Here’s how you grade a hundred and twenty five papers. Grade five. Take a break. Grade another five. Take a longer break. Repeat.
Really I should be doing yoga or swimming, not looking at any sort of screen at all – but things are a bit slow around here, so …
I like this train. Click link for larger – it’s part of the Field Museum collection.
In other graphical science news, I just finished Atomic Robo Volume 4: Other Strangeness
I’ve been meaning to praise Robo for a while, but I keep not feeling able to extract a single image + goofy scrap of dialogue that conveys how cumulatively and congenially hilarious the whole thing is. The series runs on good, amiably absurd banter
punctuated by technobabble and explosions.
It’s hard to describe in a way that does it enough credit. Because basically it rips off Mike Mignola, up and down. I mean it’s kind of hard to point to any aspect of the writing (Brian Clevinger) or art (Scott Wegener) that doesn’t seem conspicuously Mignola-esque. But in a good way. Because, after all, Mignola can only write Hellboy and B.P.R.D. stuff so fast. And Robo is really so good-natured and affectionate and wholesomely inspired in its uncanny Mignola-worship. Anyway, in volume 3 – Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time
Of course, I also just read Mignola’s own The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects
{ 12 comments }
maidhc 10.07.10 at 9:08 am
Here’s how you grade a hundred and twenty five papers. Grade five. Take a break. Grade another five. Take a longer break. Repeat.
Consider the case when one has to grade an infinite number of papers according to this algorithm.
John Holbo 10.07.10 at 9:25 am
Admittedly, I would need a different system.
Ginger Yellow 10.07.10 at 12:15 pm
…and therefore, the hare will never catch up with his grading backlog.
John Holbo 10.07.10 at 12:20 pm
I suppose an unconscientious grader of an infinite number of papers could just toss them down an infinitely long stairway and thereby produce a suitable distribution. But this would require a strong arm.
mds 10.07.10 at 12:39 pm
…not to mention the hassle involved in picking them up afterwards and putting them in the appropriate pigeonholes.
“Why do we even have the square cube law?” Awesome.
AntiAlias 10.07.10 at 2:36 pm
I like it too.
chris y 10.07.10 at 3:16 pm
It takes no less time or effort to pick up an infinite number of papers from a stairway than it does to grade them the old fashioned way. Infinity’s a bugger like that.
Zamfir 10.07.10 at 3:22 pm
Just use a finite staircase, one step for A , one for B etc. Then pick up all papers on the A step, all on the B step, and you’re finished in hardly any time.
praisegod barebones 10.07.10 at 3:29 pm
In fact, it’s worse than that. It takes a fixed, finite time to pick up each paper from the stairs, so with an infinite set of papers you’re never done.
On the other hand, when you’ve got a large stack of papers you surely get quicker at grading them. Let’s say you take an hour to grade the first paper, and each subsequent paper takes half the time of the previous one. You’re done in two hours.
Infinity’s full of counterintuitve results like that.
John Holbo 10.07.10 at 3:41 pm
“You’re done in two hours.”
Drat. I don’t have enough papers to manage that.
Salient 10.07.10 at 3:53 pm
Drat. I don’t have enough papers to manage that.
To take full advantage of the efficiency praisegod barebones mentioned, you should collect papers without grading them until you have infinitely many.
zamfir 10.07.10 at 4:24 pm
To take advantage of Salient’s system, you need to keep your job while in the collecting phase.
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