Sarah Lonsdale asks: “Where better to rest in peace than in a converted mortuary or burial chapel?”
Roanoke’s O. Winston Link Museum
Virginia Postrel writes about the new 0. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia (Link recorded the waning years of steam locomotives)
The museum is in the former Norfolk and Western train station, which famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy redesigned in 1947. As Modernism’s Victoria Pedersen writes: “He completely transformed the 1905 neoclassical station, adding 22-foot ceilings, marble walls, terrazzo floors, a futuristic wall of horizontal windows and a dome. He also designed a concorse leading to the train platform that featured the first passenger escalators in the Roanoke Valley, cutting-edge technology for the period.” The new station was the epitome of streamlined modernism. But what that meant in the Virginia of a half century ago is spelled out in the letters above the door in these photos from the Library of Congress collection, the first of which Modernism reprinted
Do right, trust in God, and fear no man
Space Ship One 40 Second Burn
“Whoa” Video of Space Ship One’s 40 second burn to mach 2 & 105,000 feet [Windows Media] from gulker.com
Learn more by visiting www.xprize.org
Madison Property Taxes: “Everybody’s Richer”
According to city assessor Ray Fisher Friday when 2004 property assessments were released. “My house went up 10 percent this year. I look at it as money in my pocket.” – Beth Williams writes. Interesting perspective…. Can’t say that I agree with Ray on that one. Bill Novak writes:
“Last year, assessments went up 8.6 percent and the local real estate tax was up 7.1 percent, according to the Assessor’s Office. In 2002, assessments were up 8.1 percent and taxes went up 3.2 percent. In 1997 and 1999, assessments went up and taxes went down.” What about 1998, 2000 and 2001?
There has been talk in the state legislature of completely shifting school taxes from the property tax to other sources, such as the sales tax. Wayne Wood, a retiring representative from Janesville and Rep Mickey Lehman (R-Hartford) developed a proposal that would have used a sales tax increase to reduce property taxes for schools.
Educators Flocking to Finland, Land of Literate Children
Imagine an educational system where children do not start school until they are 7, where spending is a paltry $5,000 a year per student, where there are no gifted programs and class sizes often approach 30. A prescription for failure, no doubt, in the eyes of many experts, but in this case a description of Finnish schools, which were recently ranked the world’s best.
Budget Deficit: “throw Granny off welfare” and “buy your own drugs”
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A teacher recently gave her students the assignment of balancing the federal budget using this simulation. Some of the results are instructive. From Marginal Revolution…
Antidepressant Use Questioned
“Pediatricians and family physicians should not prescribe antidepressants for depressed children and adolescents because the drugs barely work and their side effects are often significant, Australian researchers have concluded”, Gardiner Harris writes.
Rice Testimony Quicktime VR Scene
Chris Ramirez shot a very nice Quicktime VR scene of Condoleeza Rice’s testimony yesterday in Washington, DC. (VR scenes with lots of people are quite challenging). Very Nice
Learning to Expect the Unexpected
Former Wall Street bond trader and author of the quite useful book Fooled by Randomness pens an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times where he describes black swans (an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations) with respect to 9/11 and the current investigation:
Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.
Black swans can have extreme effects: just a few explain almost everything, from the success of some ideas and religions to events in our personal lives. Moreover, their influence seems to have grown in the 20th century, while ordinary events ? the ones we study and discuss and learn about in history or from the news ? are becoming increasingly inconsequential.
Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27, 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 ? a black swan of the vicious variety.