Sambal

When learning how to do something, it helps to break it down to irreducible subtasks. As an example, we homeschool our kids; my eldest daughter Kaija is 5th-grade age.  We want her to practice writing simple paragraphs as a stepping stone to essays.  But asking her to just “write a paragraph” can be overwhelming, because […]

People don’t die of peptic ulcers so often anymore.  Here’s a nice picture: Relevant dates include 1982, which is when Marshall and Warren identified H. pylori.  It gets a bit steeper after 1994, when the CDC starts promoting antibiotic treatment of peptic ulcer disease.  By 2005, when Warren and Marshall receive the Nobel Prize, it’s […]

But hey, if school kids are a) seeing knife wielding bullies and b) getting told to “not get involved” and quasi-punished for intervening, then well, maybe there’s more reasons to homeschool than I think. Of course, this is Calgary. Links via Gawker

Most languages have a word for ‘tea’ derived from either ‘cha’ or ‘te’– a language map.

Don’t split tasks evenly, explains Noah Berlatsky, writing in Scientology puff-magazine the Atlantic:  Housework isn’t a debt wives owe to husbands, nor one husbands owe to wives. It’s not a gift you give to make a slave. Rather, it’s the quotidian stuff of which the relationship is made. We’re married, so we help each other. […]