Trump floated that trial balloon a few months back, though currently the administration is proceeding with the much more American plan of widespread voter suppression, intimidation, and bribery, if in the most ham-fisted and unconstitutional way possible.
> Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like.
I haven't calculated a cube root by hand since, what, sixth grade? (It's been so long I don't remember.) I'd hate to spend the mental cycles having to do that kind of task.
From what I know of the Khan approach, it's akin to "flipping the classroom" [0], which has gained pretty wide acceptance. It was pioneered by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur.
(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are </sarcasm>, I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was something we all endured in law school.)
For math and engineering courses, the basic flipped-classroom approach was used at West Point for over 150 years: In the so-called Thayer method, students study textbooks in advance, then in class, they work on problems on chalkboards. The instructor moves from chalkboard to chalkboard, coaching the students in real time. [1]
(I do much the same thing in my contract-drafting classes: In small groups, students do drafting exercises using online whiteboards. I lurk on my laptop, quietly coaching in person as needed.)
"Verbing": For some reason, to me the use of "impact" as a verb has always been fingernails on a chalkboard. But it's hard to see the distinction between that and using "access" as a verb (as in the linked C & H strip), which seems unremarkable.
> "And if you really care about your health you should do them every 3 months to catch problems early!"
When I moved to Houston just after law school, I found a doctor and made an appointment to get a routine physical exam; I hadn't had one since getting out of the Navy three years earlier.
Doctor: So what brings you here?
Me: A triennial physical exam.
Doctor (incredulously): You get a physical exam three times a year?
FTA: "By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term."
FTA: "By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.
"But since Trump said in an interview with Time in 2017 that he told the Navy to go back to “goddamn steam,” top Navy and industry leaders have resisted the move because of the enormous expense to tear out such a complex system that was integral to the design of the Ford class."
> Having done both [software and law], lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words
Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down.
Lawyers who like to tinker with words can fuck things up more often and at greater scale — e.g., by inflicting compulsory burdens and costs on others — than can most programmers. That includes, e.g., contract drafters and litigation counsel, plus lobbyists trying to influence draft legislation and regulations.
I'm not-infrequently dismayed by the quality of the contracts I review for clients because of the "tinkering with words" by the lawyers on the other side of the deal. Back when I did IP litigation, I was sometimes likewise dismayed by the bullshit arguments that some lawyers felt free to make in their court papers because what the hell, the worst that can happen is almost never more than the judge just saying "no." And as mostly a law professor these days, I review court opinions all the time and am regularly amazed how judges (and their law clerks, such as Rayiner used to be) can be so patient in responding to such arguments.
> Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down.
Yeah, at least in litigation you get relatively immediate feedback in the form of a decision. Seems anxiety inducing to me to draft these contracts and have no feedback loop unless something blows up years later.
(Sarcasm noted.) There was a bitter joke about Islamist takeovers by elections after the Arab Spring: "One man [literally], one vote, one time."
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