Chez Chesler

The Volokh Conspiracy OK, Barack Obama is a rising star in the Democrat Party. Howard Manly suggests he might be a presidential candidate in 2016. He's brilliant (Columbia "83, Harvard Law School "91 MCL, president of the Harvard Law Review) handsome, and well spoken. And he's got dark skin. Why isn't anyone pointing out that while others certainly perceive him as black-skinned or mixed-race, his experience as the son of a man from Kenya and a white-skinned woman from Kansas, brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, is no more typical of the African-American/Black/Afro-American/Negro/Colored/decendants-of-slaves cultural/ethnic group than is my own, or that of Bill Clinton?

 My children are learning about the six (count 'em, exactly six)  simple machines in school.   Of course the lesson plan got it wrong, the same was as does http://www.mikids.com/Smachines.htm.  A pulley is about mechanical advantages, not changing directions; a wheel-and-axle is a form of lever, not a bearing; a screw is a form of inclined plane, not a fastener.   The plan they used did distinguish that a wedge moves, while an inclined plane is fixed, and it mentioned that screw threads are like inclined planes.   I guess this list of exactly 6 (with three classes of lever; but the three inclined planes broken out, and wheel-and-axle broken out from lever) dates to the Greeks.  Notably absent, especially for fans of Junkyard Wars, is hydraulics.  Hydraulics confer just the same kind of mechanical advantage (less force over more distance) as the classical simple machines.  They ought, in my opinion, to be added to the list.   And that same lack of physics understanding has an exercise in which the correct answer was that a straight slide (sliding pond for us New Yorkers) is faster than a curved line, because a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.  Even the local skateboard park features cycloids, although I don't know if the thrashers understand the brachistochrone problem as well has Herman Melville understood the tautochrone problem .