Potential Future Education Secretary: Schools might need guns to protect themselves from grizzlies.

Don't try that polite waving bear shtick, pal.

Bears. They're the real enemy.

Betsy DeVos is Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Education. Like all nominees, she needs to go through typical senate confirmation hearings where she's asked her views on a number of topics.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy--who represents a state that saw one of the deadliest school shootings in American history (Sandy Hook Elementary)--asked DeVos if guns have "any place in and around schools."

DeVos replied she thought the matter should be decided by individual states, specifically referencing an earlier question by another senator:

"I will refer back to Sen. Enzi and the school he is talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine there is probably a gun in a school to protect from potential grizzlies," DeVos replied.

Oh, sure, you're soooo polite.

The killer rampages of grizzly bears at America's schools needs to be stopped! Sure, no grizzly has ever killed an American student, but you can never be too sure when their reign of terror might commence.

But why stop at bears? If we're going to have American schools strapped to the teeth to kill anything dangerous, what's the deadliest living thing out there picking humanity off one-by-one--not including humans themselves?

Top Ten Animal Killers of Humans:
10.  Hippopotamus
9.  Crocodiles
8.  Tapeworms
7.  Ascaris Round Worms
6.  Freshwater Snails
5.  Assassin Bugs
4.  Tsetse Flies
3.  Dogs
2.  Snakes
1.  Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes kill 725,000 humans a year worldwide through disease. How America isn't raining the summer sky with bullets trying to take out mosquitoes is beyond me. Think of the children!

Nice try, slick!

Dogs? They kill 25,000 people a year around the world. That little ball of fluff dozing next you on the couch right now? He has murder in his heart. Better holster a couple of Glocks in case he ever turns on you. I'm sure Betsy DeVos approves!

Jazz hands is trying too hard, bub!

Even jellyfish, horses and cows kill more humans every year than all bears combined, never mind just the grizzly bear. That's right--an elementary school visit to a farm to watch cows being milked has the potential to turn into a blood bath at any second.

On average, twenty-two people in the United States are killed by cows every year. Hell, the Wisconsin dairy industry is just cow carnage! Get the kids in Milwaukee a six-shooter and extra ammo, stat!

Today a wave, tomorrow a knife in your back.

Sure, sure--you're reading this being rational and thinking,"Arming schools might be overdoing it to kill a mosquito...or a bear."

And I say to you:

Since when did you start hating America's children?

You can buy Maya Angelou's Harlem home for $5.095 million.

It looks like a banker's house, circa 1880.

Back in October Maya Angelou's Winston-Salem, NC, home went up for sale. Now, according to the New York Times, her Harlem brownstone has entered the real estate market as well. Asking price? $5.095 million.

Someone with a greater real estate acumen could explain why the extra $95,000 was added on a $5 million price tag. It raises a litany of questions. Is an even $5 million going to set the seller back--but $95,000 really solidifies the financial picture? Was $5.096 million too high? $5.094 million too low? When did Maya Angelou's brownstone become a Goldilocks situation?

Better yet, who knew that Maya Angelou was sitting on so much coin from writing poetry?




photo: LinkNY Realty

The way you spell Berenstain Bears might suggest you're from an alternate universe.

Somehow, there's a mess going on regarding the Berenstain Bears, and an internet belief over how you spell their name. Do you spell it Berenstain or Berenstein? A or E?

In the end, it might mean you came from a parallel universe some believe.

According to one, the spelling of our beloved Berenstain Bears is actually more complex than you realize (Feel free to skip ahead of the passage, because I'm not sure what the hell he's saying--except the Berenstain Bears are from another dimension, or you are, or me, or I'm not sure--am I sniffing glue?)(Try to stay awake.):
______________________

I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold.  If you don't se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part "real" and part "imaginary".  Within this 4D manifold, there are sixteen hexadectants (like quadrants, but 16 of them), corresponding to whether we consider only the real or imaginary part of each of the four dimensions.  In our particular hexadectant, the three space dimensions are real, and the time dimension is imaginary.

If the above sounds weird to you, please remember that the original proposal of special relativity by Einstein and Minkowski (and others) explicitly treated time as a strictly imaginary coordinate in pseudo-Euclidean space.  It is only modern formulations that have turned to Minkowski space with signed metric tensors.  Also, imaginary time dimensions show up again in quantum field theory to relate quantum path integrals to statistical mechanical path integrals, this done by means of a Wick rotation.

So the concept isn't foreign to physics, was used early on to help get special relativity started, and has shown up since to help quantum field theory to calculate things.

Within this complex spacetime, all mass is shared, and also wave functions of particles are shared, so that effects can leak between them.  This may account for dark matter and dark energy.  Because the imaginary coordinates in a plane wave will turn it in to a decaying function (e^ik(ix) = e^(-kx), which goes to zero as x increases), mostly particles hang out in their own hexadectant and don't leak out.

I further propose that the stEin and the stAin universes are actually just different hexadectants of the same universe: in the stEin universe, all three spatial dimensions are real and time is imaginary; in the stAin universe, all three spatial dimensions are imaginary and time is real.  Of course, from the standpoint of stEin/stAin this won't produce any mathematically significant difference; it's the same as choosing (+++-) or (---+) convention for Minkowski space, which at the end doesn't alter predictions or measurements.  We'd never know if we did swap.

__________________________

"Se habla math jargon."

If things didn't sound confusing before, he just amped it up by 150%.

Jesus, my head hurts. He lost me by the first paragraph.

Jan Berenstain: 1923 - 2012

Jan Berenstain, known as half of the duo who popularized The Berenstain Bears book series, died this week.

Depending on your viewpoint, this is either terribly heartbreaking ("I read those books as a kid!") or the universe's way of taking down a crazed anti-feminist.

According to a Slate article, The Berenstain Bears are an insipid, saccharine family--the grizzly version of The Brady Bunch, minus Alice or, for that matter, Sam the butcher. Mama Bear, in particular, is often argued to be from central casting for a third rate, wannabe, Stepford Wife. Who knew?!

Then there's the other reason people hate the books. Charles Krauthammer--a grouchy old fart of a newspaper columnist your grandfather probably reads, so go ask him--despises The Berenstain Bears. According to him "these books are easily spotted by their minimalist art and their baroque story lines, pint-size versions of the nomadic anti-plot you find in a New Yorker short story."

Wait-wait-wait, I'm confused. That's how Krauthammer describes something he hates? If someone told me this blog was a stripped-down Jack Kerouac novella, minus Kerouac's anti-Semitism and blatant sexism, like something you'd read in The Atlantic if The Atlantic wasn't so full of itself...well, I'd be pretty damn proud of myself.

It's like people want to hate Jan Berenstain, but aren't sure how to hate her. It's like hating someone who brings you ice cream. Sure, you're on a diet, have diabetes, and your clogged arteries are going to stop pumping once you ingest the saturated fat from your freebie ice cream--but damned if that ice cream doesn't taste delicious.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is...well, uh, thanks, Jan, for the ice cream?



(Not going to lie--Jan is creeping me out in that photo above. Small, frail, elderly women shouldn't scare grown men. I think it's because her eyes are obscured. Otherwise, I've never been frightened by the prospect of a Berenstain Bears book more than right now.)

In 10 years this blog will be so antique it'll be for sale at the Goodwill.

Wired.com came up with a list of 100 things they say our children might never know about. (Find it...here.) Since this is Wired.com we're talking about, the list includes plenty of computery/technologically/gadgety type references that go over the head of my bookish brain. Take for instance this gem on their list:

27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they've all got a different ID.

Rii-i-ight. The only daisy references that I understand involve The Beatles or Woodstock. At first glance I thought they were talking about CSI, and we were going to have an unsolved murder mystery on our hands, but of course it's nothing that interesting. I'm assuming I'm either so youthful (why, I do look dashingly young) or I'm so book oriented that I haven't a damn clue what they're talking about.

Then there's this:

49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.

Does anyone at Wired.com speak English? Like English English? Is there a Wired.com-to-English dictionary I can buy somewhere? Or am I just ignorant? Because I'll admit there's a better than 50/50 shot that I'm completely clueless of technological wizardry that might be commonplace, so maybe I just need to bone-up on nerd speak, which I thought I was fluent in.

That doesn't mean their list doesn't have some valid Englishy/literary/writing-ish points. Some things that will go by the wayside will be missed, if only for the nostalgia of their beauty.

Take, for instance, the typewriter, which is #57 on their list. If there ever was a contraption that made sure you reeeeally wanted to type something out before you actually typed it, it was a typewriter. Are you typo-prone? Good luck with the typewriter. Don't let the folks who make White-Out fool you. A piece of paper with 20 different blots of White-Out on it just looks like a Salvador Dali painting run amuck. (With less random melting.)

78. Neat Handwriting.

You mean handwriting used to be legible? As in readable letters and punctuation and stuff?? Look, I can't help it if my handwriting looks like I had a narcoleptic moment and passed out halfway through spelling my name. It happens.

86: Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

Are these even still used anywhere? Outside of Kansas, I mean. Really, haven't they already died off? You can't tell me there's a library somewhere with folksy people who think, "Gee, golly, whiz...that new-fangled computer system is just too neato-o for our tastes." (Pretend that was just said by some guy wearing overalls and chewing on a piece of wheat.) The last time I used a card catalog in a library I was still reading the Berenstain Bears. You try using a card catalog for hours as a child only to learn you can't find easy-to-digest books with friendly looking pictures of cartoon bears because the library goes for higher-brow fair. That's a pain that stings, my friends. That's just a pain that stings...