_.- the jelkimantis -._

A little while ago, a colleague asked me about using student presentations as a teaching strategy.  The primary concern was that the students might shy away from presenting difficult concepts that they were in the process of learning.  This is a very understandable concern, and one that has been shared by many teachers attempting to move towards an inquiry based classroom.  I realized that this concept of presentation as learning is not well documented or researched (we couldn't find much on it at all) so I decided I would put up a blog post about my perceptions and experiences in this area.

There are, apparently, a lot of really stupid people.  Last night the hash tag, #onlywhitepeople was trending.  While, yes, a lot of it was appropriate and funny, more of it was inappropriate and full of hate speech.  I want to talk, in particular, about a couple of tweets and the nature of the people who put them up.

The first tweet is actually a category of tweets.  It started out, "#onlywhitepeople like to watch ____. "  One of these blanks was filled in with the word Baseball, which just confused me.  Another was filled in with NASCAR.

One night before my buddy moved back north, we had a marathon heads-up poker night.  It was supposed to be a ring game, but I was the only person who ended up being able to make it to his house.  As with all poker nights, there was a significant volume of alcohol and stupid ideas. Among the stupid ideas was my idea of using PBR Bottle Caps as the hold cards for Texas Hold 'Em.  I forget why this ended up being a stupid idea, but it was.  We played a couple of rounds this way and decided we would never do that again.

From all my stupid ideas emerged one idea that turned out to be really fun,

It's been over a year since I last made beer.  That was a nut brown that didn't turn out too badly.  It wasn't great, but that was partially my fault.

This round I'm making American Brewmaster's Scottish Export Ale.  The OG is supposed to be 1.045 and I got 1.030.  I'm not sure this will be a bad thing, the taste of the wort is nice, and I hope that the malty flavour continues through fermentation. If I get 100% attenuation, I'll be around 4% ABV.  I usually get less than 100%, usually around 90%.  I should end up with around 3.5% - 3.75% ABV.

Ok, so my day was just changed.  Edward J Olmos, you know, the fracking Admiral of the Battlestar Galactica followed me back on twitter.  Apparently it's something he's doing right now, but I don't care, it is still fracking amazing.

This made me curious, what kind of man decides to do something like this?  I checked out his twitter feed, which was really not needed, I read his tweets anyway.  I followed the link on his feed to his website.  "So what?" you say, "If you're in LA you've got a website!" To this end, you might be correct, but Mr. Olmos has a different bit on his website.  His