Lincoln quote sourced: Calf’s tail, not dog’s tail

May 23, 2007

It’s a delightful story I’ve heard dozens of times, and retold a few times myself: Abraham Lincoln faced with some thorny issue that could be settled by a twist of language, or a slight abuse of power, asks his questioner how many legs would a dog have, if we called the dog’s tail, a leg. “Five,” the questioner responds confident in his mathematical ability to do simple addition.

Lincoln Memorial statue, profile view

Sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial. National Park Service photo.

“No,” Lincoln says. “Calling a dog’s tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.”

But there is always the doubt: Is the story accurate? Is this just another of the dozens of quotes that are misattributed to Lincoln in order to lend credence to them?

I have a source for the quote: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by distinguished men of his time / collected and edited by Allen Thorndike Rice (1853-1889). New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1909. This story is found on page 242. Remarkably, the book is still available in an edition from the University of Michigan Press. More convenient for us, the University of Michigan has the entire text on-line, in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, an on-line source whose whole text is searchable.

However, Lincoln does not tell the story about a dog — he uses a calf. Read the rest of this entry »

46 Comments | Abraham Lincoln, Accuracy, Famous quotes, Good Quotes, History, On-line education, Quotes | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Mining the Internet Archive: Tobacco, history and controversy

May 22, 2007

European Union rules require member states to do something about indoor air pollution. European states are banning smoking in public places. Gone soon will be days when we can joke about Britons and their Player’s cigarettes, or the French and their Galois habits.

Every once in a while as I recount the great Tobacco/Health Wars, my kids remind me that they never saw a cigarette commercial on television. Once, we caught a showing of past ads, and I was truck nostalgic by Fred Flintstone’s testimony for Winston cigarettes — the kids gasped: “Fred Flintstone used to smoke!”

Everybody smoked, once upon a time, it seemed. 1940s and 1950s magazines have ads in which doctors and athletes claim cigarette smoking is either unharmful, sheer pleasure, or even health promoting. Got a cigarette cough? Switch to menthol cigarettes! Mouth burns? Try a filter cigarette.

Today, kids wonder why Virginia did so well selling tobacco to Britain — who in their right mind would have smoked? they ask.

The Internet Archive has an abundance of film material on tobacco. The films come from the University of California – San Francisco: Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Business Ethics, Current History, Dissent, Economics, First Amendment, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Geography - Physical, History, History Revisionism, History video sources, Hoaxes, Movies, On-line education, Politics, Public health, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Geography learning, on-line

March 22, 2007

Do your students have access to computers?

Test Your Geography Knowledge may seem a little elementary; alas — or maybe “hooray!” — it goes over exactly the sort of simple stuff I find too many high school students don’t have:  Basic political geography.   It beats Microsoft’s solitaire for in-class timewasting.  (This is a show-off site for a programmer and company, Lizard Point; look at other stuff at the site, and think of what you can do with it.)

That site has a link to Quiz School.  On-line quizzes, that you invent, that you can put into your classroom weblog — wonderful idea.  What can you do with this tool?  (It wouldn’t hurt you at all to post links to your quizzes here, would it?)

Back to geography:  You’ll also want to check out Sheppard Software, and the collection of geography games there.  The variety of games is quite outstanding — I even found one related to forestry.

Tip of the old scrub brush to SSBG’s blogroll.

1 Comment | Education, Education blogs, Geography - Political, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

$100 laptop idea rolls on

January 5, 2007

One of its architects, Seymour Papert, lies in a Boston hospital (but out of intensive care) recovering from a head injury suffered in a collision with a motorbike in Hanoi in early December, but the idea of equipping tens of millions of students around the world with inexpensive, wireless-ready laptop computers continues to roll towards implementation.

The Christian Science Monitor carries an editorial more full of hope than opinion, on January 5, 2007, about the computer project. The laptops have been dubbed “XO.”

For billions of parents who earn only a few dollars a day, paying for a child’s education – books, etc. – often gets neglected. Many simple solutions that break that cycle of poverty have been tried and have failed. Now another one is on the horizon: a “$100 laptop.”

While noting past errors in sending technology to the third world, the Monitor cites some numbers from implementation that are quite dramatic, if accurate: Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | Classroom technology, Education, On-line education, On-line learning, Public education, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, XO laptops | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

An MIT education, on-line

September 26, 2006

Occasionally we visit the use of technology in education. It seems to me that our technical acumen far outstrips our serious application of technology to learning, and we should be trying to close the gap.

MIT offers OpenCourseWare, which is a large catalog of offerings, on line. It is a step towards realizing the potential of on-line learning:

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

MIT OCW:

  • Is a publication of MIT course materials
  • Does not require any registration
  • Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
  • Does not provide access to MIT faculty

Historians, especially teachers wishing to crib for great syllabi, will want to look at offerings like the courses from Pauline Maier. Economists should explore offerings in economics, too.

Leave a Comment » | Economics, History, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

E-learning courtesy

August 21, 2006

Setting up the on-line portion of a college course is rather new.  I found this ancient-by-internet-terms Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art suggests students need to show manners and sense in e-mailing professors, in a well-crafted post, How to e-mail a professor. 

The comments provide good advice for professors, too.

Leave a Comment » | Education, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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