עזרא

Think about what it would feel like in a classroom like the author's, where your teacher already knows the single correct answer and wants you to find it, to get things wrong half the time. It would be enormously frustrating and likely humiliating. Especially if your teacher resents your ignorance. Kids pick up on that.

A lot of these kids aren't stupid or incurious -- they're scared of being wrong and their learning is getting kneecapped as a result.

In the breakthrough moment with the sonnets, the critical thing the teacher did was visibly making mistakes. He struggled. He outright failed to understand parts of what he was reading. And then he and his students worked out the best answers they could together.

In other words, he modeled how the process of learning actually works. This might've been the first time some of his students actually had that demonstrated.

Getting the right answer (i.e. the thing that standardized testing measures) is the outcome of a frustrating, messy, process. Kids need room to learn how to get good at that process, which means being not just allowed, but encouraged, to get things wrong. Repeatedly and frequently.

Bad teaching tends to focus on the outcome instead of the process, which is where we get "teaching to the test", rote memorization without understanding, and resentful teachers pitted against bored and frightened students.

Show them the whole messy process. Struggle and fall alongside them every once in a while. Give them room to try stuff that might not work. Or to experiment just for the joy of it. If they can be comfortable with the process of learning -- if they can find joy in it -- the skills will follow.

You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.

Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.

Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.

If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.

And remember that rip currents arent the only currents to be cautious of. Rivers and lakes have dangerous currents too. (Rip currents aren't only in the ocean.) Be aware of the topology of where you swim, especially if there are man-made structures.

The following items are demonstrated in the video and described in the voice-over:

1. Assorted bump dots - Various kinds of stickers with protruding dots on them that can be put onto appliances to make them more tactile.

2. Pocket money brailler - A device that allows you to imprint braille onto paper notes, indicating their value.

3. Liquid level indicator - A device hung on the edge of a container with metal prongs that detect when liquid has reached it.

4. Braille Pop-It - A pop-it with the alphabet in braille on each bubble.

5. Tactile Rubik's cube - A rubik's cube with unique textures for each color.

6. Braille color clothing tags - Tags with braille to indicate what colour a piece of clothing is.

7. Signature guide - A card with a rectangular slit in it to guide the user when writing their signature.

8. Low vision playing cards - Cards with very large and colorful numbers on them.

9. Pop-A-Cell - A plastic card with 6 bubbles you can indent to practice braille characters.

10. Talking keychain clock - A clock that says the time aloud when you press a button.

I've addressed this libel previously

Go read that, then come back here.

-----

Caught up? Good. Let's continue:

Volkskrant, in a total absence of any verifiable evidence, relies entirely on the allegations of "doctors in Gaza."

I've worked in healthcare for 25 years. If I have a bias, I'm biased to believe and support healthcare professionals

But here are some of those same doctors in Gaza:

source

source

Doctors in Gaza have repeatedly been proven to be Hamas officers who ran command centers out of Gaza hospitals in violation of international humanitarian law.

There's been literally no confirmed evidence of systematic targeting of children by Israelis - but there's been copious evidence of Hamas and PIJ targeting children. All they have are allegations. They know that if the allegations are repeated often enough, they'll be regarded as true.

They learned this tactic from masters of deception

Repetition makes things seem true. That's how and why social media has been weaponized so effectively.

Every unsupported allegation is a confession.

I don't think we should hold that decision against them. If there was a gun in your face and a woman bleeding behind a curtain who needed your help, what would you do? Can you say? Can you even guess? I can tell you what I'd do. I might be able to save the woman if I say "sure, I didn't see anything." If I speak up, we both die, and the weapons get installed anyway. I'd play along. It's a horrible thing, to say that; but let's be real. "No! I'll never allow you to bring instruments of death into my house of healing!" is a Hollywood move. These doctors acted under duress and did what they judged to be best for their patients.

which is cool. and it would be cool to say, find a granny square cardigan pattern with 24 squares, knit these squares, make a sick cardigan. but then i realized i don't know how to knit or anything. and once you accept that there isn't really a clear "application" and this concept lives on a screen, you open yourself up to more possibilities. a la birth of venus.

step 1: python script that looks at the original image and generates an excel spreadsheet the same dimensions (793 x 1322 pixels = 793 x 1322 cells), and each cell is populated with the hex code of the color that appears in that pixel of the original image

step 2: excel macro to generate list of every unique hex code that appears in the excel spreadsheet.

step 3: excel macro to calculate the R, G, B values of each of those hex codes.

step 4: excel macro to fill each cell with the color of that hex code (not necessary, i just like to do it).

step 5: I add in Saturation (the difference between the largest and smallest RGB value) and Lightness (average of all RGB values).

step 6: pick a color palette. i always find myself gravitating towards groovy seventies palettes with warm reds and oranges, so i decided not to do that this time. i looked on coolors and found a color palette that was all dark greens that were similar to each other. there were only like four colors or something in this palette. and to make it truly different from the other project, there should be a small gradient. so i determined the smallest possible change between colors and used an excel macro to color it. i was going to stop here and do the entire image in shades of green (inspired by that guy on tiktok that paints using only one color) but then. idk. i realized the "opposite" of each color was an equally subtly changing pink. so i imagined that the end of this process would be an "abstract" image, with subtle variations of pink and green, that would end up suggesting birth of venus.

so all told, i had 502 unique replacement colors, 251 of which are green, 251 of which are pink. (793 x 1322) / 502 = either 2088 or 2089 of each color.

step 7: find some method for finding the difference between the original colors of the image and my new color palette. I use a method of comparing, R, G, B, S and L:

((abs(R1 - R2) + abs(G1 - G2) + abs(B1 - B2)) / 3) + abs(S1 - S2) + abs(L1 - L2)

and you come up with something like this. on the left, those are colors that appear in the original image. across the top, those greens are the colors i'm replacing it with. in blue, that's the number of each new color i have to work with (it's just blue for contrast). and in the center, this pink area, that's a giant spreadsheet with the "objective" difference between each original color and each replacement color. it's pink because i have some conditional formatting applied, ignore that part.

and in this situation, you have some choices to make. in the original image up there, i used a schema prioritizing light and dark--i.e., i looked at the darkest color (pure black) that appeared in the original image, then found the closest replacement color (i.e., the replacement color with the smallest number). then did the same with the lightest color. then the next darkest, next lightest.

but i'm going to do it slightly differently this time. and i don't know how this image will come out looking.

if you look at the "first" green, closest to the left, and sort by smallest to largest:

you can see that these colors on the left are closest to the "first" green i've decided to work with. that might seem odd. i mean, #7F9800--> #00a94f are pretty close, but #A95400 is red. but that's just a difference in hue. really, #A95400 and #00a94f are very similar in lightness and saturation.

and this also calculates the number of times that color actually appears in the original image. that first specific green, #7F9800, only appears twice. but some colors, like actual black #000000, appear something like 46,000 times. and if you add all the numbers in the "frequency" column, it should exactly equal the sum of each replacement color (2088 ish x 502).

step 8: excel macro again. this one is complicated. basically it sorts that first "green" column (column E in my spreadsheet) from smallest to largest. then it adds each cell in the "frequency" column until it reaches or surpasses the blue cell above column E, which for this particular color is 2089. it copies those "original image" colors and their respective frequencies over to another sheet. for the color that surpassed 2089, it splits in two. then it deletes that column E. Then it makes sure "frequency" and "replacement color sum" still total. then it runs again on the new column E, until the whole spreadsheet is used up. and it generates something like:

[color from original image] [number of times that color appears] [replacement color, filled in]

and there's approximately 8000 lines of that.

i have the replacement colors in the order above. starting with vivid green, slowing transitioning to dark green, switching abruptly to bright pink, slowly transitioning to pale pink.

step 9: another excel macro. this one looks at original image broken down into hex codes, then looks at the generated list and replaces each [original] color with the replacement color, that exact number of times.

end result of these macros, following different "rules" of assigning replacement colors to original colors, is this:

which looks different, obviously. but it is the exact replacement colors, and same number of each replacement color, as the original up there.