we should all hug a tree and just conserve and be proactive.
Lincoln Journal Star

" Personally I'm glad the price of gas is going back up. If you don't like it - start acting progressively instead of reactively, cause prices are just going to keep going up. "

Unfortunately in the Midwest, and in NE particularly, there are only a handful of major cities and alot of little villages and small towns with lower incomes. Its not so easy to say "move to where the work is..." or "get a better trade/education"-if it was then there would be a lot fewer gas station attendants, self employed carpenters, and base office functionaries. Its easy to tell others to conserve, but when you are poor you drive what you can get and it sure isn't some damn snazzy hybrid. Way to go, Yay! You've helped prove that once again, NE people are sheltered from the rest of the planet.