RadioFreePirate

Adding to Orangebeard’s earlier post about the school where students run everything:

The school featured in the video is Fairfield School, which is modeled after the Sudbury Valley School in Massachussets, of which there are about 50 worldwide, including one in Japan, where they are being studied as an alternative to the current child-suicide inducing Japanese school model.

Here is an interview with one of the founders of Sudbury Valley School.

Evidently day-to-day management decisions are voted on by the students and teachers, while “broad organizational and fiscal policy” is decided by The Assembly, consisting of students, teachers, all parents and other elected members who make up the board of the non-profit corporation.

I think the school sounds great. I think the only way for educational systems like this (Montessori comes to mind) to become state institutions is for there to be more of them, and to have educational researchers doing studies to show the benefits of adopting them versus sticking with current methods.

There is only one Sudbury school listed in the Midwest, in Springfield, Missouri, and it isn’t scheduled to open until Fall 2006.

We can tack “Be a Sudbury School” on to the list of potential pirate co-op functions.

BoingBoing posted a link to a video about the New American Schoolhouse, where students apparently decide everything, including staff. Anarchy! They call it “democratic” but they don’t really explain how the democracy is maintained without devolving into everyone playing video games all day. I suspect it’s not quite as utopian as the short video suggests. So is this how public schools should work? And if so, how could we possibly transition from the current education system to this? Discuss.

From the land of “Things-That-Everyone-Would-Be-Glad-To-Know-Yet-Oddly-Aren’t-Common-Knowledge”: It turns out that not only do they make you cough, cigarettes also deposit a radioactive isotope in your airways.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commision lists cigarettes as a man-made source of radiation. They contain the radioactive isotope Polonium-210, which is in the calcium phosphate fertilizers used on tobacco crops and many food crops as well.

Here is an adorable diagram of radon from fertilized soil decaying and sticking to a lovingly rendered tobacco plant.

Anyway, the most conservative estimate is that a pack-and-a-half a day smoker receives the equivalent of 300 chest x-rays per year, or 0.01 chest x-rays per cigarette. The least conservative estimate is 20,000 chest x-rays, or about 2 x-rays per smoke.

Here’s a fun article that makes the rounds of the Cannabis liberation websites, full of primary source references to some of the relevant research.

Aren’t you glad to know that? Oddly, it’s not common knowledge!

One pirate says, “Yar, wouldn’t a multi-pirate blog be a worthy endeavor?” And then the other pirate replies, “Aye, didn’t another of the crew speak of this some days past?”

And then the pirates have a confab, and discover that, yes, indeed, they are interested, and yes, indeed, one of the crew did speak of this some days past.

And here we are.