Archive for June 10th, 2009
Pinky is Pet of the Week
Would you like to adopt this cat? Pinky was being featured as “Pet of the Week.”
Friendly Atheist to Visit Mangia Italiano
Hemant Mehta, (FriendlyAtheist.com) will be at a local (St. Louis) eatery on Saturday afternoon. Here’s his details in detail.
Excerpt from his post:
Where: Mangia Italiano, 3145 S Grand Blvd. Saint Louis, MO 63116
When: Saturday, June 13th, 2:00 p.m.
Cost: Free! (Just pay for your own food. Sadly, my teaching salary won’t cover your tab.)
Ideally, we could just take over the entire downstairs area, but in order to do that, we need a good estimate of how many people are coming.
See his site for various contact info, and to let him know how many of “us” will be there.
Alternative medical “cures” flunk out en masse
According to the Associated Press, numerous alternative medical cures have now been tested by the U.S. government, at great cost, and almost none of them show any promise at all in controlled studies sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.
Colbert vs. Colbert re gays in the military
Stephen Colbert argues about Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell in front of a large crowd of troops.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Formidable Opponent – Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell | ||||
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And now here’s more on Dan Choi, yet another gay Arabic language specialist fired by the military. This is insanity. It’s time for Barack Obama to step in and for Congress to get busy repealing Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Never pay for textbooks again, in six steps.
A college education (and even more, the “college experience”) costs a lot of money. One of the most bemoaned college-related expenses is textbooks. Every quarter or semester, students trudge through their local bookstores and shell out hundreds of dollars for the heavy, price-inflated compendiums of glossy photos, useless asides, and (maybe) small slivers of information.
The pattern of behavior is always the same: the students scan the bookstore shelves for cheaper, used editions (perhaps $70 a pop instead of $100). Some classes require multiple books; some classes require ten. The students carry the stack of texts to the counter and pony up hundreds. In class, the books may never be used- it’s impossible to tell when they will actually be relevant.
Later, these students gather the books up and try to return them to the store for a pittance (maybe $20-30). Often a book is not returnable because it is an “old edition”- a new version has just come out, with minor updates such as a new cover photo and a table with a new layout. Next quarter, everyone will be buying the full-priced new editions.
The textbook industry is a racket. The books are made unnecessarily expensive, for they are puffed-up with frilly nonsense. My school drove up the price of Psych 100 textbooks by requesting a special “Buckeye Edition”; the only difference was a black-and-white photocopy inserted into the first page, which acknowledge the student reader as a member of Ohio State. It’s a hose.
Last year, however, I realized that I never really have to pay for textbooks. For the past four quarters of school, I have not laid a cent on a bookstore’s counter. As I see it, there is no reason for any student to ever pay for textbooks, ever again. Here are my simple steps to attain free textbook access:
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