Bloomberg reports today that Robert Wilson – known as one of the great stock investors of the last 50 years, the now-retired peer of Warren Buffet and George Soros—gave $5.6 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York this summer to set up fundraising programs for Catholic schools.

“Most of what the Catholic schools teach are the three Rs,” said Wilson, 83, in a phone interview, referring to reading, writing and arithmetic. “And they do it better than the union-controlled inner-city schools.”

It’s not the first time he’s donated money to Catholic schools, though.

It’s the latest of many gifts from Wilson to the city’s Catholic hierarchy and educators, this one aimed at funding the Catholic Alumni Partnership, a program he founded that helps elementary schools track down their 750,000 alumni and recruit them as donors.

According to Wilson:

“I realized that Catholic schools were closing all over the country, and Bill Gates probably didn’t have enough money to save them,” said Wilson. “Every private school I hear of relies on alumni support…

In an April 2000 profile of Wilson, The Street’s Jim Cramer described him this way:

Wilson’s investment strategy was to go both long and short — long because he believed in the long-term future of America and short because he never wanted to be wiped out in a downturn.

It looks like Wilson believes that the long-term future of America includes the long-term future of Catholic schools as well.

As Megan Gibson reported at Time’s News Feed:

It all started when two scientists in Montana, John Scannella and Jack Horner, argued that triceratops (arguably the best of the dinosaurs) was actually just a young version of another, lesser-known dinosaur. They say that the young triceratops would shape-shift as they grew, developing into the dinosaurs known as torosaurus. Known by scientists that is, because no one else has ever heard of the torosaurus.

The news, as you can imagine, caused a great deal of distress—and a FaceBook page– because early reports implied that Triceratops was no more. But it was all a misunderstanding.

Andrew Stanton explains:

Torosaurus is the name that has to be abandoned.

The reason is simple. What takes precedence is not the age or maturity of the specimen, but the age of the name. Othniel C. Marsh published the name Triceratops in 1889, while he coined the name Torosaurus in a paper that was published in 1891. Since the name Triceratops is two years older than Torosaurus, and the two genera of dinosaurs are the same, the older name takes priority according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).

In short, the name that was published first is the valid name.

As Amy Graff at the Mommy Files observes:

But the good news is that the Triceratops will in a sense live on–huge relief to toddlers, toy makers,[her] 5-year-old son, Michael Crichton, Pixar…

The cost of textbooks is high and getting higher–a 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported an increase in the cost of textbooks that was twice the inflation rate– but there’s some relief in sight.

The AP reports that textbook rental programs and online-shopping for textbook bargains are replacing the more traditional and expense practice of shopping at the campus book store.

These days, sites such as BIGWORDS and BestBookBuys let students search several online stores at once. The 13th edition of the seminal textbook “Marketing Management,” which lists for $190 new, can be had for as little as $19.99 used.

More recently, textbook rental sites such as Chegg, BookRenter and CollegeBookRenter have arrived, offering rentals at roughly half the cost of buying. Their business model – Netflix goes to college – has prompted college bookstores and publishers to play catch up and offer rentals themselves.

Textbook rentals benefit book publishers too:

Behind the scenes, publishers get a share of the rental revenue – something they can’t say about used book sales.

A former Upper St. Clair High School student who already claimed she had been raped once was raped again on school property after school officials used her as bait in a failed attempt to catch students they believed were having sex in the building, her attorneys claim.

Upper St. Clair –rated one of the 10 Best Places to Live by U.S. News & World Report—is a mostly-residential suburb whose schools score above the state average in reading and math. It made the U.S. News list because—while the average income is high—crime and cost of living are low. Almost 67% of the population are college educated, compared to a 52% average nationwide.

According to the school website, Upper St. Clair High School had been awarded the must-prized Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education—three times—had has a strong college-prep curriculum.

The rape occurred in 2008. After a student—identified in the Post-Gazette only as Jane Doe—told her teacher that a boy had forced her to have sex, the teacher took the matter to the principal and offered to walk the girl to her school bus to make sure she got home without incident.

Principal Michael Ghilani—according to a court filing—had a different idea:

“Instead, Ghilani wanted to keep Jane Doe on school property and not let her leave. Ghilani’s plan, known as the ‘sting operation,’ was to use Jane Doe as ‘bait’ to lead the school administrators to [the boy] and perhaps other girls.”

School security officers were instructed to follow students until they left the building. They did not realize until too late that some students had returned. Even after students were spotted after hours on a school surveillance camera, the officers were unable to find them.

The girl’s attorneys contend that two girls were raped in the stairwell that afternoon, including their client.

The school is seeking dismissal of the suit, arguing that the former student cannot prove that the school district was deliberately indifferent to the possibility of rape.

In a written statement, the school district said it believed that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden of proof. Officials would not comment further.

… researchers like Ross A. Thompson, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, have been discovering that empathy and perspective-taking are not just developmental milestones that we have to wait for children to reach.

They can be developed with the help of an engaged and skilled parent or teacher using language and story-telling.

This reminds me of Paul Bloom’s NYT piece last spring on “The Moral Lives of Babies,” which implied that there’s an innate universal moral code.

A panagram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. You probably learned where the keyboard letters are by typing this one: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

According to Robert Quigley at Geek O System, linguists and puzzle-solvers like to see just how few letters they can use in a sentence that makes sense.

My favorites:

”Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”: According to Wikipedia, this one is used on NASA’s Space Shuttle. (32 letters)

And this one, which should win a prize for brevity:

”Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz”: Amazingly, this 26-word-long sentence uses every letter only once, though it uses some pretty archaic words; translates to “Carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person.”

The Animated Score of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Crank up your speakers and sit back.

H/T: First Thoughts