6.24.2005
funny
My friend Frank from Princeton (now an assistant prof. at Middlebury) used to be the only math department grad student who was a native speaker of English. As a result, and also because he was an excellent teacher, he won awards for his teaching abilities. For a sense of why, check out this story here. My friend Adam, a standup comic in Baltimore (and also science grad student) does a really funny joke about this.
It rained like crazy today, so I checked out my two online sources for weather in Oxford. First was the Met office, who said that it was raining. Second was Weather.com, which said that it was partly cloudy. Visual confirmation suggests that weather.com was full of it.
But it's an interesting proposition regarding the weather: again, according to the New York Times, the BBC has been getting a lot of complaints about its new weather forecast. Story here. I was particularly amused by the second paragraph: reprinted here in its entirety and without permission:
"We have to be very careful not to make value judgments," Mr. Gibbs said. "If we say, 'It's going to be a fantastically nice sunny day' " - here he mimicked a gung-ho American-style weatherman, perhaps the sort whose on-screen persona might include sunglasses and a "fun" T-shirt - "then we will get letters from people who don't like the sunshine, or who have asthma, or who need the rain because their gardens are dying."
Excellent...
It rained like crazy today, so I checked out my two online sources for weather in Oxford. First was the Met office, who said that it was raining. Second was Weather.com, which said that it was partly cloudy. Visual confirmation suggests that weather.com was full of it.
But it's an interesting proposition regarding the weather: again, according to the New York Times, the BBC has been getting a lot of complaints about its new weather forecast. Story here. I was particularly amused by the second paragraph: reprinted here in its entirety and without permission:
"We have to be very careful not to make value judgments," Mr. Gibbs said. "If we say, 'It's going to be a fantastically nice sunny day' " - here he mimicked a gung-ho American-style weatherman, perhaps the sort whose on-screen persona might include sunglasses and a "fun" T-shirt - "then we will get letters from people who don't like the sunshine, or who have asthma, or who need the rain because their gardens are dying."
Excellent...
