Jon Negroni, who came up with the idea of a Unified Pixar Universe, has come up with what he and his intern believe is the identify of Andy’s mom in the movie Toy Story.
Even if it isn’t true, the details are there and it’s another thing that makes Pixar great story tellers.
Andrew Whyte takes pictures of Lego Minifigs taking photos of their travels. This has to be one of the most enjoying Lego photography series I’ve enjoyed in a while.
via Neatorama
James Murphy is looking to create a soundtrack for New York’s Subway stations. He proposes using three to five “pleasant” notes that would chime when a MetroCard is swiped (or when the city joins the rest of the world with a tap system).
James has set up a petition on his website to gather support for the project. His project was featured at the WSJ and Observer. Watch the WSJ video and you get a sense for what he’s looking to accomplish.
And of course, you can follow the project on Twitter and Facebook.
Elizabeth Kolbert has a son who should be studying for the SATs. In a edition to this history below, she offers her thoughts (mostly negative) on what the test doesn't do: test cognitive skills and imagination.
“The SATs were administered for the first time on June 23, 1926. Intelligence testing was a new but rapidly expanding enterprise; during the First World War, the United States Army had given I.Q. tests to nearly two million soldiers to determine who was officer material. (Walter Lippmann dismissed these tests as “quackery in a field where quacks breed like rabbits.”) The SAT’s inventor, a Princeton professor named Carl Campbell Brigham, had worked on the Army’s I.Q. test, and the civilian exam he came up with was a first cousin to the military’s. It contained some questions on math and some on identifying shapes. Mostly, though, it focussed on vocabulary. Brigham intended the test to be administered to students who had already been admitted to college, for the purposes of guidance and counselling. Later, he argued that it was foolish to believe, as he once had, that the test measured “native intelligence.” Rather, he wrote, scores were an index of a person’s “schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else.”
By this point, though, the test had already been adopted for a new purpose. In 1933, James Bryant Conant, a chemist, became the president of Harvard. Conant, the product of a middle-class family, was dismayed by what he saw as the clubbiness of the school’s student body and set out to attract fresh talent. In particular, he wanted to recruit bright young men from public schools in the Midwest, few of whom traditionally applied to Harvard. Conant’s plan was to offer scholarships to ten such students each year. To select them, he decided to employ the SAT. As Nicholas Lemann observes in his book “The Big Test” (1999), this was one of those small decisions “from which great consequences later flow.” Not long after Harvard started using the SAT, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale followed suit. More and more colleges adopted the test until, by the mid-nineteen-fifties, half a million kids a year were taking it.”
Thank goodness I took the older version. I'm going to hate it when my son has to take it.
George Takei, yes, that George Takei on Arizona’s proposed ’Jim Crow’ law on LGBTs in the name of “freedom”:
So let me make mine just as clear. If your Governor Jan Brewer signs this repugnant bill into law, make no mistake. We will not come. We will not spend. And we will urge everyone we know–from large corporations to small families on vacation–to boycott. Because you don’t deserve our dollars. Not one red cent.
And maybe you just never learn. In 1989, you voted down recognition of the Martin Luther King holiday, and as a result, conventions and tourists boycotted the state, and the NFL moved the Superbowl to Pasadena. That was a $500 million mistake.
So if our appeals to equality, fairness, and our basic right to live in a civil society without doors being slammed in our face for being who we are don’t move you, I’ll bet a big hit to your pocketbook and state coffers will.
You can add Arizona to a, sadly, growing list of states I refuse to provide tourist dollars in the name of personal freedom, equality, and the 21st century.