I agree with you, and I would like to see a chart of ratio of gun violence to gun owners, that would be interesting.

The difficulty with trying to compare a country that has strict gun control with the US is that most of the countries that have it also have different demographics or a smaller population. That said, the stark contrast to me comes in the rate of firearm deaths between the US and the Uk. The US has a rate of about 10.5 deaths per 100,000 people, while the UK is something more like .25 per 100,000 people. Granted, that is in a smaller population, but the fact is that gun violence occurs less when there are fewer guns.

This video floated around my social networks a couple of weeks ago, and I LOVED it. As a music education major what Sir Ken says about stigmatizing what people are good at really hits home.

I think this is a fair assessment. I would say that any post-high school training could be approached this way, and that is what I wish more people were open to. I think society needs to rid itself of the "Oh, you're a trucker? You must have been too dumb for college." type of stigma. My father-in-law had a master's degree in electrical engineering and held contracts with NASA for his optical systems, but he went out and got a CDL and drove trucks for a while because he had always wanted to. I often wonder what people in gas stations thought of him when he was on a trips, no way did they know that he was an expert in holography, or lidar, or that he had developed the optical disk used in IBM's first barcode scanner. Einstein was a patent clerk, kind of unassuming.

I think this is a good article, and I do agree there is a wealth gap at play here, but I think that there are bigger problems surrounding college debt and how we go about receiving training or requiring training for jobs. A big part of the reason that students are unable to pay of their debt after college is that they can't find a good job in their field of study. There was a time when you could drop out of high school, get a job, and hold that job and earn a decent living to feed your family. Younger kids could apprentice with mechanics, carpenters, contractors, etc. and learn a trade that they could use. While there are still some opportunities in the US for young people to do this, these jobs do not provide the same sort of lifestyle they once did.

While I think that college education is a good thing, I also think that it has become very idealized, like if you go to college you will automatically have a better life. My little sister hated school, didn't want to go to college, so she went to a trade school, trained to be a dental assistant, and now she works in the office of an oral/facial surgeon, makes a pretty decent living combined with her husband's wage from the grocery store where he works, and without going to college, or even incurring a large debt.

So basically, I think that college is a good thing, and I think that anybody who really wants to go to college should have the opportunity, however, I think that the US needs to rid itself of the stigma that has developed around jobs that do not require a college degree, and trade schools should be utilized more than they are. They can even help a kid get certified for a great job they can hold while going to school.

No, I think Helm's Deep was kind of exaggerated as well. Jackson loves to go big, but sometimes exercising restraint is just as much of an art in filmmaking.

Honestly I felt like the battles were a bit overdone. I mean, I get that this is fantasy, but honestly, if the dwarves can be COVERED in goblins and still fight through and escape, I think they could probably figure out a way to get rid of Smaug on their own. I liked a lot of things about the movie, but some stuff was just too unbelievable.

Facebook: I still use this to keep in contact with my family, and a lot of my fellow students in my program use it to keep in contact and coordinate things. Most of my friends haven't quite moved to twitter yet.

Twitter: I mostly use twitter to network with other music educators, and to discuss a little bit of politics in my state.

Reddit: I still check it, but I mostly just look at content, I don't really comment too often, and I avoid posting as well, since the downvotes flow so readily for anything that doesn't fit the current culture climate of Reddit. I still like r/jazz and r/classicalmusic.

I just came to Hubski yesterday, but I quite like it so far.

I use G+, I like the community aspect, but I don't use it terribly often.

I have a thing for good luck charms, from all different cultures, even good luck new age crystals, semi-precious stones that have a history of being carried for luck, etc. My wife gives me a hard time about all of the jewelry I own, but in a strange way it helps me to deal with my anxiety.

Senior in Music Education at Utah State University. Go #Aggies

I would love a mobile app! That was the first thing I looked for after discovering Hubski.

I wandered over from Reddit out of curiosity. I have used Reddit for less than a year, and I already felt like the stuff I was seeing was not as quality as what was there when I started, and I started after the image macro invasion. I still like Reddit, I haven't given up on it completely, but I do like the somewhat smaller community. It makes interacting much easier, it's not quite like scrolling through all of the comments from the "Reddit Celebrities" to get to the average Joe posts.

I don't know about that. I am a believer in the multiple intelligences theory in education, there are different ways of learning and thinking about information that is presented, the intelligences if you will. Some students are much better suited to learning through internet related content. Other students need an instructor there to ask questions throughout the process. Some students need to be able to use hands-on methods to learn the subject matter, others can just read the textbook and figure it out on their own. We all have different learning styles. I personally do learn well from audio and video sources, I had a professor this semester who was terrible at learning from lecture, audio, or video, he needed to have it written down so that he could read it and refer to it later.

I think that internet resources are a great thing to use in the classroom. Music education (my field) has been greatly enhanced by new resources available through the internet. I do not think, however, that an education system based entirely on internet related content would be any more effective than our current system, because neither effectively addresses multiple learning styles consistently.

My dad always told me "If you do it right the first time, you don't have to do it again." when I was a kid. It usually applied to cleaning my room, but I have found it useful later on. I understand the value of failure as a learning experience, but as a musician it's far easier to do it right as soon as possible than to spend hours failing at it.

Of course, as did I. I would rather have LOTR and The Hobbit slightly overdone than not at all or poorly done.

I think there's a certain element of the natural aging of a photo, like when a photo fades on a shelf. I get a little nostalgic when I see photos that are a bit washed out because my great grandmother had photos of she and her husband that had been on the same shelf for years and had been faded by the sun coming through a window. For some reason I equate some of these filters with the look of those photos.

Sorry, had to follow. I followed you over here from that reddit post about the changing climate of reddit. The parentheses at the bottom made my day, BTW, my little sister and her husband have a one mont old baby, and my sister complains about her daughter pooping and screaming whenever it is least convenient.