Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“I wonder how many people don’t get the one they want,
but end up with the one they’re supposed to be with.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

“Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life
with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down;
perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through
quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose,
until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart
its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music …”
– L. M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables

There’s so much to say about revising. Even though I’ve just published a book on revising – shameless plug – I still have things I want to say about it.

The key message in the book is that revising effectively requires you to need to read through your text with purpose, have something in mind. A focus. Rather than just pick up the text and read, waiting to see what jumps out at you, it’s very helpful to approach your draft with a question in mind. In fact, I suggest that it can be pretty useful to read your text through several times, looking for different things each time. Looking for one thing at a time means you caconcentrate on that thing alone and not get distracted by other issues. 

One of the very first things to look for – and you’ll see I have written a little chapter about…

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions. The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. … The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period: Speakeasy, developed in 1964 at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Stanley Cohen, is an OOPS (object-oriented programming system, much like the later MATLAB, IDL and Mathematica) numerical package. …

Writing in the Tampa Bay Times, journalist Jeff Solochek reports that the College Board released a letter last night denouncing the Florida State Department of Education. The College Board says it was naive in trusting the latter agency, which wanted to score political points.

Taken aback by Florida’s attacks against its new AP African American studies course, the College Board late Saturday denounced the state Department of Education, saying it used the course to advance a politically motivated agenda.

The organization’s letter, published at 8 p.m. Saturday, came just two days after it released another statement that did not take such a harsh tone as it pushed back against the department’s claims that portions of the course are “historically fictional.”

“There continue to be conversations and misinformation, and we felt the urgency to set the record straight and not wait another day to do so,” a College Board spokesperson…

The College Board released this letter last night. It seeks to demonstrate that it did not cave in to Florida’s demands. It does not explain why all of Florida’s targeted names and topics were deleted.

Our commitment to AP African American Studies, the scholars, and the field

COLLEGE BOARD COMMUNICATIONSFebruary 11, 2023

Our commitment to AP African American Studies is unwavering. This will be the most rigorous, cohesive immersion that high school students have ever had in this discipline. Many more students than ever before will go on to deepen their knowledge in African American Studies programs in college.

Teachers and students piloting this course are everywhere voicing their enthusiasm for the discoveries they are making. They are thriving in the openness and respect of the classroom environments they have built.

There is always debate about the content of a new AP course. That is good and healthy; these courses…

Linda Lyon, former president of the Arizona School Boards Association, writes in her blog “Restore Reason” about the newly elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who held the same office from 2003 to 2013.

He intends, she says, to stop “critical race theory” and “social-emotional learning.” He seems to think that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are nothing more than left wing propganda. He’s a get-tough guy who will crack down on students and teachers.

She writes:

You’ve heard it said that an old dog can’t learn new tricks. AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is the living embodiment of this saying. His campaign gave us a preview that he was not going to change his ways. After all, he didn’t tout plans to improve our public schools (he was vying for the position overseeing “public” instruction after all), but rather, posted countless campaign signs shouting, “STOP CRITICAL…

“In the last 10 days I have read about 20 sophisticated articles analyzing the results of the 1968 elections. Most of these pieces of punditry contained the same two assumptions — which I believe are misleading, and perhaps paralyzing, illusions. One is that the election returns are proof of a sharp veering to the right by the electorate. And the other is that the future hope of liberal politics rests with the ‘new politics’ Democrats. I disagree with both these interpretations. First, George Wallace ran much weaker than most of us anticipated. He carried only five Southern states, for a total of 45 electoral votes. He failed to get the bit white working-class vote in the industrial backwaters of Gary, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. And he did not carry any of the border states such as Kentucky, Maryland, or Texas, that his supporters hoped he would. Second, most of the…

“… I’m a theater guy. In my field, in my business, when a character addresses the audience, there are two options: he or she is on the stage itself, in front of us, telling a story (see Our Town, Swimming to Cambodia), or the character is speaking to us from a specific place and time other than onstage and right now. The actual actor is always in the present, on the stage, but the character, more often than not, is somewhere else—some other location at some other moment—addressing us from there. Someone once excitedly told me about seeing a play by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, one in which a guy tells his long, crazy story directly to the audience and then, at the end, puts on a necktie. Suddenly, the audience knows he’s going out, or going to court, or wherever. The reveal is that he is not…

“The Beatles made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, including three in February 1964 that were among their first appearances in front of an American audience. Their first appearance, on February 9, was seen by a then-record 73 million viewers and came to be regarded as a cultural watershed that launched American Beatlemania—as well as the wider British Invasion of American pop music—and inspired many young viewers to become rock musicians. The band also made another appearance during their 1965 U.S. tour. Ed Sullivan Show talent booker Jack Babb saw the Beatles twice in concert in the UK in 1963, after being invited by Peter Prichard, a London talent agent who was also friend of Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Babb was initially uninterested in booking the group for the show, as British musical acts at that time experienced little commercial success in the U.S…