David Murray

Snow by Claude Monet

Standards based grading: I teach you a set of skills and if you master every one of them you meet expectations. That’s a B. To get an A you have to exceed expectations by being able to apply these skills in a new context, a fairly rare thing to see.

“I regard books in my library in much the same way that a sea captain regards the charts in his chart-room. It is manifestly impossible for a sea captain to carry in his head the memory of all the reefs, rocks, shoals, harbors, points, lighthouses, beacons, and buoys of all the coasts of all the world; and no sea captain ever endeavors to store his head with such a mass of knowledge. What he does is to know his way about in the chartroom, and when he picks up a new coast, he takes out the proper chart and has immediate access to all information about that new coast. So it should be with books. Just as the captain must have a well-equipped chart room, so the student and thinker must have a well-equipped library, and must know his way around that library. I, for one, never can have too many books; nor can my books cover too many subjects. I may never read them all, but they are always there, and I never know what strange coast I am going to pick up at any time in sailing the world of knowledge.” –Jack London

The Black students at Yale are in fact some of the highest achievers in the country. Their scores are in the 95th percentile! Past the 90th percentile they are equally qualified and brilliant.

Good morning from 7 Barrel Ranch. Get out there, there’s work to do. 🇺🇸

CA gets the cold Alaska current whereas Eastern Seaboard gets water from the tropics. As result even Cape Cod has warmer water (at least in August) than LA. California invented surfer/wetsuit culture as a ploy to promote its beaches.

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

Around 90 percent of humans across all cultures strongly prefer their right hand, a level of dominance unmatched by any other primate species. For decades, scientists struggled to explain this striking human exception. A new study now offers a compelling answer, linking extreme right-handedness to two key evolutionary changes: walking upright and the dramatic expansion of the human brain. Researchers examined hand preferences in more than 2,000 monkeys and apes from 41 primate species. They compared these preferences with traits such as brain size, body structure, diet, social behavior, and locomotion patterns. At first glance, humans appeared to be a complete outlier. However, once the team adjusted for brain enlargement and bipedal walking, humans fit neatly into the broader primate pattern. The findings indicate that when early human ancestors began walking on two legs, their hands were freed from the demands of locomotion. This shift created evolutionary pressure for greater hand specialization. Later, as human brains grew larger and more complex, this preference became far more pronounced. The researchers suggest that early hominins such as Australopithecus likely showed only mild right-hand preferences, similar to those seen in modern great apes. Right-handedness then strengthened progressively in the Homo lineage, including in Homo erectus and Neanderthals. One notable exception was Homo floresiensis, the small “hobbit” species from Indonesia. Because it retained a smaller brain and more arboreal adaptations, scientists predict it had much weaker right-hand dominance. While the persistence of left-handedness throughout human evolution remains unexplained, the study proposes that one of humanity’s most familiar traits largely emerged from two transformative changes: standing upright and developing larger brains. [Püschel, T. A., Hurwitz, R. M., & Venditti, C. (2026). Bipedalism and brain expansion explain human handedness. PLOS Biology, 24(4), e3003771. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003771]

Good illustration of ejection seat technology: Look at where the rockets on the seats fire. Both jets are inverted when the ejection is initiated, so the seat should fire the pilots straight at the ground… But they are smart. They fire enough to clear the jet, then re-orient themselves & fire enough to slow the descent. Once they do, the seats cut the occupants loose from the straps & deploy the parachute. Look where the parachutes deploy in relation to the jets. Absolutely incredible technology!