brainrow

Words of wisdom from Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders:

[Y]eah, we all want to be perfect, but first we just have to suck less…

The compulsion to be perfect, immediately and eternally, is one of the most profound causes of procrastination for the garden-variety human, and it most certainly gives each of us all the reason we’ll ever need not to even try.

“Not even trying” is a huge time-saver, believe me.

Some people believe that elections were stolen in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, through malicious mischief by those states’ secretaries of state — the officials responsible for running elections. Many voters worry about the potential for stolen elections this year, too. I’ve said the cure for this worry is to win big: it’s much easier to steal a very close election than a blow-out. Given the record of the Republicans in recent years, most races shouldn’t be close at all.

It turns out some Republicans here in Ohio have thought about that, and have a plan B:

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality. We’d like to think that his office would not ultimately do that, or that if it did, such a ruling would not be allowed to stand. But the mere fact that an elected official and political candidate has the authority to toss his opponent out of a race is further evidence of a serious flaw in our democracy.

Ted Strickland, the Democratic nominee, is leading Mr. Blackwell by as much as 28 points, according to one recent poll. In their panic, some Blackwell supporters have hit on the idea of trying to prevent the election from occurring. One of them filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Strickland, who is a member of Congress, does not live in the apartment where he is registered to vote.

A few years ago, I would have laughed this off. Now, I can’t. I’m convinced there’s nothing these guys wouldn’t do.

From CNN:

President Bush personally assured Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Monday that he has no plans to pull troops out…

Al-Maliki took no comfort from Bush’s attempt at reassurance. Bush had no plans for post-invasion Iraq, either, and we all know how that worked out.

Unstructured play is vital for children, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported.

Aaron Swartz may have uncovered why play is important:

There’s an interesting little experiment you can do. If you have a classroom of kids and you give them a bunch of tasks they can work on of varying difficulty, the kids will pick the tasks that are just outside their level, that stretch them to do a little bit more. (This is, of course, if they aren’t getting graded on this. If they’re getting graded, they’ll always pick the easy ones.)

When I first heard about this experiment, I just assumed it was because they were good kids. But now I think there’s a different explanation. It’s because doing this is fun.

Children are built to grow — they want to stretch and learn. Is it possible that our current relentless focus on testing is exactly the wrong prescription for real education?