Would you give a three-year old child a knife to play with? Well, maybe not to play with, but to work with? Definitely. Nathanael Johnson at Grist rounds up the arguments in favour of teaching children knife skills, as part of cookery skills, which, of course, are survival skills. Johnson thinks that the lack of overt hostility to an article by Sarah Elton advocating just that "signifies a tipping point in American culture" (conveniently annexing Canada for the sake of his argument).
The insoluble mystery -- is one home on the internet better than several -- continues to puzzle me. It came up in discussion on ADN, without any resolution. The reason I have several homes is that perhaps people who are interested in bread aren't interested in podcasts, and vice versa, while maybe...
This morning I went for a dawdling walk to play with my new toy: an adapter that lets me put my old, manual Minolta lenses on my shiny, automatic Sony camera. (There's a set on Flickr, completely unprocessed, if you want to see more). It was fun, for all sorts of reasons. Like, having to fiddle with aperture, shutter speed and focus. The camera does a brilliant job automatically, but it is also gratifying to make decisions.
I've always hated a certain word-processing package, because it is is just too complicated and powerful for most people. Would you let a kid play with an automatic assault weapon? 1 And yet people daily do untold harm by their uninformed use of this particular tool. That's just one example though. There are lots of others, in software and in real things, although many of the overcomplicated real things have software at their heart, I suspect.
On the steps down from Monteverde Vecchio to the Viale Trastevere, an enterprising chemist has created an outdoor billboard. "The best stuff in Rome," it says. I cannot vouch for that, nor for the accuracy of the formulae.
