May 4, 1861, letter from Millard Fillmore to Abraham Lincoln – Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress
Transcription of the letter:
From Millard Fillmore to Abraham Lincoln, May 4, 1861
Buffalo May 4, 1861.
My Dear Sir,
The bearer, Dr. Martin Mayer, a Stranger to me, has asked of me a letter of Introduction to your Excellency, and produced such high proofs of character, that I do not feel at liberty to refuse it; and therefore while I decline any interference, in any appointment he may desire, (which is my uniform practice) I desire simple to ask that he may be heard.
Respectfully yours
Millard Fillmore
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Students would have to find the old photos at the library, or at your local historical association or museum. Most of your students already have the electronic photo equipment though . . .
Biology covers vast fields, with experts in some areas able to spend entire lives without touching other areas of the science of living things.
Working on the effects of climate change, many different areas of biology need to be tapped to figure out what is going on, and what might happen.
Mushrooms, anyone?
Old friend Greg Marley, one of the very few I’d trust to identify edible wild ‘shrooms, presents a session on mushrooms in Maine, tomorrow. Mushrooms had a tough go of it in Maine over the last season. Why? Marley may offer suggestions, you may have some data.
Greg Marley is the author of Mushrooms for Health
In any case, if you’re in or near Brunswick, Maine, this is one of the better things you could do tomorrow; I hear from Marley:
The Maine Mycological Association is holding their second Winter Lecture this Saturday, Jan 30 In Brunswick.
Many people talk about the cold wet year that we just allowed to slip into history. “Boy, it must have been a fantastic year for mushrooms!” they say. Well, in reality it wasn’t. We didn’t see many common species at all or in anything approaching normal numbers. Other species were delayed or fruited in very different habitats that usual. It was a very odd mushroom season.
Greg Marley will be leading a discussion and showing slides of mushrooms fruiting in 2009. We will look at weather patterns and talk about out ideas on what happened and, more importantly, what we can learn from the year’s lessons.
Please come, bring your ideas and opinions along with your mushroom stories from 2009 and join the conversation!
Saturday, January 30. 9-11:30am Free and open to all.
Curtis Memorial Library
Pleasant St
Brunswick, ME
Exit 28 from I-295 onto Route 1 (Pleasant St). At the 3rd traffic light continue straight as Rt 1 bears left. Curtis Library is 2.5 blocks down on the right, across from the Post office.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Angst over the state of education never goes away:
Much more important is the way we seem to have turned away from the very idea of education that sustains a healthy, vibrant liberal democracy. As I write this I am conscious of how unfashionable it sounds. However, there has been a steady erosion of the notion that education can and should fuel our individual ability to think critically about the world as we find it – which requires knowledge and understanding of how the world has come to be. We are swamped with a language of targets, skills and 21st century ‘learning to learn’, but have forgotten what it is that distinguishes learning (a word that now seems to carry huge weight and always deemed a good thing in itself, when clearly it is not) from education. All worthwhile education is, in the end self-education, based on the student’s curiosity, their need to know and readiness to rise to the challenge of finding out. Indeed, offering challenge to young people is one way to motivate them – so different from today’s orthodoxy which says we should make learning accessible, bite-sized and achievable by all.
They aim to “change the perception of recess from free time away from learning to a valuable learning experience that will teach them and will help them cope in all social settings and environments. When children view recess as “free time” they have a tendency to act in a less responsible manner and push the limits of irresponsible behavior. In order to change the perception of recess, children must see that its content is respected and valued.”
The absolute best memories I have of my childhood consisted of me and my sister on the loose in our backyard making mud pies and playing “lost kids”. When I was in college studying early childhood education, I spent countless hours in classrooms learning about how kids learn. Kids learn through play. They just need the resources. The tools. And time.
Well, yeah, that’s what recess is all about, isn’t it?
Kids need recess to stay healthy, the studies show. Recess keeps them healthy. In my corporate consulting, we counseled managers to provide recess. Creativity and corporate problem solving experts, like Dr. Perry W. Buffington, recommend business people take a recess and get away from work for a while when things get tense, or when problem solvers get dense. In one session I watched with Buffington, one manager didn’t get it and kept coming up with all sorts of things to do to avoid taking a recess. Buffington finally spelled it out for him: Get away from the office; make sure that the activity is AWAY from the building . . .
Heck, do they have an “organizational health” survey at that school? The teachers need recess for the kids, too.
PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 2 February 2009, pp. 431-436 (doi:10.1542/peds.2007-2825) (subscription required for full text), “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior,” Romina M. Barros, MD, Ellen J. Silver, PhD and Ruth E. K. Stein, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Rose F. Kennedy Center, Bronx, New York
OBJECTIVES. This study examines the amount of recess that children8 to 9 years of age receive in the United States and comparesthe group classroom behavior of children receiving daily recesswith that of children not receiving daily recess.
That fat pay the denialists keep claiming comes to the scientists, and urges them to misreport the data?
The only remuneration IPCC scientists get – as a quick check of last week’s ad would have made clear — is travel costs and living expenses while they are at IPCC meetings. The IPCC work is on top of their day jobs as academics and researchers.
You know that denialists won’t apply to do the job. Most of us suspect they don’t have the courage of their convictions to do it, but there’s another problem: Very few of them are qualified. They don’t do science.
As of January 26, 2010 9:00 AM MST there have been 1,360 located earthquakes in the recent Yellowstone National Park swarm. The swarm began January 17, 2010 around 1:00 PM MST about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the Old Faithful area on the northwestern edge of Yellowstone Caldera. Swarms have occurred in this area several times over the past two decades.
There have been 11 events with a magnitude larger than 3, 101 events of magnitude 2 to 3, and 1248 events with a magnitude less than 2. The largest events so far have been a pair of earthquakes of magnitude 3.7 and 3.8 that occurred after 11 PM MST on January 20, 2010.
The first event of magnitude 3.7 occurred at 11:01 PM MST and was shortly followed by a magnitude 3.8 event at 11:16 PM. Both shocks were located around 9 miles to the southeast of West Yellowstone, MT and about 10 miles to the northwest of Old Faithful, WY. Both events were felt throughout the park and in surrounding communities in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
Ground deformations in the Yellowstone Caldera, from satellite photos, in 2005 - Geology.com image (This isn't really directly related to the earthquake swarm, but it's a cool image.)
Update, March 12, 2011: This post has been mighty popular over the last week. Can someone tell me, in comments, whether this post was linked to by another site? Why the popularity all of a sudden — even before the Japan earthquake and tsunami? Please do!
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Our local classical station, WRR-101.1 FM promises appropriate playing of his music, even taking requests with that modern device, the internet:
Listen to WRR, Classical 101.1 as WRR plays works exclusively by Mozart, born Jan. 27, 1756. All your favorite symphonies, concertos, opera overtures and chamber works by this musical titan will be spotlighted.
Something from Mozart you’d like to hear? Share it with us at facebook.com/wrr101 and we may add it to the birthday celebration!
Mozart’s stock rose in the 1990s with the production of the play and movie Amadeus! I like to think it rose at least partly because people like his music, too, as this essay suggested way back then:
Turn your channel to PBS, where Hugh Downs or Peter Ustinov is narrating a Mozart special. Turn to one of the commercial channels, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 and “Little” G Minor Symphony K. 183/173dB are selling MacIntosh computers, Don Giovanni gives class to Cheer laundry detergent, The Marriage of Figaro hawks the Sirocco automobile, the Requiem’s Lacrymosa seemingly sanctifies Lee Jeans, and another piano concerto (K. 482) perks Maxwell House coffee. The recovery of a Mozart symphony, even if juvenilia, receives front-page coverage from The New York Times. Dealers and collectors will go to any extreme for a piece of the action; Mozart autographs sell at the same prices as fine paintings, and dealers in one case dismembered the “Andretter” Serenade K. 185, retailing it piecemeal for greater profit. The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni now rival the box-office receipts of La Boheme and Madame Butterfly.
So, what will you do to celebrate?
In a chldren's play, everyone but his sister has forgotten Mozart's birthday. Photo by Chalemie
Invite others to celebrate, too!
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Beyerstein has more details here, here, and here. Astoundingly, the four men appear to have been working to plant bugs in a federally-owned building. That will make it a federal crime, a felony.
It’s a pretty good rundown of the fight between Keynes and Hayek, conducted mostly after Keynes’ death in economics classrooms and central banks world wide.
Especially since they purloined the e-mails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), climate change denialists get bolder and bolder about making wilder and wilder statements of disinformation.
Anyway, Dale Husband takes a harder look at some of the denialist claims. Nils-Axel Morner claims that, contrary to all measures and the actual submersion of islands, sea level rises do not occur. Morner testified to that point to the British government in 2005, according to Dale Husband.
Can you detect the “trick” Morner used to deny sea level rise in his graph?
Morner's "data trick" to show no sea level rise, 2005
Maybe the denialists should just take up yoga. If you stand on your head to look at the charts, they all look different, and the charts showing the temperature rising aren’t quite so scary.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 