Where's Santa?


At Serendipity35, we still believe that Santa Claus is alive and well in the hearts of people throughout the world. And what more evidence do you need than the fact that NORAD is using its super-high-tech equipment to track his Christmas deliveries. Santa's sleigh and reindeer show up quite clearly on their radar.

Every year, we follow the Countdown to Christmas Eve which started on December 1st and will continue throughout Christmas Eve.

You and any other kids in the room can track Santa live as he makes his journey around the world. You can also watch videos from NORAD Santa Cams of Santa and his reindeer.

I know what you academics are thinking. If Santa's list gets bigger each year (check out the world’s population right now) and Santa has to deliver more toys in the same amount of time, according to NORAD's calculations, he would have to limit each of his stops at homes to two to three ten-thousandths of a second per home.

And yet, for 16 centuries he has been getting the job done.

There's only one logical explanation: Santa's 24 hours are not the 24 hour day we operate within. Santa functions within a different time-space continuum than the rest of us.




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Where's Santa?



At Serendipity35, we still believe that Santa Claus is alive and well in the hearts of people throughout the world. And what more evidence do you need than the fact that NORAD is using its super-high-tech equipment to track his Christmas deliveries. Santa's sleigh and reindeer show up quite clearly on their radar.

Every year, we follow the Countdown to Christmas Eve which started on December 1st and will continue throughout Christmas Eve.

You and any other kids in the room can track Santa live as he makes his journey around the world. You can also watch videos from NORAD Santa Cams of Santa and his reindeer.

I know what you academics are thinking. If Santa's list gets bigger each year (check out the world’s population right now) and Santa has to deliver more toys in the same amount of time, according to NORAD's calculations, he would have to limit each of his stops at homes to two to three ten-thousandths of a second per home.

And yet, for 16 centuries he has been getting the job done.

There's only one logical explanation: Santa's 24 hours are not the 24 hour day we operate within. Santa functions within a different time-space continuum than the rest of us.


Follow the action on Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter too.




Professor Gingrich Goes Online

From Inside Higher Ed, comes this interesting but almost frightening electionland news...
Of all the campaign promises made so far in the Republican primary, one of the most unexpected has come from the former speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich: If elected, he will teach a free online course from the White House, returning to his roots as a college professor.

With two weeks remaining until the first votes are cast at the Iowa caucuses, it’s unclear how long Gingrich will maintain his status as front-runner in the topsy-turvy campaign for the Republican nomination -- let alone whether he will serve as professor-in-chief.

Still, Gingrich is unusual in the Republican field in his ties to academe and his choice to emphasize his academic background. He is the first major candidate from either party in decades to hold a Ph.D. His history dissertation, written 40 years ago, has attracted a spate of media attention. A supporter of expanding federal spending on scientific research, Gingrich has already proposed a few specific, if perhaps far-fetched, ideas for reforming higher education nationwide.

“We're at the beginning of a period of disruptive reform, and one of the disruptive places will be education,” Gingrich said at a College Board forum in October.




An Email Charter

email
Reading and replying to email requires a lot of time. Smartphones and texting may be the thing now, but email is still the killer app, especially in the workplace.

I recently saw that Chris Anderson (WIRED editor, author, TED conference guy) created an "Email Charter" and posted 10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral. He figures that you can't solve this problem acting alone - despite lots of articles about how to have a "zero inbox". He thinks we need to change the ground rules. He is particularly perturbed by email that takes more time to respond to than it took to generate.

I also saw a response to the Charter by The New York Times’ technology columnist, David Pogue, who admits to his own public-figure email problems, but also sees changing other people's habits as the only workable solution.

I agree but I'm less than confident that we can change the world than I was as a college sophomore. Still, I am a lifelong teacher, so here is my list culled from their lists (see, I'm already saving you time) of things we all can do that will help the problem.


  1. The big goal is to minimize the time your email will take to process and that does require taking more time at your end before sending.

  2. It's OK if replies take a while coming and if they don't give detailed responses to all your questions

  3. Clarity - use relevant subject lines - and change them when the conversation changes

  4. No odd fonts and colors

  5. Avoid open-ended questions (Status? Thoughts? What's next?) These short queries require a lot of time to answer. Administrators seem to like them. ("How can we use social media effectively? Thoughts?)

  6. Think twice on cc's - at work, they are often cya's (Cover Your Ass) but it fills other inboxes and increases the chance of you getting multiple replies

  7. Think three times before you click "Reply All" Wow, can you get in trouble doing that too quickly!

  8. Cut the thread - the thread is all of those earlier emails that are at the bottom of your mail. If there are more than three, maybe you need to make a phonecall or visit their office (especially when the person you're mailing is in the same office/building)

  9. Graphics files (logos, signatures) that appear as attachments suck.

  10. Why do I have to open a Word or PDF file attachment to read something that could have been in the email itself?

  11. Trim your signature lines - I get ones that are quite a bit longer than the message. You can have different ones and you probably don't need to send everyone your fax number or include Bible quotes. David Pogue calls those legal disclaimers that some companies use "Legal Vomit". Has that silliness ever protected a company from anything? They are like the tags on mattresses that say "Don't remove this tag".

  12. How about ending a note with “no reply necessary” so that's clear? Maybe we can make NRN a popular shortcut.

  13. If you really must blast out a message (or joke or whatever) use BCC and protect your friends' e-mail address and privacy. Those mails get forwarded and eventually someone scrapes those addresses for spamming or hits "Reply All" to tell you (and now all 35 of the rest of us) that they are ROFL.

  14. And about those Forwarded mails... get rid of the carets (>>>>>>) and earlier parts of the thread. Remember when people passed jokes along in the office by photocopying the photocopy? By copy number 25, bits of dust were the size of letters. Carets are the dust motes of electronic mail.

  15. And was that really worth forwarding? If you had to pay for a stamp to forward it, you probably would forward about 1% of the things you pass along electronically.

  16. When replying to that email that has multiple statements or questions, you can reply inline - hit the Return after each one and type your answer there, creating a little dialogue. (Some people use bold, caps or colors, but a line return or two should be sufficient).


The Email Charter says that "If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email" and that's true. It also suggests that we consider "calendaring half-days at work where you can't go online" which is much more difficult. If the Internet goes down at the college where I work, I feel like we should send everyone home as you hear the work gears grind to a halt.

Email-free weekends are a nice idea. Unfortunately, they lead to stuffed-inbox Mondays...