Steelers take the Superbowl

Neither Prairie nor I really know much about football, and we don’t really care to know much. However, that didn’t stop us from kicking back and having a fun time watching the game and doing our own form of silly armchair quarterbacking.

Favorite commentary moment: after a player got injured, the commentator was trying to figure out just what the injury was and said that, “I can’t tell if that’s an ankle or a head.” To which I responded, “good thing you’re not a doctor!”

Best commercials: the “Don’t Judge Too Quickly” series (for an insurance company…I think) were a close runner-up, as was the Bud Light “Streaker”, but my favorite (due to being completely bizarrely surreal) was the Burger King “Whopperettes” bit.

And, in the end, the Steelers took it. Still — at least the Seahawks were there.

And now, a few hours without TV before Grey’s Anatomy comes on. Code black!

The 24.6 Second College Degree

Update: I munged up some of my math this morning and got the numbers slightly wrong. I’ve updated the post with correct numbers. They’re still scary and infuriating.

According to this morning’s Seattle Times, the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing approximately $118,000 per minute$100,000/minute for the war in Iraq, and $18,000/minute in Afghanistan.

CNN/Money reported last October that the average cost of attending a four-year public university was approximately $12,127 per year, or $48,508 for four years.

In other words, 2.69 minutes worth of the money we’re spending in Afghanistan would pay for the average four-year degree. Only 29.1 seconds worth of the money we’re spending in Iraq would do the same. So would 24.6 seconds of the two operations combined.

Every day, we’re spending enough money in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for 3,503 four-year public school college degrees.

And yet, George Bush is asking for $70 billion more to pay for those wars, while cutting education funding by $12.7 billion.

The bill the U.S. Senate passed in the last hours of its 2005 session is called a “budget reconciliation” – an attempt to force the federal budget into balance with spending cuts or tax increases. But there’s no way to reconcile one of the biggest items on the chopping block, aid to education, with the long-term interests of the nation, its students, families and economy.

The bill includes a $12.7 billion cut in federal aid to education. The Senate passed it 51-50 with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote. The cut, the first in federal education spending in more than a decade, accounts for nearly a third of the bill’s spending reductions.

[…] If the House approves them, the cuts will be very real. Here’s what they will mean:

  • An increase in the federal Stafford Loan Rate from 4.7 to 6.8 percent. The will go to 8.25 percent in July.

    The higher interest rates mean that on average students will pay $2,000 more and parents $3,000 more.

  • Pell Grants to low and moderate-income students will remain frozen at $4,050 for the fourth straight year despite the president’s earlier promise to raise them to $5,100.

    According to the American Council on Higher Education, Pell Grants covered 84 percent of the cost of attending the average public four-year college when they were created in 1972. They now pay 34 percent.

The cuts come at a bad time. In five years the average cost of tuition at a public university has increased by 57 percent, the cost of room and board by 44 percent. American higher education is becoming more unaffordable at a time when attending college has never been more important.

A conversation Prairie and I had while walking into NSCC about how we’re going to afford getting me a degree prompted this little exploration. Meh. Not happy right now.

Trademark this, Aggies!

Given that Texas A&M is up in arms over the Seahawks’ use of the ’12th Man’ phrase — which the Aggies have actually trademarked — I must agree with this idea that popped up in LiveJournal’s seattle group.

Someone needs to make t-shirts with the following (forgive the slightly clumsy formatting, I’m not familiar enough with MathML to actually make it work completely correctly, and apparently Safari doesn’t even display MathML correctly, so it wouldn’t matter anyway…):

√144th Man

Gored for Women!

Another example of organizations that should check their web site addresses a little more carefully.

Today’s case in point: The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women site, promoting heart disease awareness.

Unfortunately, ‘go red for women’, when written as a single phrase for the website — www.goredforwomen.org — looks a lot like ‘Gored for Women’.

This made me laugh.

(It’s still a good cause, though, and if I had any red in my wardrobe, I might wear it today.)

GLTerminal

Best. Terminal. Evar.: GLTerminal.

GLterminal

Complete with green or amber text, spots of variable brightness, screen curvature warping, and even baud selection (set it to 300 baud and watch the characters pop up on your screen)!

Incredibly old-school geeky. I love it.

ENG101: Analysis: A Blogger is Just a Writer With a Cooler Name

I got my first paper back in my ENG101 class today. The only comment given by my teacher was, “superb,” and I got a 3.9/4.0, or 95/100 — it would have been perfect, except that I forgot to include a ‘memo of self-reflection’ wherein I “analyze and evaluate the effectiveness/growth of [my] own work.” Oops. Still, I think I can cope with the final grade.

The paper was an argument analysis; the article I chose to work with was A Blogger is Just a Writer with a Cooler Name.

Here’s the paper…

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Portfolio 2: KidsQuest Childrens Museum

Every so often, someone contacts me after finding one of my photos and asks permission to use it for one project or another. Here’s another: exhibit design firm PPI Design and Fabrication used this photo as part of an exhibit at the newly-opened KidsQuest Childrens Museum in Bellevue.

Prairie and I were able to stop by the museum this morning to find my photo…

KidsQuest Childrens Museum, Factoria, WA KidsQuest Childrens Museum, Factoria, WA

My Picture, KidsQuest Childrens Museum, Factoria, WA Me with my picture, KidsQuest Childrens Museum, Factoria, WA

iTunesTrust (Never)” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album Glory (1994, 4:36).