Dear Asheville-

Despite City Council’s best efforts to ignore, Asheville does have a part of town called “East Asheville” that exists to the eastern side of the beloved West Asheville, the happening East-West Asheville and the canonical Downtown/Lexington Ave area. I love those areas of town. However, we need to talk.

Seriously, there’s more than just a mall over here. There’s the beautiful municipal golf course, the WNC Nature Center (now with two otters!), the VA, great local restaurants and bars, a fantastic dog park, the East Rec Center (better soccer than the world cup) and a ton of good folks. A good number of those folks vote too. I know, I was a precinct chair (now Vice Chair).

So can we start talking about sidewalks now? We’d love to walk more on this side of the Tunnel, but walking is just shy of Russian Roulette (especially for our younger families with strollers looking to put down roots and create a nice tax base for our community’s future).

Thanks-
Sam

The iPad is an especially good reader for @mxnews‘ print publication, which is our local free and excellent weekly (that you can see at MountainX.com).

Don’t tell Jeff, but I actually look at the ads more when they are presented as pixels on my iPad than I do when I view them in print. In fact, I’m heading to Ingles for the 5-for-1 Breyer’s ice cream sale today.

Hulu on my iPad?

Game changer.

Now I can read books, Docs, comics and watch Netflix and Hulu on this device. That is amazing.

Happy 2010.

Beautiful post:

Advice for Teachers Scorned: “‘Go ahead. And good luck. Teaching is an important job. Thank you for doing it in Korea.’”

I need to read up on my Confucius…it has been a while.

What if Google designed a school?

What if Apple designed a school?

What if I designed a school?

Or Options 2, 3 or 4

Option 2:

Option 3:

Option 4 (my fav at the moment):

The font is “Bouncer” from Fenotype. The font has a certain 60′s playfulness that conjures Paul Rand (at least for me).

Each visit is (at least) a twenty minute lesson.

First the Humanities, now the Sciences…

The Real Science Gap | Miller-McCune Online: “America’s schools, it turns out, consistently produce large numbers of world-class science and math students, according to studies by Harold Salzman of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and his co-author, B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies for the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. But the incentives that once reliably delivered many of those high scorers into scientific and technical careers have gone seriously awry.

If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.”

The Business Econ major must die.

He’s discussing design and advertising, but it applies to science equally well:

Paul-Rand.com :: Design and the Play Instinct: “If possible, teaching should alternate between theoretical and practical problems-and between those with tightly stated ‘rules’ imposed by the teacher and those with rules implied by the problem itself. But this can happen only after the student has been taught basic disciplines and their application. He then is able to invent his own system for ‘playing the game’. ‘A mind so disciplined should be both more abstract and more concrete. It has been trained in the comprehension of abstract thought and in the analysis of facts.’”

Fantastic in an Ockham’s sort of way.