Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Here’s my dessert polenta recipe.  We had it for brunch.
3 cups water
3 cups skim milk
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground fennel seed
Bring the mixture to a boil.  Gradually stir in 2 cups of corn meal with a wire whisk.  Reduce heat and stir constantly until it takes on a porridge-like consistency.  Spoon into [...]

By Thoreau
Ghadaffi afraid that his Brave Men In Uniform might actually do the right thing.  Kadaffi* is reportedly bringing in mercenaries from Africa, and Bahrain reportedly recruits most of its forces from outside the country.
Given the number of military contracting firms in the US, I see an excellent business opportunity for some enterprising firms.  Libya, [...]

By Thoreau
It’s getting bad in Bahrain:

And then, from somewhere, the army opened fire. Everyone ran and the helicopter overhead chased people, shooting at them.
(The helicopter appeared to be American-designed, according to an official at Bell Helicopter, who said the aircraft looked like versions that had been sold, unarmed, to Bahrain.)

Just who do [...]

By Thoreau
The Minion of URKOBOLD, who often comments here, has been in the hospital lately.  He just got a liver transplant, however, and will soon be back to his trolling ways.  (Unless the URKOBOLD withers another vital organ as punishment for insolence.)  Anyway, he won’t be able to help drink his share of the world’s [...]

By Thoreau
While I continue recovering from my horror at a bunch of juniors who did abysmally on a midterm, and my horror at the realization that one of them will eventually squeak out a D, graduate, and become (God help us) a high school science teacher, I have just learned that a very weak student [...]

By Thoreau
Give me your clueless, your bored,
Your huddled masses yearning to get C’s,
The wretched refuse of your public high schools.
Send these, the hopeless, totally lost to me,
I base my grades upon a generous curve!

By Thoreau
One interesting feature of working in a large institution is that whenever they get wind of you having visitors at the institution, even visitors on official business, they want to start worrying about liability, and consider the possibility of paperwork and/or a fee (not for the visitors, but for the host department).  Now, if [...]

By Thoreau
I’m in a presentation right now on a system of interactive online demonstrations for students to study before class.  On one level I am all in favor of making available more materials to study before class.  But they just had to begin the presentation with “This was developed by a professor who noticed that [...]

By Thoreau
This is fascinating:  A gene that is set up to mutate quickly, while also ensuring that the formation of a sperm or egg is accompanied by recombination. Basically, although you have two copies of each chromosome (one from each parent), sperm and eggs only half half as many chromosomes (1 copy of each, rather [...]

By Thoreau
As part of the tasks that I’m vaguely referring to below, we have to interpret some very strange rules.  The people who claim to understand the rules include some of the people I’ve been complaining about in other posts.  Most meetings involve me getting quite exasperated as I try to make sense of contradictory [...]