Will YouTube be around much longer?

Slashdot reports that Google is Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube:

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"The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars, according to new research that shows Google losing up to $1.65 million per day on the video site. More than two years after Google acquired YouTube, income from premium offers and other revenue generators don't offset YouTube's expenses of content acquisition, bandwidth, and storage. YouTube is expected to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, costing Google up to $2,064,054 a day, or $753 million annualized. Revenue projections for YouTube fall between $90 million and $240 million."
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I believe that because of Moore's Law some of the costs should come down over the next couple years. Google may just see a year of loses as an investment for the future. Once servers and bandwidth costs drop, they'll turn a profit.


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Technorati tags: YouTube, Google

Internet addiction is for everyone

Blogging can be a bottomless pit. There is always one more thing you could post. I try to limit myself to an hour or so in the morning. Then maybe another hour, either during lunch at work, or in the evening after the children have gone to bed.

I was a bit surprised to read that internet addiction is a problem among some young mothers. Why moms are at risk for Internet addiction starts with:

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I was scrolling through family photos on my computer, admiring my two beautiful babies, when I spotted a disturbing trend: My laptop was open in almost all of the pictures. There's my daughter, at 8 months, playing at my feet while I typed away on the couch. There's me and my son, a year later, with the laptop at my side as I held him in my arms.
I'd heard about Internet addiction before, but always assumed it was something limited to socially challenged guys who played too much World of Warcraft. Now it seemed my Internet "habit" was slowly but surely crossing the line. Sometimes I found myself up into the wee hours of the morning, surfing the Web while my family slept. I read the news, kept up with friends, and looked up answers to endless questions. I wrote my personal blog and read dozens of others, just for something to do.
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It use to be that television would soak up all the extra hours. Now the internet is much more enticing and effective in distracting us.

My suggestion is if you think you are spending too much time on the internet to cut back on all the blogs you read, except ours! :-)

(Hat tip: Digg)


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Technorati tags: internet, addiction

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up - The Peter Rabbit Edition

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is being hosted at the Home Education Magazine.

It starts off with this lovely quotation from Beatrix Potter:

"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality."

The carnival has several beautiful pictures from Beatrix Potter's books.





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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Glenn Beck explains one of the reasons for the Tea Party Movement

Glenn Beck explains what has happened to our money supply:



This also explains why the prices of stocks has gone up, because there is more money floating around, not because people think the stocks are worth more.

(Hat tip: Adventures on Beck's Bounty)


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Technorati tags: government, tea party, education

Reminder - Tomorrow is Tax Day Tea Party

It seems like the whole Tea Party movement is in the formative stages, where things are a bit chaotic. I've found another national web site which is pushing for the Tax Day Tea Parties tomorrow.

You can go here to find location(s) near you.

Does anyone understand how the various Tea Party groups are related?


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Technorati tags: government, tea party, homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

This could be cool - power from space

One of the topics at Space Access 2009 was how are people going to make money in space? Tourism is a popular one. Another is getting scientific experiements into space for private businesses and colleges. A third one mentioned was to use solar cells in space and beam power to the earth.

Alan Boyle reports that PG&E makes deal for space solar power:

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California's biggest energy utility announced a deal Monday to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a startup company that plans to beam the power down to Earth from outer space, beginning in 2016.
San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric said it was seeking approval from state regulators for an agreement to purchase power over a 15-year period from Solaren Corp., an 8-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The agreement was first reported in a posting to Next100, a Weblog produced by PG&E.
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(Hat tip: Instapundit)


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Technorati tags: space, solar power

The difference between childhood and adulthood

I like this thought from A.Word.A.Day:

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'
-Sydney J. Harris, journalist (1917-1986)


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Technorati tags: childhood, adulthood

Resource for students getting ready for college

Janice Campbell has found an online radio show for students getting ready for college. In College Admissions: Knowledge Is Power! Janice writes about Countdown to College Radio. Beth Pickett is the host and producer. She has a weekly show where she interviews a variety people about issues related to attending or picking a college.

This looks like a a good resource. I've asked my two older daughters to give it a try.


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Technorati tags: education, college

Great resource for Sherlock Holmes stories

I went through a period where I read all 56 Sherlock Holmes stories in a couple weeks. They were loads of fun.

221B Baker Street is a great resource for the Sherlock Holmes Stories. Many of the stories are available, there are pictures, and other links.

(Hat tip: The Informed Parent)


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Technorati tags: Sherlock, Holmes, Sherlock Holmes

The Carnival of Space is up, edition #98

Fraser is hosting this week's Carnival of Space at his blog Universe Today.

It is wonderful to see the Carnival of Space still going strong. When I started it almost two years ago I could only hope that others would help keep it going. I am grateful that Fraser has done such a good job.


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Technorati tags: space

Fun idea - your car in people years

Daniel Macintyre of Key Words reports on how to calculate the Age of your Car:

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According to my co-workers, the rule of thumb for translating the age of your automobile into human terms is as follows:
take the mileage and divide it by the four digit year. For example, if you have 20,000 miles on your 2000 car then it's 10 years old. If, however, you have 500,000 miles on the same car, then it's two hundred fifty years old and you should be counting your blessings if it still runs at all.
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To a first approximation you can always divide the mileage by 2000. The exact year of the car will only affect the second or third decimal point.

Based on our car is about 65 years old, and our van is a young 19 years old.


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Technorati tags: car, age

We must be doing something right

Last night my parents, and a good friend from church, joined us for Easter dinner. We weren't quite ready when my parents showed up, so our older two girls talked with their grandparents in the living room. The kitchen work was mostly done. The girls had set the table. Janine just wanted to cook the fish a little longer.

I was helping Janine with a few little things when I over heard the conversation between my parents and my older two girls. My 14-year-old and 12-year-old were talking politics!

Our girls start looking through the paper at a fairly young age. (I think they like mimicing their parents.) Every one of the girls picked up pretty quickly how to tell the weather from the pictures.

As each one of them learned to read the competition for the comics increased. My oldest also likes Miss Manners and reads her column every Sunday. Recently they've been paying some attention to the first section of the paper. I hadn’t realized how much.

Just before dinner was a great moment. The older two girls were talking intelligently about some of the issues. And they were taking turns, and listening to their grandparents. They talked about what is in the Constitution, and what some of the Founding Fathers said. And what is even better, they were enjoying it. Politics wasn't an unknown weird thing that adults talk about. Politics is something they have a foundational understanding, and they are interested in.

Moments like this make me feel like we are doing something right. I’m almost sad that the local paper is struggling financially and may be going out of business.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, government, politics

Invitation to a Tea Party

This Wednesday, April 15th, there will be hundreds of Tea Parties across the United States. Here TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already. People are protested the unprecedented, incredibly high spending that the Federal Government has recent embarked on.

Janine will be taking our daughters Wednesday afternoon to a local Tea Party. I'll leave work a little early and join them.

I encourage you to check out Tax Day Tea Party. You should be able to find a local Tea Party (on the right side of the web page) with detailed information on where and when.

I think this will be historic. I even give it a good chance as the start of a new political party. More and more Democrats and Republicans have become the parties of big government spending.

Besides, it would be a good homeschooling activity.


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Technorati tags: government, tea party, homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

Submit entries for the next Carnival of Education

Joanne Jacobs does a great job of reporting on the latest events in education.

She'll be hosting the Carnival of Education this week.

To send in a post click here.


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Technorati tags: education

Not good news - Economists See a Rebound in September

Wall Street Journal reports that Economists See a Rebound in September:

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Economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey expect the recession to end in September, though most say it won't be until the second half of 2010 that the economy recovers enough to bring down unemployment.
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My fear is the current recession will go on for a couple more years. I would love to be wrong.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)


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Technorati tags: recession

Maybe I really am in another reality - Say a prayer for a teacher, get kicked out of school

I wrote Thursday that sometimes it feels that while six billion people may live on the same planet, some people seem to live in a different reality.

Expulsion threatened over prayer for sick teacher just reinforces the worry:

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Attorneys representing two students who have been threatened with expulsion by a California college because of a prayer for a sick professor say a federal judge has refused the school's efforts to have the case dismissed.
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Here is an account of what happened:

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The case was prompted by an incident just before Christmas in 2007 in which the students went to deliver a Christmas gift to a professor.
"Kandy found the instructor alone in her shared office," according to Pacific Justice. "When the instructor indicated she was ill, Kandy offered to pray for her. The instructor bowed her head, and Kandy began to pray – until she was interrupted by another faculty member, Derek Piazza, who walked in and said, 'You can't be doing that in here!' Kandy quickly left and rejoined her friend and fellow student, Ojoma Omaga. Piazza followed Kandy outside and repeated his rebuke."
While the students reported they were surprised by the teacher's aggressive behavior, they were stunned when, days later, they both got letters notifying them of the college's retroactive "intent to suspend" plan.
The letters, however, provided no facts on which to make such a threat, listing only vague references to "disruptive or insulting behavior" and "willful disobedience."
School officials informed them during administrative hearings that Kyriacou was being disciplined for praying for the sick teacher. Omaga was not part of the prayer, and her offense apparently was that she was with Kyriacou a short time later.
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This is seems weird in so many ways. Here we have a teacher who agrees to let a student pray for them. The student does so, and then another teacher thinks the sky is falling and the college decided to threatens the student with explusion.

What reality is this college from? Is it a reality that doesn't have the First Ammendment?

(Hat tip: EducationNews.org)


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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education

Another book for my reading stack

Rebecca Hagelin has a new book: 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family. She writes about the book in a recent column:

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One of my main goals as a mom is to have as few regrets as possible - to wake up each morning and pray for guidance to be true to the faith that God placed in me when he placed those precious babies in my arms so many years ago.
And I want to help you too. That's why I took four years to listen to parents hearts, their questions and their dreams and then look for ways to help strengthen your families. The result is my new book, 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family. I hope you will take a few minutes to check it out through my brand new, website. I hope you will also order it right away. It is filled with personal victory stories and tips from regular readers of my column, a list or organizations that can help you through your struggles, and my own personal experiences and lessons learned along the way. Thanks to all of you who submitted your stories. They are going to make a real difference in the lives of families around the nation.
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It looks good. I'll try to track the book down the next time I'm at the library.

Marybeth Hicks writes about one of the most important part of parenting - Parent skills take work, not luck:

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A few years ago, author Rebecca Hagelin appeared on Fox News' “O'Reilly Factor” to promote her first parenting book, “Home Invasion.” During the interview, an incredulous Mr. O'Reilly challenged Mrs. Hagelin, asking how she reacts to teens who rebel against standards in the home about media.
Mrs. Hagelin calmly explained that when children and teens understand their parents' standards and values, they tend not to rebel much - or at least, that's been her experience. Mr. O'Reilly summarized, “Well, then, you're just lucky, that's all.”
I've no doubt that Mrs. Hagelin is lucky, in the way that we all feel blessed with the embarrassment of riches that parenthood brings. But it wasn't luck that created a household in which she and her husband could expect that their children follow guidelines about media consumption; it was skill.
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Our society has a meme that success is largely the result of luck. If success were even partly the result of hard work and perseverance, then people would have to admit that they didn't work hard enough. It is easier to say "I don't know why my children turned out so badly." than to admit "Well, I love to play golf and go boating. I use to dump my kids off at the daycare center during the week and leave them with a sitter on the weekends."

Having good children is partly the result of luck. It seems that some children will turn out well almost no matter what kind of parent raises them, but most children have a wide range in potential. Good parenting, through lots of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, help channel children towards being mature, happy, competent adults.


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Technorati tags: parenting, children

An interesting way to phrase it - lack stamina to read books

One of the things Janine and I are very happy about is our daughters love to read. It is a treat to go to the library. Baby Bop is picking up on this trend and will bring books to us, so we will read to him.

We've noticed several years a sad thing. Most of the friends of our daughters who go to public schools do not enjoy reading. They don't read for pleasure.

This article from across the Atlantic reports on a similar problem in the UK - School literacy lessons 'have left a generation lacking the stamina to read books':

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School literacy lessons have killed off the study of English and left a generation lacking the stamina to read whole books, a teachers' leader claimed yesterday.
Dr Mary Bousted said the Government's £500million literacy drive forced children to study short extracts from works of literature instead of the full text.
Youngsters were losing the art of reading for pleasure as a result, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers warned.
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It is an interesting phrase: "lacking the stamina to read whole books." My impression had been that our daughters' friends didn't read because reading had been turned into a chore, something boring. The claim from the UK is that children no longer have the strength of character or will power to read. They have the ability, but the students are too lazy.

(Hat tip: EducationNews.org)


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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education, reading

Place a throw pillow and go to jail

Reason TV has a good ten minute video about the licensing of interior designer.

(Update I - 2 May 2009, I removed the embedded version of the video because some times our blog wouldn't load. The link to the video is still good.)

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

While I watched it I thought about the similarities between professional teachers and licenses interior designers. The claim is licensing protects the customer. I was surprised to learn that states with licensed interior designers have twice as many consumer complaints. Many private schools often use uncertified teachers, and do just fine.

I let my daughters give me haircuts. They'll give me a pretty close buzz and then Janine will do the finishing touches. I think it would be great if they would be permitted to cut other children's hair. It would be a good little business.

But my state has decided that only licensed professionals can charge for cutting hair. I wonder why so many people feel like they need to be protected by the government. I think the truth is we need to be protected from the government.

As homeschoolers we are doing as good a job as most public schools. Our daughters are educated, confident, comfortable in social situations, and have a good work ethic.


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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

Lloyd's List of The 25 Most Useful Sites on the Internet

My mother found this: Lloyd's List of The 25 Most Useful Sites on the Internet.

There some interesting looking sites. I checked out the first ten. I liked the first nine. I wouldn't trust "Mail 2 Web" and with Yahoo Mail and GMail every where, there is no need for "Mail 2 Web."


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Technorati tags: Useful, web, Sites

We must be doing something right

Just recently Baby Bop came wandering into our study. He is just two and a half. He had a book he wanted us to read to him!

Moments like this are precious.


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Technorati tags: parenting, family, children

The contest in the garden

Currently for Toastmasters I'm working through a Story Telling unit. I gave a speech yesterday where I was suppose to make up a story which had a moral. This is what I gave:

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Would you please close your eyes? Imagine a tomato seed. They are small, maybe a forth of an inch long, and a tenth of an inch thin. One day a gardener opens up a package of tomato seeds. He puts one see in the dirt. Open your eyes for just a second, and then close them again.

Now picture a tomato seed in the dirt. It is dark, maybe a little cold. But it is wet. The seed feels the water and dirt and starts to grow. The roots grow down into the dirt, reaching deeper and deeper. The stem struggles up, pushing through the dirt. It is just a small thing, hardly bigger than a couple hairs. Finally it breaks through the dirt and is in the sunlight. Please open your eyes.

The tomato plant eagerly soaks up the sunlight. It continues to grow. It notices that there are other plants around it. It talks with a few of them. Some of them are weeds. Every so often the gardener comes through and pulls out many of the weeds. There are some corn plants, water melon plants, and pepper plants.

After a couple weedings the closest plant is a little corn stalk. Both the corn stalk and the tomato plant are just a couple inches tall.

The tomato plant asks the corn stalk, “What are you?” The corn stalk says “I’m a corn stalk. I’ll grow tall and produce a couple ears of corn.” The tomato plant is a little vain. It wants to be the tallest.

The tomato plant works hard to grow tall. The corn stalk grows straight up, but the tomato plan finds that it is blown back and forth with the wind. Luckily the tomato plant is able to lean on a metal structure the gardener puts around it.

Week after week the tomato plant tries to grow as tall as it can. Some days the corn stalk is taller, some days the tomato plant is taller. Weeks go back.

In the middle of the summer both the corn talk and the tomato plant are about five feet tall. Soon they are five and a half feet tall. The tomato plant digs deeper and deeper into the dirt. It reaches as high as it can. One day it is six feet tall. It looks like maybe the corn stalk has stopped growing. The tomato plant starts celebrating. “I’m going to win! I’m going to win.”

Then the gardener comes out. He prunes the tomato plant, heavily. He cuts off the top third of the tomato plant, and much of the side.

The tomato plant is despondent. Now the corn stalk is so much taller. Yet it doesn’t give up. It shoots up a couple branches and again reaches for the sun. A few weeks go by. It is almost up to the top of the corn stalk.

Then again the gardener comes out. The tomato plant is so angry. Why can’t the gardener just leave him alone? Clip, clip, clip, the top of the tomato plant is pruned back again.

Why! Why couldn’t the gardener just leave him alone?

The gardener comes out one day with a bushel. He plucks two ears off the corn stalk, and then turns to the tomato plant. “I know you wanted to be big and tall, taller than the corn stalk, but you are a tomato plant. Your job is to produce tomatoes. Because I pruned you back, you were able to produce dozens of big, juicy tomatoes. If you had put all your energy into being big, you won’t have been able to generate so many beautiful, sweet tasting tomatoes.”

With that the gardener filled the basket with dozens of tomatoes.

The moral of the story is we need to be careful about trying to do so much that we are not productive. We can be involved in so many activities that we miss doing the important things, like spending time with our family and friends.

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I found the hardest part was trying to come up with my own story with a moral, on demand. I kept thinking of all the other good stories I had read, or heard.


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Technorati tags: toastmaster, speech, story, moral, education

We're not doing a good job now, so lets try to do additional stuff

I wonder if the six billion people on this planet live in different realities?

You know like in Star Trek where Kirk goes to an alternate dimension and meets the Spock with a beard!

Maybe the reason life seems a bit crazy is all these people may physically be on the same planet, but they live in different realities.

I thought about this while reading on a recent push to have public schools teach "niceness." My first thought is most public schools are doing a poor job of teaching the fundamentals. Maybe someone could figure out how to help more students write well, do some math, and know history. Yet there are professionals out there who think it is more important to spend time, energy, and money, figuring out how to teach children to be nice. The conflicting world view could be explained if they were in some alternate reality where their children are doing just fine in the core subjects.

Boston.com's article The other kind of smart starts with:

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FOR MOST OF us, what we were taught in school and what we remember from our school years are two different things. We sat through uncountable hours of lessons about denominators and organelles, about precipitates and dangling participles, about Boo Radley and Shays' Rebellion, and yet the memories that sneak up on us today are more likely to be the humiliations suffered on the school bus or the awkward moments from a pubertal romance, the triumph of a deftly parried insult or the sheltering solidarity we felt in a now long-dispersed clique.
Much of what we learn about social life, in other words, we learn in school. The learning process is a fumbling and painful one, administered not by teachers but through schoolyard intrigues and emotional outbursts. And in this part of our education, we are largely on our own. While some people - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one, Ronald Reagan another - seem born with a gift for emotional perception, the rest of us muddle through as we can. School is set up for one kind of learning, but when it comes to emotional matters, the assumption has always been that these are instincts we have to develop for ourselves.
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I think it is important for children to learn to be nice. This is the responsibility of parents. Government schools are not the right place. Currently public schools are failing in their core responsibility. They don't need to go looking for more things to mess up.

I'm afraid that if public schools teach niceness like they teach writing we'll end up with the rudest people in the world.

(Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)


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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education

Reminder - send in your entry for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Mary Nix will be hosting the next Carnival of Homeschooling at Guide to Homeschooling Resources.

As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Here are the instructions for sending in a submission.





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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education, Carnival of Homeschooling

Kids say the darndest things

Do you remember Art Linkletter?





My favorite is the little boy who wanted to be a bus driver or a pilot.