Ms Emily Goes To The Movies

Review by Emily Trosprel
10th Grade BHHS
Senior Entertainment Editor

3:10 to Yuma

For decades, the gunslingers have not drawn their weapons, the stagecoaches haven’t been menaced by outlaws, and the heroes have not drifted into the sunset, but now the cowboys can ride again. Judging by the quality of 3:10 to Yuma, hopefully they’ll be galloping for years to come. It’s a return to the classic western in its purest form for this remake of the 1957 film of the same name; the villains are vicious, the hero is pure, and the outlaw is roguish in true form. That hero is Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a rancher in some of the worst years of his life. He can’t afford to pay for his land or family, is thought of as a failure by his wife and eldest son Will (Logan Lerman), and is literally one leg short, a reward for his service in the Union Army. Fate gives him a chance to renew his life after infamous stagecoach robber Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is captured, and the need for an escort, a paid escort, arises to guard Wade on the way to the 3:10 train to Yuma, where the death sentence is to be swiftly carried out. Evans is not in for a romanticized ride through the desert, as the mission is complicated by Wade’s ruthless right hand man Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) and gang, who are set on freeing their boss no matter how many bullets it takes (quite a few, as it happens.) For Evans, what begins as a quest towards a two hundred dollar reward that will save his ranch morphs into a journey for his own dignity and moral honor in the eyes of his son and a taunting psychological spar with the man he is sending to death.

What would a western be without an open, panoramic view of a brown, ceaseless desert? What would be a western without horses galloping in the distance, their riders seemingly in hidden ecstasy at the freedom of the plains? It certainly wouldn’t be a film with the magic of 3:10 to Yuma; those shots are on no cramped sound stages. The riders, Christian Bale and Russell Crowe fit right into their saddles. The film is a celebration in character, and the two actors bring out such richly realized individuals that they prove that a movie can be absurdly entertaining and thoughtful. If it’s true that a film is only as good as its villains, then Crowe and Ben Foster have already shot the 3:10 to Yuma into brilliance, with Crowe providing a psychological foe and Foster as the born-without-a-conscience, brutal knave. The conflict that rises with a swell of powerful, sweeping music builds into one powerful, sweeping movie, trotting out emotion and gunslingin’ action in the same ragged breath right up to the end, on which the viewer needs to know one thing: prepare to be shocked.

Three and a half starsout of four Stars for 3:10 to Yuma

Should Have A Contest

To see who has the best explanation on how this could happen.

PHOENIXVILLE — The Phoenixville Police Department is investigating a freak accident in which a borough woman ran over both of her legs in the drive-through lane at McDonald’s, 651 Nutt Rd., Friday afternoon.

According to Cpl. Pat Mark, a black Chevrolet Blazer, driven by a 53-year-old borough woman, was in the drive-thru lane at McDonald’s around 1:55 p.m. September 28.

“For some unknown reason, her legs were run over by her vehicle,” said Mark. “We are investigating how this accident could’ve happened.” Article

McDonald should lawyer up because some how this is going to be their fault.

Trouble with a Teenage Padawan

Its Star Trek Weekend at National Review.

My daughter is a good girl. That’s why it’s such a shame that she has hormones. Ryan, her “boyfriend,” might be a good boy too. I don’t know since he’s not allowed to call our home or really, even, to exist on the planet with my daughter because, you see, he has hormones, too. And, I have reason to believe that he is trying to turn my daughter to the dark side

We found out that our 14-year-old daughter had a boyfriend the old-fashioned way. We read her journal. Before you tsk tsk me, you should know that she left it in plain view and the first line read: “So. . . I guess I have a boyfriend.” We decided this was an obvious plea for help, and so read on.

And you should read on.

Things You Really Don't Need To Know

#1 Wikipedia list of historical cats

Flori-duh Strikes Again

Be careful when driving in scohol zones. Judging by the fading paint it took long enough for someone in Orlando to finally report it.

Teaching By The Numbers

Hollywood answer to failing inner city schools (Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver) is to have a new naive but driven teacher show up and after overcoming both an non-caring administration and suspicious would be gangster students go on to produce students ready for Harvard. Great movies and they can be inspirational but it ain't no way to run a railroad.

This is not a scalable solution because heroes can't be replicated. If this is what it takes might as well save all the tax dollars and tell the kids they are on their own. Wars are not won by armies composed only of John Waynes but just ordinary people doing the best they can with the tools and supported available. So in order to have a real scalable solution for education it needs to be staffed by average folks with the proper system in place. Now what would be the best delivery system?

DI is scalable. Its success isn't contingent on the personality of some uber-teacher....You don't need to be a genius to be an effective DI teacher. DI can be implemented in dozens upon dozens of classrooms with just ordinary teachers. You just need to be able to follow the script.

In his new book Super Cruncers, Ian Ayres shows how large amounts of data combined with cheap computing power are improving forecasting and decision making in social science, government and business. One chapter deals with number crunching studies on education and it came up with one system that stood head and shoulders above all the rest Direct Instruction. summaries for the non-academic can be located here and here.

Regardless of what the data shows DI isn't widely implemented.

Contrary to what you might think, the data also show that DI does not impede creativity or self-esteem. The education establishment, however, hates DI because it is a threat to the power and prestige of teaching, they prefer the model of teacher as hero. As Ayres says "The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says." As a result they have fought it tooth and nail so that "Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market." - Marginal Revolution

Homework Help For Parents

If your child has a problem and you are looking for a way to help or trying to remember something like dividing fractions check out TeacherTube Hundreds of short videos created by teachers and students on a great variety of subjects.

The Happiness Gap

Now "social scientist" have teamed with the press to find a new gap between the sexes. According to two different research groups men have grown happier while women have grown more unhappy.

Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there were also a number of activities that produced very different reactions from the two sexes — and one of them really stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team, figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Mr. Krueger, who, when not crunching data, enjoys watching the New York Giants with his father.

...

Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

Simple reason no research grant needed women just don't like to see happy guys.

Whine Away

It is back in operation.

Site Problem

There is a problem with the topic section this morning asking about login and password. I don't know where that came from and I don't have time today to fiddle with it. The web host was working on the server last night and they seemed to have flipped some random bit.

09/25/2007 @ 00:20 EDT
Last evening starting at 9:00 PM EDT we conducted scheduled maintenance on the server which hosts your hosting account. The maintenance took 3.5 hours, during which your site was inaccessible. The maintenance is now complete and all services should be up and running. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your patience while we performed the necessary maintenance.

Just An Old Fashion Love Story

A teacher in Knoxville, TN , allegedly had an affair with a student who was murdered. The husband has been charged in the killing of the 18 year old. After being fired from the Pioneer Christian Academy for the inappropriate relationship and her husband in jail she has now disappeared with her two children. She is believed to be hiding in CA to be with someone she met on the internet. Just a romantic but I bet those crazy kids have a chance.

Since this happened in Knoxville the surprising part is that there is no mention of the teacher, the husband and the murdered student all being at least double first cousins. Maybe in a TN paper that is just understood and doesn't have to be mentioned.

Heavy Metal The Base Of A Nutritious Diet

SACRAMENTO—State officials on Thursday urged consumers not to use some 56,000 potentially lead-tainted lunch boxes from China that were distributed through the Department of Public Health in an effort to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Tests found elevated levels of lead in three of the boxes, officials said.

The boxes were given out at health fairs and other events and carried a logo saying "eat fruits and vegetables and be active."

Does anyone else see a continuing Chinese plot here against US children.

The New Jobs

There was a discussion in the past on why schools spend time teaching students to estimate and one on critical thinking. These skills are very important because for one thing high tech companies like Google don't always ask the standard "Where do you see yourself in 5 years" question. The questions are not becoming more tuned to finding out how well the interviewee thinks, especially under pressure. Below is an example of the types of question a job hunter might encounter, some are easy, some like #9 the answer isn't intuitive and #15 is the Fermi classic Piano Tuner problem

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?

8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?

9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?[Ed. Note: Unlike most of the others there is only one correct answer. The men should immediately head for the tall grass.]

10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

15. How many piano tuners are there in the United States?

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

Supposedly this list came from an interview at Google. If this is true the answer for all of them is the same "I would just google it"

Don't taser me, bro!

The funniest line on YouTube a while. A student at the Univ. of Florida disrupts a town hall meeting for John Kerry and gets hauled off by security.

Would have been perfect if only he had screamed out "Now you see the violence inherent in the system!"

Steel Cable? We never had no steel cable.

There will be no complaining this year about school buses and no comments about "when I was a kid I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways." On the other hand what are they complaining about people pay big buck to go to amusement parks where the rides aren't nearly as fun.

A bridge is to be built in a Chinese village where children are forced to cross a raging torrent on a steel cable to get to school. Nearly 500 children, from Maji village in Fugong town, Yunnan province, cross the most dangerous stretch of the Nujiang River each day.

They fasten themselves to the cable with a metal carabiner and a rope and slide across the 200 metre wide canyon.

The youngest student, A Qia, 4, has to go over by herself each day.

The villagers say that usually four-year-old children are taken by their parents, and begin to go by themselves from the age of five.

A Pu, five, who was stuck in the middle of the cable for nearly 20 minutes once, said: “I used to dream of having a bridge, but then I learned that my dream was too expensive.”

On second thought didn't anyone at Central Planning ever think about building a school on the other side of the river.

"Imagine a school with children that can read and write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live." -Peter Cochrane

Ever Been Lost On The Net?

A programmer once built a vast database containing all the literature, facts, figures, and data in the world. The he built an advanced querying system that linked that knowledge together, allowing him to wander through the database at will. Satisfied and pleased, he sat down before his computer to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

After three minutes, the programmer had a headache. After three hours, the programmer felt ill. After three days, the programmer destroyed his database. When asked why, he replied: "That system put the world at my fingertips. I could go anywhere, see anything. Because I was no longer limited by external conditions, I had no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know. I could neither sleep nor eat. All I could do was wander through the database. Now I can rest."

From:

This excerpt was published years before the World Wide Web came to be and in a weird coincidence was titled "The Navigator".

Literature of Capitalism

The NY Times on the most influential business books ever written. After 50 years it is still on the best sellers list at #388 Atlas Shrugged.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong, that excellence should be your goal.” - James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft.

One of the biggest fans of the book when it was published was a 25 year old economic forecaster Alan Greenspan.

In 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Bill Gates through Micro$oft not his charitable fund has helped bring more people in India out of the depths of poverty and the associate illnesses then Mother Theresa. Too many times society lavishes praise on good intention and scorns actual results.

Think Pink

High Schools in Nova Scotia learned that the best way to stop bullying is just to laugh at them.

CAMBRIDGE — Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

"The bullies got angry," said Travis. "One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted." David said "Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on."

"It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something," said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

"I made sure there was a shirt for him," David said.

They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink.

The two friends said they didn’t take the action looking for publicity, but rather to show leadership in combating what they say is frequent bullying in school.

Only 10 Kinds Of People In The Wold

Those that understand binary and those that don't. No press coverage on that today being a non-leap year September 13th was Computer Programing day since it is the 100000000 (256 for mortals) day of the year. The holiday started back when a byte of data meant something and 256 = 2 to the power of 8 the number of values representable in a byte of data.

The Dot com bust and fear of technology jobs being sent to Bombay have drastically lowered the number of college students majoring in Computer Science. Many of the best and the brightest are now majoring in economics and finance hoping to snag a high paying job on Wall Street.

Gates says he's in the 'IQ business,' and his rivals for the brainiest students in America are the elite Wall Street Investment banks

One criticism of the major is the first year or two were not compelling and not linked to real-world results. To help control this problem Microsoft has teamed with a traditional technical university Georgia Tech and Philadelphia's traditional women's college Bryn Mawr (any female geeks out there) to form the Institute for Personal Robots in Education. This joint project is developing an easily programmable tabletop robotic device to introduce to first-year computer science students.

"America’s education system isn’t producing enough supply to meet market demand for IT talent. Microsoft is hoping that initiatives like its robotics-in-education effort can reverse recent trends and help coax some brains away from finance and into science. Future innovation—and perhaps U.S. economic growth—may hinge on the robots’ success."

Could also help if Micro$oft paid higher starting salaries.

This Saturday

Come out and support our local Third Place. The Brandywine Community Library is more then just an alternative to Blockbusters or Tower Records for the cheap thrifty. The place also actually has books on dead trees and a source for e-books. Our local library is close to being an internet for real things. Don't see what you want just ask,("asking" is the real world equivalent of googling.) our local branch has access to the Berks county library system and beyond. All they need is a bulletin board where patrons can put up notes saying that the guy at the next table is an idiot.

Live & Silent Benefit Auction
It’s auction time again! Put Saturday night, September 15th at 6:30 p.m. on your calendar, and plan to come out for an evening of fun, food and a live and silent auction to support the library. The Friends of the Library (BCLA) are hosting the event, to be held at the Henry Auditorium, The Lutheran Home at Topton. The event will include appetizers from the Market Café in Topton, wine, cheese, yummy desserts from Sweet Street, not one, but TWO incredible handmade quilts (one raffled and one auctioned), and many items to tempt you into raising your bidder card. Tickets are $15 per person, or $100 for a table of 8, and are available at the library, or may be reserved by phoning 610-641-0380 or 610-682-1639. Why not take advantage of this great opportunity to get together with friends and neighbors for a night of fun to support a good cause. We hope to see you there!

Insurance Paid Up

Why men die early:

100 Thing Challenge

Feel overwhelmed by "stuff" then take the 100 Things Challenge Be nice to have a large community wide garage sale to help in this endeavor but everybody would just buy each other junk and as junk does it would multiply before it came to its new home

"Animals and birds are lucky. They don't keep acquiring things, the way men do. You can teach a monkey to drive a motorcycle, but I have never known a monkey to go out and buy a motorcycle." - E. B. White in The Trumpet of the Swan

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Hay Creek Festival

(click for a larger image)

Brandywine Fife& Drum performed at the Hays Creek Festival yesterday.

Paul Carpenter On Lack of Scholarships

Without chemistry, most diseases would never be cured, transportation would still be limited to the speed of a horse, and many famines would never be averted.

So a few years from now, when perhaps your life or your child's life depends on chemistry or some other scientific discipline, consult a jock.

Mr. Carpenter also had another column on the funding at Northampton's Bob Gilly Stadium and lack of public support at the nearby library.

Not Easy Being Green

Climate Care is an organization that organizes Carbon-Offsets for people that want to have a decent lifestyle without guilt. One of their methods is to pay farmers in India to trade in their diesel pumps and use human powered treadle pumps. There are however some critics of this green initiative.

Climate Care points out that even children can use treadle pumps: ‘One person - man, woman or even child - can operate the pump by manipulating his/her body weight on two treadles and by holding a bamboo or wooden frame for support.’ Feeling guilty about your two-week break in Barbados, when you flew thousands of miles and lived it up with cocktails on sunlit beaches? Well, offset that guilt by sponsoring eco-friendly child labour in the developing world!

Lets see there are a lot of private wells in this school district, constant complaints about overweight underutilized, ungrateful kids, and people needing money to offset property taxes. Anyone want to help start Brandywine Carbon Offset Inc. as the Greenies say Act Locally. The schools instead of giving kids detention, where they just sit around and plan their next caper against society could be put on a treadmill. If it was hooked up to a generator they could be used to produce electricity for the school or sold to Met-Ed. The possibilities here are endless.

Got Milk

. Global milk prices have doubled over the last two years.

2. In some parts of the United States, milk is more expensive than gasoline.

3. There are reports of cows being stolen from Wisconsin dairy farms.

4. The rising demand for milk is coming mostly from developing nations; the average Chinese consumes six gallons of milk a year, up from two gallons in 2000. China is now the world's leading milk importer.

5. Parts of New Zealand are booming.

6. Only 7 percent of all milk commercially produced is traded across national borders.

7. Sufficiently high (market-driven) milk prices may render many milk price supports and subsidies irrelevant.

From the NY Times summary from Marginal Revolution

Teaching School

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher - By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

For Non-Morining People

The Happiness Project:Six tips for keeping school-day mornings calm and cheery.

Last One To OK Is A Rotten Egg

If you have ever been to OK you would know why it is cheap to live there. Just surprised the cost is not a negative number as in people are being paid to live there.