No, really. I am a professional writer. I know many people who would love to be writers (or so they tell me at workshops). But one problem is that they are (usually quite properly) occupied with other matters. So they don’t actually write.

One must write a great deal to get good at it (no different from basketball or soccer). But it is difficult to write while standing or running, so take the time to … sit down.

While we are here, talent is vastly overrated. Have you ever heard people complain about all the rubbish that leads in the best seller charts? Well, what does THAT tell you? Those people sat down.

Maybe it would be better if they hadn’t, but here we are. Writing is one game you can only play if you sit down.

As the number of students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) continues to rise, statistics reveal which of these fields guarantee the most success. Surprisingly, those with a biology degree at both the bachelor’s and the master’s level earn below the statewide median. In comparison, there was a “premium for bachelor’s graduates in mathematics, who out-earn biology graduates by more than $20,000 statewide and all bachelor’s graduates by more than $9,000.”

Graduates who majored in nursing, the top-paying program, earn almost three times more than students who majored in biology, the bottom paying program. In fact, “out of the 10 most popular undergraduate majors, biology graduates who enter the labor market lag behind all other graduates.”

Strictly speaking, this isn’t new. “Biology” is a pretty general concept. It won’t make money if it can’t be quantified.

Put another way: Wildlife biologists are famously poor but have you ever tried collecting a bill from a wild animal?

Even the tame ones expect you to treat.

The following Top 20 Careers in the list below take into account the Top 10 Rankings within each of the five Industries analyzed by US News. It also considers the importance of the jobs highlighted in their slide show of a Top 10 Overall slide show on the website and featured as a link from the SimplyHired.com Blog.

Top 20 Hot Jobs for the 2010s

Computer Software Engineer

Systems Analyst

Network Administrator

here.

… the fact that choosing a marketable major came last doesn’t reflect its importance but simply that chronologically it’s often one of the last decisions that students make. I advised my own children not to choose a major that ended with the word studies because it was too vague.

Yes. The worst prime minister in Canadian history ended by reducing her party to two seats in the House of Commons, is almost certainly considered an authority on Canadian Studies. Whatever.

And … ?

has a border with Canada:

“A smart fence, which is what Senator McCain and I want to build–since he’s from Arizona, I think he knows more about this than the Senator from South Dakota who only has a border with Canada and that is quite different,” Landrieu said.

It sure would be different because South Dakota doesn’t have a border with Canada. Here’s a map. North Dakota borders Canada, as one might expect.

About the rest of the information Sen. Mary Landrieu offered, one question is, why is the relationship between Canada and the United States relatively uncontentious but the relationship with Mexico is otherwise? Both countries were formerly involved in wars with the United States (Canadians burned Washington in 1814). It would be worth some study.

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

And he adds,

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Maybe it is still unfolding. What’s uncertain at this point is who will control the Internet, how, and why.

Since the NSA and PRISM scandals broke, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have been soaring. The story of an all-seeing, all-knowing state is suddenly relevant again. Yet long before Orwell focused his literary imagination on official propaganda, he attacked the deceptions of mainstream and partisan media as precursors to tyranny.

It was in Spain, writing about (and fighting in) the Spanish Civil War, that Orwell fully understood the depths to which the media could descend. In his 1942 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell wrote:

By the way, not just in the United States. In Canada, perhaps because the current government is committed to natural resources development, victims of snooping are typically environment activists, not conservative family values types.

How Lincoln was dissed?

Sure, people around the world revere Lincoln today, but in his lifetime the bile poured on him from every quarter makes today’s Internet vitriol seem dainty. His ancestry was routinely impugned, his lack of formal learning ridiculed, his appearance maligned, and his morality assailed. We take for granted, of course, the scornful outpouring from the Confederate states; no action Lincoln took short of capitulation would ever have quieted his Southern critics. But the vituperation wasn’t limited to enemies of the Union. The North was ever at his heels. No matter what Lincoln did, it was never enough for one political faction, and too much for another. Yes, his sure-footed leadership during this country’s most-difficult days was accompanied by a fair amount of praise, but also by a steady stream of abuse—in editorials, speeches, journals, and private letters—from those on his own side, those dedicated to the very causes he so ably championed. George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and diarist, wrote that Lincoln was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.” Henry Ward Beecher, the Connecticut-born preacher and abolitionist, often ridiculed Lincoln in his newspaper, The Independent (New York), rebuking him for his lack of refinement and calling him “an unshapely man.” Other Northern newspapers openly called for his assassination long before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. He was called a coward, “an idiot,” and “the original gorilla” by none other than the commanding general of his armies, George McClellan.

And you have just got to see the graphic of him, in his own day, quivering in a tree, as a frightened racoon.

Yet this man wrote the Gettysburg Address. Stuff to remember when people diss you.

Justice officials say a “sheltered workshop” at Birch where students worked long hours doing manual labor for little or no wages served for years as a “direct pipeline” to the similarly segregated Training Through Placement program.

The key problem might be how to value labor.

From Asia One News:

BEIJING – More than 9 million students packed exam halls across China for the opening day of the country’s university entrance exam on Friday – with attempts to stop cheating even leading to bans on metal bra clasps.

Students in the northeastern province of Jilin were banned from wearing clothing with metal parts and education authorities installed metal detectors in exam centers to clamp down on “wireless cheating devices,” the state-run Global Times reported. More.

My dears, … study. If you would only study, you don’t need to care what people think of your clothes. Albert Einstein was not a fashion plate.