Blog Heap of Links for the day 25 July 2011

Obama has lost the youth vote — he just isn't trendy any more. Which is good news for Republicans: President Untrendy gives us a better chance to win. As a generation of media-encouraged Obama idealists has turned economic realists, Republicans can appeal to this age bracket to take the prize next year. [h/t to Cuz BD]

OLD VERSION ... The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold. ... MODERN VERSION ... Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. ...

So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan's programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who've seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it "to stop students from becoming this advanced." This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly. [h/t to Cuz BD]

Early childhood "education"? There's no such thing. Content is everything. The question is, what content are we going to transmit?

Robert Ettinger, who died on July 23 aged 92, was the intellectual father of the cryonics movement, whose members have themselves frozen at death pending scientific resurrection. ... Robert Ettinger will be shipped back to Michigan to join his two wives and his mother in cold storage. He is survived by a son and a daughter from his first marriage, both of whom are active immortalists.

"It's a real catch-22 at the moment: if you decide to go to university and don't work, you leave with qualifications but no work experience and lots of debt. If you opt out of university and concentrate on work, you get plenty of work experience but no qualifications...." "Everything is done online and if I want to do three lectures in a day, I can. I set my own timetable, that's one of the good things about long distance learning."

she chased Vaughn Matthews, a career criminal with a dozen arrests going back 19 years, down a stairwell, but when she tried to get her bag from him, he lashed out, breaking her wrist and punching her in the stomach. That's when O'Brien says she drew on her 3.5 years of kick-box training, leveling a kick at the suspect's shin, shattering it in two places. Officers say they found Matthews, screaming in pain, lying on the street.