I have copied the precise language below. To be clear, the illiteracy numbers do include people at entry level 1*. If I calculate correctly, the absolute illiteracy percentage falls at 2.4%, and there were another 2.3% completely unable to participate in the survey.
“Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1 ). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills: 26.5 million at level 1 and 8.4 million below level 1, while 8.2 million could not participate in PIAAC’s background survey either because of a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed. These adults who were unable to participate are categorized as having low English literacy skills, as is done in international reports (OECD 2013), although no direct assessment of their skills is available.”
Particularly damning of our educational system:
“By race/ethnicity and nativity status, the largest percentage of those with low literacy skills are White U.S.-born adults, who represent one third of such low-skilled population. Hispanic adults born outside the United States make up about a quarter of such low-skilled adults in the United States (figure 3 ).”
A spider with the scientific name of Anapisona simoni which lives in the rain forests of Central America weighs less than 1 milligram when fully grown. That’s less than a staple or a few centimeters of sewing thread.
Nevertheless, it is able to weave webs and capture prey. To be smart enough to do this, its extra large brain spills out of its head and into its legs.
Players wouldn’t just be building the database from the games they play, though. All of that information is already out there, or the casinos wouldn’t have been able to create that library of races to begin with.
I suppose that accessing that database would require a device of some sort, and using a device to aid in a betting game is actually illegal, so the casinos can have you arrested for it, not just thrown out. I still wouldn’t think they’d want to make it easy, though, because they can’t catch everyone.
Actually, that’s a question: How do casinos police phone use, nowadays? Saying that nobody’s allowed to use their phones on the premises would mean a huge drop in business, because so many folks are so attached to their phones. But allowing phone use would make it easy to cheat on a variety of games.
This came up this morning as I was perusing the news – Julia Chinn, Enslaved Wife of the Ninth US Vice President. I have to admit, I never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson Before. Who the hell knew the name of Martin van Buren’s Veep? Fascinating story. There’s a forthcoming book about her, and evidently a fictionalized version of her life was published two years ago.
By the 1970s, the farm commodity price support programs had the U.S.D.A. storing tons of butter, cheese, peanut butter and all kinds food. A lot of it was disgorged to local school district lunch programs.
That’s how we got those spiffy combination knife-sharpener peanut butter squares. And rectangle pizza slices, oatmeal cookies, etc. The “Government Cheese” meme was born. Supplied in 5lb blocks, it was pretty dense, and even aged in a cave. Made good grilled cheese sammiches.
YIL that Hollywood prop providers maintain contacts with the farming industry to provide them with recently deceased animals. They don’t want any animal that was deliberately killed in order to say no animals were harmed in the production of a movie or TV show so farmers will let them know when they have livestock that died of natural causes that can be used as props.
A few years back it made the news that someone found a couple of +30 year old blocks that had been shoved to the back of a refrigerator. It reportedly had aged quite well.
Before going ahead with production on Spaceballs, Mel Brooks sent over a copy of the script to George Lucas to get his okay (and promise not to sue). Lucas had no problems with the script, with one exception: under no circumstances was Brooks allowed to merchandise the film.
As a parody of sci-fi movies and of Star Wars itself, Lucas could foresee the toys would very much resemble his own line of SW merchandise and he couldn’t have that. In response, Brooks turned it into a joke and liberally peppered in references to Spaceballs merchandise throughout the film.
I’m astonished and ashamed that I didn’t know about her either. The Wiki article helps with the info that she was dead before Johnson became VP and that she almost certainly could pass for white. Therefore Johnson had some plausible deniability when the inevitable scandal rolled over him (as it had done previously as well, though). The other interesting fact I didn’t know is that Johnson was the only Vice President elected by the Senate. Virginia refused to give him its electoral votes, so he didn’t have a majority.
The Wikipedia article makes Johnson a complicated mixture of good and bad, both from our standpoint and that of his time. Just when you think he was better than others of his era (like Henry Clay) he does things absolutely heinous.
Years ago (late 80s, early 90s?) I had a friend who qualified for free government cheese. He would pass some of it on to me; it was large cylindrical blocks of cheddar, medium sharp and slightly greasy as I recall. I seem to remember finding all kinds of uses for it, including grilled cheese sandwiches.
There are some new info boards at Wakehurst Place, Sussex (about 30 miles south of London), put up while the manor house is being renovated. One of them describes the building as “Iconic, but not unique.” Why so? Because James John Van Alen (1846-1923) had an exact copy built in Newport, RI.
It’s harder than you would think to find two displayable images which offer a straightforward comparison of the two buildings. This is the best I could do. One happens to be a link to a YouTube video about the Newport building and it’s history, which was an interesting watch. JJ Van A was a strange guy.
Completed in 1888 for the widowed James John Van Alen (1846-1923). Wakehurst was one of the most ambitious projects of the many mansions built in Newport having been directly modelled on the English manor, Wakehurst Place, built in 1590. Predating many of the better known museum houses (eg. Winterthur etc.), it was Van Alen’s that led the way in America for the concept of “museum rooms”. Wakehurst was built to cheer up a grieving husband, though much as he had loved his wife there was no love lost between Van Alen and his father-in-law, William Backhouse Astor Jr., and a duel between the two (that’s right, pistols at dawn!) was only avoided at the last hour…
What I find strange is that I have been a pretty frequent visitor at Wakehurst (Sussex) for thirty-odd years, and knew nothing of this story until today (!)
