One Trick Pony

Another lunch out, another stab at geocaching. The post storm skies were brilliant blue and filled with cumulus clouds, so the prospect of falling (2 feet) to our doom into Alvarado Creek seemed less daunting. It took no time at all to return to the former rat box at Cache GC4426, sign the log book and claim our prize: a small plastic emu. We’ll keep that as a trophy, like framing the first dollar taken in at a restaurant. To restore balance to the universe, we left behind a 2 Kroner coin from our trip last year to Copenhagen.

Continuing the saga, we went on to Cache GC6686: Crystal Tower Cache which consisted of a Parmesan Cheese container hidden under a pile of rocks at the top of the hill that we see from our front yard. Yes, this is high adventure… traipsing through fields within view of our weedbeds.

This is a cool thing. It gets us out away from our keyboards but the technology connection keeps it interesting to all of us.

So when I heard that the UK was going to release its X-Files on the Rendlesham sighting from 1980, I got all aflutter. I’d vaguely remembered it as a pretty good case and CNN’s report made it sound like this was finally The Smoking Gun.

Then the cooler part of my mind prevailed and I looked up this and

this and this. Crash go the saucers again.

I want to believe, but not really.

I’ve been interested in geocaching for close to two years now, and today we finally got around to trying it. After a trip to D. Z. Akins for lunch, June, Alex & I stopped to search for Cache: (GC4426) Alvarado Crossing by Rob. With Alex holding the GPS receiver and me reading the coordinates, we zeroed in on an area under a bridge over Alvarado Creek. At that moment, it started pouring rain, so every step we took began to seem treacherous. June got adventurous and probed further under the bridge than either of us until she saw a rat trap… which put us all instantly into let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here mode™. As we ran back to the car through buckets of rain, it gradually dawned on us that putting a rat trap out in the wilderness makes no sense at all, and that what she saw was the actual cache. Too wet to go back, we drove home with our geocaching virginity intact.

We shall return!

What perfect timing! I’ve started to gather information about PHP/SQL packages to support the next leap forward for the WebQuest page. Just last week, the Internet Scout Report people rolled out the Scout Portal Toolkit! I think it’s just what I was looking for. Here are the features:

“For a resource portal site to be worthwhile it has to provide significant functionality for the average user looking to locate or learn about valuable online resources. The Portal Toolkit provides a number of site features intended to meet this need.

Suggested Resource Referrals (Recommender System) - By evaluating ratings and other information entered by users, this feature allows the portal to recommend other resources that may be of interest to a user.

Hot damn!

From Slashdot:

“Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs!”

This has generated over 500 replies on Slashdot, 450 of them being lame jokes about buggy software. The rest, though, discussed the mysterious attraction that electricity has to ants. Alex did a research paper about this a year ago and dug up information from Texas Tech about fire ants and the havoc they wreak on transformers in the Southwest.

I can add my own datapoint to this topic, and it pre-dates laptops by several decades. Back in my Peace Corps years in Sierra Leone, I was lucky to have electricity in my house. The light switches were these plastic enclosures that were bowl-shaped, kind of like an old-fashioned doorbell. Every month or so, the lights would start to flicker and we’d hear a crackling sound coming from the switch. It became a routine chore whenever this happened to unscrew the switch and empty it out. What was it filled with? Thousands of ants, some still twitching, that had packed themselves into the switch until it started to short out. We’d whack the switch cover onto the ground outside and out would pop a single solid bowl-shaped block of highly concentrated anthood.

If this ever happens to my PowerBook, I think I’ll use some other non-whacking strategy to clean it out.

Yesterday was the annual Technology Fair held by San Diego CUE. Attendance was less than 200, I’m guessing, but it was a great place to be. I don’t go to this expecting to hear anything new but to catch up on the lives of people I’ve known since I came to San Diego. It’s funny how loyal we all are to the organization after all these years, a bond forged by working hard together to put on countless conferences and events. Got to chat with Al Rogers and Yvonne Andres who I normally bump into thousands of miles from home, and hear the latest about Global Schoolhouse.

Also spent time with Bill and Debbie Simpson (pictured above with Pam Howard) who retold the story of the night in 1988 when they were out to dinner with June and her water broke. Since I was stranded in Fresno for the night, they were the ones who drove her to the hospital. Got hugs from teachers who participated in the Patterns Project, too, a shared adventure we all look back at fondly. Whoever still thinks technology has to be dehumanizing hasn’t been paying attention.

What’s that Girl Scout song? Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver, the other gold.

According to Smartest State 2002-2003, my life has been in a downward spiral from the start.

“METHODOLOGY–The Smartest State designation is awarded based on 21 factors chosen from Morgan Quitno’s new annual reference book, Education State Rankings, 2002-2003. These factors reflect a strong commitment to students and teachers, an emphasis on excellence in the classroom and support of safe, well-run public schools.”

I was born in Connecticut (#1), went to college and worked in Massachusetts (#7), to grad school in New York (#26) and spent the last 22 years in California (#29). At least my fall is decelerating. At this pace, I should be be hailing my Maker from Oklahoma.

Or maybe my cosmic purpose in life is to nudge my adopted state to the #1 spot. Works for me.

From Education Week comes an article by Robert Sternberg, one of my favorite educational psychologists. It gives order to some fuzzy thoughts I’ve been having lately.

“The road to teaching for wisdom is bound to be a rocky one. First, entrenched educational structures, whatever they may be, are difficult to change. Wisdom is not taught in schools. In general, it is not even discussed.”

True enough. I remember that David McClelland did some work on teaching for wisdom long ago. Sternberg’s at Yale and McClelland was at Harvard, and the latter got interested in this topic by contemplating the worth of a liberal arts education. The only trace of McClelland’s work I can find on the web is his 1981 book New Case for Liberal Arts. As for Sternberg, here’s a description of his grant studying wisdom. I also came upon an interesting overview of wisdom from a conference in the UK.

This would be an interesting new direction to take with WebQuests, I think. It would be a lot heavier on the quest part and only incidentally about the web. Hmmm.

From the Psychoceramics list, here’s a new wacko in the spirit of the Bible Code.

The Postscript: “At the time of writing the A-series of cut paper sizes (defined by ISO 216) is a familiar accompaniment to life in most countries and promises soon to be accepted universally as a truly _international_ standard. Its principal representative, A4, has metric dimensions that reveal a remarkable affinity with significant features occurring in the texts of both Genesis and Revelation - the first and last of the Bible’s Books. Further, even the sequence number of the standard, viz 216, is found to be closely involved in these relationships. Such intriguing matters form the basis of the current paper and the question is asked: How is it possible that fragments of ancient writings should map so precisely onto an artefact that was not to appear on the world’s stage until some two or three millennia later?”

So those annoying unAmerican sheets of paper that refuse to fit in your binders and file folders are all part of God’s Mysterious Plan™. Now we know.

But seriously: aren’t you glad that the 1950s version of the future with lots of leisure time never happened? Imagine if we had a world in which everyone only had to work 10 hours a week. With all that time on their hands, millions of bozos and bozas would be coming up with theories like this and publishing them globally. We’d never get anything done.

“Imagine walking through the city and triggering moments in time. Imagine wandering through a space inhabited with the sonic ghosts of another era. Like ether, the air around you pulses with spirits, voices, and sounds. Streets, buildings, and hidden fragments tell a story. The setting is the Freight Depot in downtown Los Angeles. At the turn of the century Railroads were synonymous with power, speed and modernization. Railroads were our first cross-country infrastructure, preceding the telegraph and the Internet. From the history and myth of the Railroad to the present day, sounds and voices drift in and out as you walk.

“34 North 118 West plays through a Tablet PC with Global Positioning System device and headphones provided onsite (see website for hours). GPS tracks your location and determine how the story is delivered. The landscape becomes the interface. Every version is rendered in real-time, according to your pattern of movement.”

Verrry interesting. I’ve been thinking about new ways to incorporate GPS with education in the form of field trips, role playing games, etc. This sounds like an inspiring example to learn from. [from boing boing]