This page gives my possible career paths as:

Clergy / Religious Work
Teachers
Medical Doctors / Dentists
Alternative Health Care Practitioners, i.e. Chiropractor, Reflexologist
Psychologists
Psychiatrists
Counselors and Social Workers
Musicians and Artists
Photographers
Child Care / Early Childhood Development

I’m really enjoying teaching yoga. It’s deeply satisfying in a way that neither science nor programming are. I wonder what my 18-year-old self’s type was?

Look at this one!

“Associations with a :through option can now use any association as the through or source association, including other associations which have a :through option and has_and_belongs_to_many associations.”

From the API Documentation (search for “Nested Associations”)

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :posts
  has_many :comments, :through => :posts
  has_many :commenters, :through => :comments
end

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :commenter
end

@author = Author.first
@author.commenters # => People who commented on posts written by the author

or equivalently

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :posts
  has_many :commenters, :through => :posts
end

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments
  has_many :commenters, :through => :comments
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :commenter
end

The associations are read only:

When using nested association, you will not be able to modify the association because there is not enough information to know what modification to make. For example, if you tried to add a Commenter in the example above, there would be no way to tell how to set up the intermediate Post and Comment objects.

so you can’t do @author.commenters << Comment.new, but still this is a nice savings for some deeply nested associations that I’ve been dealing with lately.

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

The only thing that matters is the test, and doing well on the test is a matter of memorizing a number of decontextualized facts. The worst affect by far of the exam system is that it creates a distorted and poverty stricken idea of what education is and how to engage in it. These students hunger for real engagement, real knowledge, real education, but they don’t know what it is or how to look for it.

The thing that bothers me more than anything else, though, is that the educational system in the U.S. is being pushed down the same road. The increasing emphasis on standardized testing, something which teachers almost universally deplore, is leading to the Sinification of American education. If things continue in the direction they are going, the U.S. will soon have a system that is just as rigid and anti-creative as China. From having taught in both places, I think the U.S. is already well on its way.

From that point, my mind can go a hundred directions.

For some reason, today, it went to national security. Our educational system has already failed us, with catastrophic consequences for national security. Somehow we were presented with a pastiche of fact about Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction, and threats to our national security and neither average Americans, nor elite-educated Americans, were able to shift fact from fiction in any significant numbers.

How many facts does one have to memorize in order to develop the discernment to note that the “facts” one is being presented, have no basis in fact? Or perhaps more correctly, how many “facts” does one have to memorize in order to lose the discernment that those facts have no basis in fact?

Asked for his reaction to Bush’s decision [not to pardon Scooter Libby] Cheney said: “Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and honorable men I’ve ever known. He’s been an outstanding public servant throughout his career. He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”

via Cheney Speaks Out on Libby.

Let’s see, who has Dick Cheney known in his life? Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, David Addington, Lynne Cheney, The American Enterprise Institute, Halliburton, William Kristol, the Project for the New American Century.

Yeah, I guess compared to that lot, being a convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements is “capable and honorable”.