tberton

This doesn't really apply in the Canadian situation though. The Liberals are, historically and currently, about as centrist as you get. The NDP's platform was a fair bit more radical than the Liberal's on many points, notably a $15 minimum wage and a promise to abolish the Senate. The main issue was that they were also promising to balance the budget, which made their promises seem far-fetched. And they refused to cow-tow to racists, which hurt their support in Quebec, which was the base that was giving them such a strong position in the first place.

Glad that the Conservatives are out. Super surprised by the big Liberal majority. Even though I voted Liberal, I'm disappointed in the NDP losses. Thought for sure Peggy Nash would win in my parents' riding in Toronto and Paul Dewar would win in Ottawa, but I was wrong. I think the NDP were pretty hurt by the shift to the center here. I may have voted for them had they not been so adamant about balancing the budget immediately.

Isn't Suikoden 2 available on the Playstation Store?

I listened on the radio last night. Depressing, but good on Volquez and Perez for taking the right approach to the Jays' lineup. Shutting out those bats is a feat to be proud of.

Thanks! I actually found a video of it on YouTube and made a gif from that.

I wish I could find a GIF that showed his face. When he flipped the bat, he looked like he was challenging God to throw a fastball he couldn't hit over the fence.

It was more than the intensity of the reaction and the bat flip than the fact of staring.

Yesterday's Blue Jays-Rangers game was the most incredible baseball game I've ever seen. An almost-unheard of error by Russell Martin in the weirdest situation you could imagine, three errors in a row by Elvis Andrus. And then this. I'll remember that for the rest of my life.

Just finished Between the World and Me. Highly recommended. The Toni Morrison quote on the cover is right: this is required reading, especially, I imagine, for any Americans on this forum. Ta-Nehisi Coates does a better job than anyone I've read of explaining how racism in the States works and how the history of slavery, of Jim Crow and of segregation hangs over the lives of black people. The fact that he writes as beautifully as anybody I've ever read sends the book from "interesting" to "transcendent." Read this book.

For what it's worth, I found Swapper puzzles often benefited from stepping away, doing something else and then coming back with fresh eyes. I often couldn't solve puzzles simply because I was missing something obvious.

They talked about this on a Thumbs GDC episode ages ago, didn't they? EDIT: K, not a GDC episode. But almost exactly a year ago! Episode 175: It's an Itchio

My comment about the XCOM pacing has more to do with the moment-to-moment pacing than over the course of the game. I think the back and forth between the tactical layer and the strategic is brilliant. Each time I leave one I'm exciting to enter the other and neither ever feels boring. I don't think of the mounting tension as a pacing issue necessarily - that's more tonal, I think.

Just finished the episode. Regarding the stuff near the end about Barcade and the joy of curating games for people: for two years, I worked at a board game cafe. For much of that, a lot of my job was doing exactly what Kieron was describing - recommending games to people, teaching them, explaining their significance if they seemed interesting. It really was a super cool job.

Midway through the episode and loving it. Kieron Gillen's certainly one of my favourite writers right now, even if he's completely wrong about Zelda.

A bunch of Alice Munro's short stories are available online. Here's a list of some.

Mass Effect 2 had great pacing. The loop between going on missions and then talking to people on the ship was really, really good in that game. Likewise, XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within has really good pacing, for the same reason - the game mode switches before you get bored of what you're doing.

I actually found that triangle really useful for three-variable equations. You're right that it's not useful for more variables than that though.

I agree completely that there's an underlying process in the standard algorithm. What I'm saying is that the way we write it obfuscates that, so that unless a teacher goes out of their way to continuously mention that, none of the underlying processes are made clear in the notation. And if every time somebody used the standard algorithm they broke it down into the steps you describe, it wouldn't look any less confusing on the face of it. I'll also agree that it's silly to completely throw out the old way. Both should be taught in conjunction. Zeus, I'm singling this section out of your post because I agree with the rest of what you said about teaching multiple methods and ensuring that teachers are actually conveying information effectively. But I want to point out that it is not at all obvious that you need to add 20 to 12 to get 32. It's only obvious to you and me because we've dealt with equations like that since we were children. But unless you can't just say to a kid "what do you need to add to 12 to get 32" and expect them to know it right off the bat. They could get 12 apples and keep adding to them and counting until they had 32 apples and then check how many apples they needed to add, but that's tedious and impractical. However, that works really well on the smaller scale, because we've all got at least a few fingers to count with quickly.. All this method is doing is splitting it into smaller steps to make it very obvious what's going on. Basically, I just think a lot of the criticisms of Common Core math are rooted in the fact that certain ideas are so ingrained and practiced in us as adults that they seem obvious, when they are not at all obvious to children. To use a bit of a strange analogy, a Greek of Euclid's time would have been completely baffled by our use of symbols to represent numbers, but completely comfortable counting geometrically.

I think some clarification is in order here, at least for my position: I think memorization is a perfectly fine tool for retrieving knowledge - I use it all the time for a lot of the examples that Zeus brought up. However, memorization as pedagogy is pretty terrible. Once you've learned something, memorizing it is fine. But memorization should not be how you learn it. To go back to the Common Core math example, I don't think anyone's saying that older styles of teaching arithmetic were entirely based on memorization. However, that's often what they have to fall back on, because the standard algorithm is super confusing and obfuscating. Subtraction is one that gets brought up in a lot of Internet memes about Common Core, but the fact is that the way I learned subtraction in school makes no damn sense. Look at this image for instance: The "old fashion" way here actually makes far less sense than the Common Core method. It tells us nothing about why 32 - 12=20. It would make even less sense if the question asked for 32 - 13, because then you'd have to get into all the nonsense about "borrowing" numbers. That stuff confused me a lot as a kid and I was always good at math. I think it's that kind of seemingly arbitrary stuff that turned off a lot of people I know from math at a young age. Compare that to the Common Core method and you see how straightforward the latter is. First, it's probably just an expanded version of how you'd teach very basic subtraction. If I wanted to show a five-year old what 9 - 5 is, I'd get them to put 9 fingers up and then put 5 of them down. This is the exact same thing, just reversed and with a few more steps. Moreover, it actually shows at a much more basic level what subtraction is than the standard algorithm - that is, subtraction is the reverse process of addition. It's laid right out. When it comes time to teach these kids more complex algebra, my guess is that it would be a lot easier to convince them that x - y = z is the same equation as x - z = y, because their understanding of arithmetic has the relationship between addition and subtraction at its core. Sorry, that was a bit ranty. That image got shared on my Facebook recently and I've been simmering about it. The point is mostly just that the standard algorithm encourages memorization because of how obfuscating it is. The Common Core method shows the underlying principles a lot more clearly and so memorization is less necessary.

Heck, I wouldn't even write a trivia question that was just about a single date in isolation. It's just a boring way to create a question.

BBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLLLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't want to insert myself too much into this conversation, but I will say, Zeus, that memorization is actually a terrible way of teaching other subjects, such as language or history. Something like spelling, which in most cases is pretty arbitrary, requires memorization, but for subjects that, at a high level, require more critical thinking than memorization, teaching things by rote by start is just going to turn people off.

This is me too, from both Nintendo Power and EGM. There's a ton of SNES-era games that I have nostalgia for, despite never owning a SNES. Likewise for a lot of Playstation and PS2 stuff.

There's liquid water on Mars!

Man, that self-harm comment is especially insulting given that Zoe (and many friends of mine involved in social justice causes) have a history of self-harm.