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"Howard Rhiengold, quoting Ernest Hemingway from 1954: "Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him." Have twenty minutes to spare? Even better, have twenty minutes to spare at a staff meeting? Which this video with your staff. Read the accompanying blog post. Talk about the literacies that we need to be helping students in our classrooms to develop."

"When discussing what to eat and how much, people often come to the conclusion "Everything in moderation." This is too vague for me. What exactly is "everything"? Every kind of Drake's Cake and candy bar? There's a lot I could justify with this "directive." Twinkies in moderation? Pop-Tarts in moderation? Ice cream in moderation? I could make an entire "everything in moderation" diet in which I eat nothing but crap.\n\nOf course, this is not what "everything in moderation" means. It means lumping these foods into one category (junk food, or refined carbohydrates, or sugar, or desserts, or processed foods) and taking the whole category in moderation. But what exactly is "moderation"? What, pray tell, would a "moderate" amount of chocolate be? An ounce a day, a week, or only on special occasions? And what would a moderate amount of trans fat be? Aren't some things better avoided altogether, or is this what people mean when they say, "Everything in moderation. Even moderation"?\n\nAnd where did this "Everything in moderation" come from? "

"All day long, people have been telling me about an article headlined: "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." And I've had enough! I'm posting my reaction so that I don't have to keep talking about it. Getting to the point: the piece is crap. But its writer, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, is also a marketing genius. Let me explain…."

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded