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The Oscars: Substance still takes the gold

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Last weekend at the box office, the raunchy little-substance comedy Identity Thief took in a whopping 23.6 million dollars. Much further down the profit totem pole, the four-Golden Globe, eight-Oscar nodded Silver Linings Playbook raked in a mere 6 million. This year's domestic box office hit a record 10.8 billion dollars and the number of tickets ... [Read More…]

Put class before Sing Song acts

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Sing Song is fun. Always a friendly competition, students look forward to the event's outcome because they know if they don't win, some of their friends will, and then everyone is happy. Ideally, that would be the case. Instead, if you didn't know Thomas Hobbes was talking about life, you'd think he was describing Sing Song as "nasty, brutish and ... [Read More…]

Answering the tough questions

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What exactly makes a question hard? 5x^2 + 19x + 12, that's a relatively difficult question. X could be any number of answers. "Are you going on that mission trip?" "Will you buy this house?" "Should we take him off the ventilator?" These questions only have two answers to pick from: yes or no. Why is it when faced with them we are likely to think ... [Read More…]

But I paid for it. How do I not legally own it?

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Remember the old days when we could buy something and then it was ours forever? Thanks to the Internet that time has passed. The first-sale doctrine, legally recognized since 1908, has allowed us to redistribute copyrighted products for decades. Mix tapes, libraries, used video games, gifting Homeward Bound on VHS; none of these things would be ... [Read More…]

Homeschooled, not friendless

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Hi, my name is Lindsay Palmer and I am socially awkward. If you actually know me, then you probably know that isn't true at all. However, what you may not know is that I was homeschooled for all of my life. The only times I stepped foot in a school was for speech therapy when I was 5 and for three months of second grade. In high school, when ... [Read More…]

Best of science still yet to come

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As long as men like Carl Sagan and Neil Armstrong lead the way, the best scientific accomplishments are yet to be had. Wait, what? It seems that both Sagan and Armstrong died without bothering to tell me. The future of space exploration is now a bit more dubious. The era of popular interest in interstellar space travel was during the Cold War, ... [Read More…]

Snow, rain nor heat… except on Saturdays

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Last week, the United States Postal Service announced it will stop delivering first-class mail on Saturday. The new plan will go into effect Aug. 5. In 2012, the postal service reported a $16 billion loss. The postal service is expects the change to save about $2 billion a year, the effect might not last long. After Aug. 5, Saturday mail ... [Read More…]

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