Curren events

I was surprised (but realize I shouldn't have been) to hear on TV this morning that the manhunt for those two escaped killers is costing $1 million a day. There's a reason for that:

Sorry, fad-a-day education "expeerts," it's still memorization and repetition we need.

Time after time, professors in mathematics and the sciences have told me that building well-ingrained chunks of expertise through practice and repetition was absolutely vital to their success. Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding. In fact, I believe that true understanding of a complex subject comes only from fluency.

This is the best argument against the death penalty, stemming from the one thing people on all sides of the debate should be concerned about:

CORSICANA, Tex. — For more than 20 years, the prosecutor who convicted Cameron Todd Willingham of murdering his three young daughters has insisted that the authorities made no deals to secure the testimony of the jailhouse informer who told jurors that Willingham confessed the crime to him.

With Tim Russert as the host, NBC's "Meet the Press" was a strong No. 1 among the Sunday talk shows. Under David Gregory, it's a dismal third and still sliding, and the network hotshots are in a panic:

Remember the simpler days of retailing years ago when a company would offer a product or service and people who wanted that product or service at the stated price would patronize the company? Nowadays the retailers get so easily distracted and customers so easlily annoyhed. First of all, let's never, ever offend the Muslims:

Today's entry for the "well, duh" file:

To figure out which countries dislike the U.S., one quick way is to simply look at which ones are getting the largest dollops of U.S. aid.

This wasn't the focus of a . But it did emerge when Pew spoke to people in 39 countries about the U.S. and China, asking respondents if they had a favorable view of these two countries.

Oh, yeah:

There, of course, have been awful weeks before, terrible tragedies, death, war, uncertainty, raw fear.

But this time, in our full-on, post-Sept. 11 surveillance society and freshly Twitterized media, we were able to experience each event in excruciating, exquisite detail.

Hooray for the Koch brothers. Maybe they can save this industrry, or at least put off its demise:

I love it when the falling-off-the-left-edge-of-the-world Journal Gazette editorial page instructs someone on how to be a proper conservative:

Hoosiers probably aren’t surprised that Sen. Dan Coats now opposes the same type of assault weapons ban he supported two decades ago. But his attempt to block the Senate from voting for or against the ban is anything but conservative.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Congrats are in order for Jim Nabors. And from the sound of it, they're long overdue.

The actor, known for playing Gomer Pyle in the 1960s on The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., has married his male partner of 38 years.