MIT Engineers

[eCat]

these have me laughing like Muttley

[youtube]1t2zn7Ve0bw[/youtube]

[10ac]

Discovered a cool factoid recently. If you take 2 pairs of polarized sunglasses and hold them up to light (or the sun) facing each other, and then twist one pair at a 90 degree angle, it goes dark. Something about the way they infuse the lens with vertical strips of fiber...

Why does just the one turned 90 degrees turn dark?

[Bklyn]

hedge disgusts me with his embrace of the bastardized definition of "factoid."

[hedge]

"Why does just the one turned 90 degrees turn dark?"

When I said "it goes dark", I wasn't referring to either pair of glasses, I was talking about one's optical experience at that moment...

[Jungle Rat]

Discovered a cool factoid recently. If you take 2 pairs of polarized sunglasses and hold them up to light (or the sun) facing each other, and then twist one pair at a 90 degree angle, it goes dark. Something about the way they infuse the lens with vertical strips of fiber...

Good Shrooms?

[BigRedMan]

Rat - Adrianne Curry just posted on Facebook about your daughter and the Tool song her class did. She won the first America's Top Model, married one of the Brady boys, and is in general a smoking hot nerd chick that likes video games and sci-fi shit. Not up your alley cause she is not a tranny hooker but she had lots of love for that song.

[Jungle Rat]

Cool.

[eCat]

Bought my daughter a Chromebook for school

This is a pretty big departure from the traditional laptop.

It only has 16gb for a hard drive and it runs Google's ChromeOS which is designed to have very little overhead. So start up takes like 30 seconds and your up and going. Most if not all of your data is in the cloud, not local so this is a machine where you are almost completely dependent on wifi

It has HDMI , USB and and SD slot for expansion. Paid less than $200 for it.

But if all you do is internet based activities - email, twitter, youtube, banking, etc - no video or photo editing, no MS Office Suite, etc then its pretty much ideal.

[SnoodGator]

e I've been using a ChromeBook since December. I use the Google word processor and spreadsheet programs, email, and the browser. Lack of wifi is a nonissue as I have a hotspot on my phone and also access to some international wifi via American Express for free. Not that I use either of those very often because free wifi is most everywhere anyway. My son got it for me and its great.

[eCat]

good, I'm glad to hear it. I could have spent another $80 and got her a low end laptop but this is what her school wants her to have. I think she'll like having something she can legally surf on at school.

[Cletus]

Is your kid going to the fancy high school?

[eCat]

sadly no - turns out our invitation to attend wasn't as exclusive as we thought.

[Cletus]

sadly no - turns out our invitation to attend wasn't as exclusive as we thought.

That's too bad, I guess. Did you decide not to send her there or was the spot not actually available?

[eCat]

sadly no - turns out our invitation to attend wasn't as exclusive as we thought.

That's too bad, I guess. Did you decide not to send her there or was the spot not actually available?

we really didn't get that far - once we realized the open house we went to had about 200 other kids with the same invitation letter as my daughter , my wife and I decided that the odds were much greater than we initially thought for not only getting her in but receiving a financial package where we could make it work. Basically every 8th grader that scored X or higher on the ACT in the area received this invitation letter from them.

[Bklyn]

not to pry, but did you play out the string with it?

[eCat]

no, the open house pretty much wrapped it up for us.

I know we should have pursued it, there really is no excuse but there were a few other things that came into play before we even went to the open house that de-motivated us.

We talked to a guy that used to teach out there but lives down the road from us - he said he'd be concerned our daughter would be singled out a bit for her economic class, we also talked to a counselor who currently worked there and basically said the same thing - and honestly, I was scared of the idea of trying to keep up with the extra curricular expenses once we got the basics covered.

If my wife gets a different job we may consider it. A couple of things have happened with my daughter since then - she was picked to play on the varsity team over the summer (she is an incoming freshmen) which got her really excited and an art teacher has kind of taken her under her wing so school is alot more appealing to her now. She hasn't mentioned the other school since summer workouts began.

no one likes to admit they can't do whats best for their kid, but in this case we were just a fish out of water.

[hedge]

Actually, given everything you said, it sounds like you are doing what's best for your daughter...

[Bklyn]

Yeah, sad how the administration knows elitism is an issue but their way of addressing it is to caution the parents that don't simply write a check for every school need and request. Shit like that makes me angry to my core.

Classism isn't there yet, but it's gaining on racism in the damage it will do to us as a country.

[eCat]

I was feeling a bit guilty for not doing more to address the school. I had some one on one time with my daughter in the car yesterday after a doctors appointment and I asked her how school was going. I can't remember what she said because I was just priming her to get to the next question and I asked her if she thought she'd enjoy school more if she was at Country Day (the high $$$ school). She said "no way, I would really feel uncomfortable around all those rich kids" - so whether she really meant it or not, she gave the old man an out for being middle class.

[Jungle Rat]

You made the right call.