IT Insights Blog — Education

There's a pretty good chance that almost no one who stumbles across this blog post will have ever read, or even heard of, the 19th-century English novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Let's face it, there are probably plenty of people who teach English literature who have never read or heard of Paul Clifford. Bulwer-Lytton's novel is not quite so lost to time that it's out of print altogether ... but the current paperback edition is ranked No. 1,890,901 on Amazon.

In 1955, after years of study and testing, virologist Jonas Salk announced a successful polio vaccine. Across the United States, in the four years immediately preceding the release of Salk's vaccine, polio caused paralysis in more than 16,000 patients and killed nearly 1,900 patients every year. Today there are fewer than 10 documented cases of polio per year.

It's possible that one of more members of the TestOut Continuing Education Blog Squad has (or have) recently been watching old episodes of Friday Night Lights, the pigskin-powered TV drama that originally aired on NBC and ran for five season (the last three on DirecTV). The series follows the ups and down of small-town Texas football coach Eric Taylor and the Dillon High School Panthers football team under his supervision.

The IT Insights blog is taking the day off, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We will be back on Wednesday, Jan. 23. Here at TestOut Continuing Education, we often encourage IT professionals and other learners to do something for themselves ...

Probably almost everyone who has ever been to Yellowstone National Park in (mostly) Wyoming knows about the Old Faithful Geyser. Millions of visitors have stood and waited for one of its frequent eruptions to spew boiling water more than 100 feet into the air. Old Faithful blows its stack at regular intervals of between 44 minutes and 2 hours, and has done so for decades. The carefully managed area around the geyser's mouth might be the most visited spot in the entire park.