Random

~ Mom was right. If you snack before supper "you'll spoil your appetite" -- which is a good way to lose weight. -- Link

~ Dan bought a Kia Rondo -- cool. I like our Toyota Corolla and that it gets 30 mpg. But I'd like a Rondo for the higher ride. For economy, though, I would like to try one of the Smart Cars that we saw in Australia. I understand that they will within a few months be available in the US. But it looks like the mileage (33 city/41 highway mpg) isn't that much better than our last millennium Corolla. That can't be right.

~ Smart Cars are not electric. But it looks like everyone else is trying to rush small electric cars to the market. -- Link

~ And then there's the Tata Nano -- India's new minicar which reportedly gets 50+ mpg and costs only $2,500. It's a disposable car which makes the Yugo look like a Cadillac. Frankly, it wouldn't last a week on the pot-holed roads of Guam -- assuming that you could sneak one past Customs.

~ California's Hydrogen Highway has become a dirt road to nowhere. Well, you've got to try lots of new things before you can get it right. -- Link

~ Not all costs are on the rise. The value of apartments in central Stockholm have fallen 9% in the past three months. It's a temporary hiccup. -- Link

~ Mr Wesleyan Keith Drury says that he likes Calvinists. -- Link

~ Speaking of Weslyans, Ben Witherington has a piece on rethinking the number of the beast -- (yes, it's a humor piece) -- Link

~ The recent SATS newsletter had a link to the 2007 Horizon Report on the key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity. Among the trends: rapid change in the environment of higher education; increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate; information literacy isn't a given -- even among younger students; academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship; notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship; students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty. -- .pdf Link

This is a helpful read -- even for people who are not education "professionals."

~ Eric Bangeman reports on greenwashing and the whole carbon-offset nonsense. -- Link