NBA, Mr. Sulu, and The Gays

You would think Tim Hardaway would've kept his mouth shut (audio) on former NBA player John Amaechi's recent coming out, if for no other reason than after Mavs' Coach Mark Cuban's remarks about the marketing of homosexuality.

regardless, it makes for an extremely amusing retaliation video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4

Nice quote from Charles Barkley (and blatantly stolen from chen's blog), "no black man should hate a gay man -- how can a black person use the word hate?"

ooh.
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Medieval Muslims made stunning math breakthrough

blatantly stolen.

muslims used to be so cool:

Link

By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be "quasicrystalline" designs, Harvard University's Peter Lu and Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science.

Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry.

more pictures featured Here.

"It is hard to picture," he says, "and it's hard for humans to process these patterns and interpret them."

Which raises the question of whether the medieval artists really understood the math behind their creation.

Some scientists are skeptical. Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist who studies star patterns made by Islamic architects, says that it has not yet been proven that medieval artisans understood the mathematics of their intricate designs.

What It Takes to Make a Student by Paul Tough (New York Times)

NYT article about the education gap between low-income and high-income students (with race often an overlapping issue, since African-Americans and Hispanics in the US are 3x more likely to be in low-income households).

Check it out.

Highlights:

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

[Researchers] found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children's I.Q.'s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What's more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of "discouragements" a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Concerted cultivation, she wrote, "places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents' incompetence and disparage parents' decisions." Working-class and poor children, by contrast, "learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize." But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of "natural growth" disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.

A public school that enrolls mostly well-off white kids has a 1 in 4 chance of earning consistently high test scores, Harris found; a school with mostly poor minority kids has a 1 in 300 chance.

Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor — where excellent teachers are needed the most — just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.

also a pretty cool section on charter schools and their debated effectiveness. really, read the article.

"Half of Your Faith" by Tariq Ramadan

i'm generally not one for the lovey-dovey articles, but this one had some nice quotes (particularly the first one featured below)

Half of Your Faith by Tariq Ramadan

Highlights:

God has given you, as He has given others, noble qualities and intelligence. God has given you, as He has given others, faults and deficiencies. Perfection is not given to you or any human being.

Although it is true that the principles of Islam bring you together, or will bring you together, you must remember each day that the person with whom you share your life comes with his or her own history, wounds, sensitivities and hopes. Learn to listen, to understand, to observe, to accompany.

Remember, brothers and sisters, the last of the Prophets (peace be on him), an example for eternity, so attentive, so tender, and so patient. He did not only remind the Umma of principles, he enlightened with his presence, his listening, and his love.

Before being the mother of his children, his wife was a woman, his spouse, a person he discovered each day, a person whom he accompanied and who accompanied him; subject of his attention, a testimony of his love. He knew the meaning of silence, the power of a touch, the complicity of a shared glance, the pleasure in a smile, and the kindness found in being attentive.

Blahpplications

i don't know what i'm doing with my life. it's very odd.

TMac: 13 Points in 33 Seconds

Dec. 9th, 2004. it's probably *the* reason i started watching basketball again.

In one of the greatest last minute comebacks in NBA History, Tracy McGrady took the Houston Rockets on his back and beat the San Antonio Spurs. This was the game where T-Mac earned his Rockets' uniform.

Be My Anti-Valentine

http://www.meish.org/vd/