Shack Attack

TaskRabbit: One-off Personal Assistants for City Folk

Last night, a friend told me he's been part-timing for TaskRabbit, a service that connects people with free time with people who need stuff done. How it works (according to the site):

1 - Sign up and post! When you post a task, you'll describe it, indicate when it needs to be done & set the price you'll pay.

2 - Like magic, you'll hear from a runner who wants to help. They may accept your price or counter with a price they believe is appropriate.

3 - Your runner does your task! If your runner pays for anything while doing your task (like groceries they pick up for you), you can reimburse them through our site.

4 - Once your task is complete & you have paid your runner, you rate them to indicate your level of satisfaction.

He's delivered urgent mail, picked people up from the airport, bought groceries and supplies, and done other miscellaneous gophering tasks, for an average of $12-20 each.

If you sign up with this link, you get $10 to spend free on the site, which is probably enough (or almost enough) to get a runner in your area to do something for you. Pretty cool! Need some OJ from the store? Find a restaurant for a date? Have someone come to your house and help you with minor computer frustrations? Go spend your free money.

The Human Body and Energy Equilibrium

Heard some woman at the supermarket yesterday obsessing over the number of calories in some crackers. Made me think of this:

Let’s say there is a person whose caloric intake is 2700kcal per day, which is quite the likely number. 2700kcal/day makes a total of 1000000kcal per year. That’s 10 million kcal in a decade or roughly 12 tons of food.

For a person to keep his weight within 5kg in the course of a decade he must have an accuracy in controlling energy intake and expenditure of 0,4% or 11kcal/day.

Having this kind of accuracy is impossible. 11kcal is the equivalent of a medium sized fart. What this shows, is that it is highly unlikely that energy balance is matter of cognitive control. We cannot tell people to count calories because it rests on an assumption of an inhuman accuracy equivalent to that of a very, very accurate machine.

via a great post on human metabolism at Ramblings of a Carnivore. It's more or less a restatement of Gary Taubes' ideas, but they're ideas worth restating.

"Sir, You're Just Yelling. You're Not Even Having a Conversation."

Oh lordy...it's like I don't even need the Daily Show anymore. How dare this uppity CNN reporter ask for evidence of the terror-baby conspiracy? He's attacking the messenger! Long video, but it's worth watching at least the first half.

via The Agitator

Student Teaching vs. Lead Teaching

Student teaching (at least for TFA folks):

"Here's your unit. Make a lesson plan for each objective, then teach one a day. If you want to get fancy, you can combine or cut a couple here and there."

Lead (ie normal) teaching:

"Here are your 150 kids. Teach 'em good."

Schoolteachers have far more flexibility and responsibility than I anticipated. Do you use the textbook? Create your own materials? How should units be divided and arranged? Strategies that worked with 30 students are often impossible when scaled up to 150, across 2 or more subjects.

That said, things are moving along. My kids are bright and wonderful (even the high-energy ones), and the Aptos staff and faculty is great, too. I think this is going to be a good year.

 

Standing and the Prop 8 Decision

No one, no indi­vid­ual or group, can show that they’re harmed by per­mit­ting gay men and women to marry, while those cou­ples can eas­ily show they’re harmed by pro­hibit­ing their mar­riage. You often hear argu­ments tossed out of the form “how does two men/women mar­ry­ing hurt you?” as if that ques­tion is sup­posed to incline you to sup­port or per­mit gay mar­riage based on a min­i­mal­ist “it’s none of my busi­ness” ethic. And some­times that feels a lit­tle unsat­is­fy­ing, because “it doesn’t hurt any­body” is a pretty thin grounds for sub­stan­tive accep­tance and equality.

But that’s not what it’s for. In a very real sense, it’s about estab­lish­ing whether or not some­one has the right to speak for or against a legal deci­sion. And that, ulti­mately, is how the law is shaped.

 

The full post on SnarkMarket has a great explanation of why this concept is so important.