Charter students tops in test scores. File under: least surprising news of the week. More please.

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Sean Thomas Lugano

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Today's the day. Nine years gone and the rest of our lives to go.

This blog honors Sean Thomas Lugano

I knew Sean casually. We went to college together and were on the rugby team together. He was much better than I was. He was very fast and much stronger than he looked. Sean was one of those guys who was reserved but very funny. He wasn't one of those guys who garnered attention by being outrageous or demonstrative. He was just there, always with a smile and quick with a laugh or a joke. He took a lot of flack in college because of his modeling career. He used to model to make money for college and the idea of a rugby player being a model seemed absurd. The only commercial I ever saw him in was for The Gap and ironically, he was playing rugby in the commercial. That seemed to redeem him somewhat in the eyes of his teammates and we didn't rib him much after that.




I didn't know Sean well enough to keep in touch with him after college. Occasionally, I'd see him in th…
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My Entire Career in a nutshell

Obamacare's Big Thinkers Forgot to Bring in the Doers - Bloomberg: "The yawning gap between what the IT people knew and what everyone else seems to have realized is staggering. Now, I’ve worked on some projects in which the business units seemed to have some sort of selective deafness that only materialized when we tried to tell them that they couldn’t have their magic fairy computer system that did everything they could imagine, only better, in the three months they wanted it to take, or for the paltry sum that they were willing to spend. And I learned the hard way not to assume that the business units, or even the chief information officer, had heard and understood what you said. That is how I became gifted in the art of writing CYA memos when I was directed to do the unwise or the impossible. "

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Elevated carbon dioxide making arid regions greener: "Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010."

I have often argued that since CO2 is plant food it cannot be pollution. It merely causes an increase in plant life wherever the CO2 happens to be. IIRC there was a huge spike in ocean algae in the past due to high CO2 levels. The Earth wants to survive. It adapts to do so. It is not static as some would have you believe. It changes. Even when man comes in and screws everything up (c.f. Salton Sea) the ecology adjusts and rolls on. Even Chernobyl is teeming with life. It may be different than it was but life goes on. What is …
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