Thursday, February 22, 2007

Cool links from reddit - 22 Feb 07

The following are some cool selections I found via reddit.com:

A few general items:

This is way cool: a personal submarine. The price tag is a bit high for me: £65,000.

From the Boston Globe is an article on Too much medication. It makes a valid point that too often our society uses mind altering drugs to "fix" children.

In Capitalism and the Common Man Walter E. Williams makes an interesting observation: a hundred years ago you could tell who was rich by how a person dressed. Today you can't pick out the rich just by their clothes.

25 Rules to Grow Rich By would be a good list to review with your children.


Wikipedia:

Do you ever wonder what other people are reading at Wikipedia? WikiCharts shows the articles from the English Wikipedia with the most views.

Nine Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Wikipedia, enough said.

I wish the List of countries by life expectancy chart had some ability to factor out small nations, or to have life expectancy correlated with the average income. Still pretty interesting.


On the education front:

Do you have a Beginner's Mind? Darren Henson makes the point that to learn we first have to be ready to learn.

From the Ririan Project is a list of 13 Rock-Solid Ways To Build Knowledge For Lifetime. The first one is to Nurse your hunger of knowledge. I think as parents often it isn't so much nurse a hunger of knowledge in our children as to not destroy the hunger they are born with.

Economist.com has an interesting article on Bright Children. The article explores the concept of what contributes to genius and focuses on Laszlo Polgar who set out, successfully, to train his three daughters to be chess masters. The three daughters were homeschooled! The Economist article concluded with: "Some say the key to success is simply hard graft. Judit, the youngest of the Polgar sisters, was the most driven, and the most successful; Zsofia, the middle one, was regarded as the most talented, but she was the only one who did not achieve the status of grand master. 'Everything came easiest to her,' said her older sister. 'But she was lazy.'" My understanding is it helps to have some native ability, but it is also very important to work hard.

Ever time I read something like GWU Raises Tuition to More Than $39,000 I think homeschooling may not stop at 12th grade.


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