Tim Horton's is great. I wish they'd expand to California. It's astonishingly hard to find decent doughnuts in San Francisco.
We were visiting relatives in Canada, and they were amazed we'd never heard of Tim Horton's before. From what I saw, Tim Horton's outlets were more common than Starbuck's and MacDonald's combined.
Most often, the final boss battle is fundamentally unlike any of the combat you've faced up to that point. The final boss is often hyper-detailed, in which case, the game which ran smoothly up to that point is stuttering just at the most tactically challenging fight in the game. There's often some implausible, repetitive maneuver you have to use to defeat the boss.
The Half-Life series of games, otherwise brilliant, is particularly obnoxious about final boss battles (with the exception of Half-Life 2: Episode 1). Even the short masterpiece Portal was marred by the final boss battle -- why didn't GlaDOS just switch off her damned rocket launchers?
A particular irritant in final boss battles is that there's usually some long, dramatic speech or cinematic just before the battle -- and when you die, as you do frequently in this scenario, you generally reload to go through the damned cinematic again.
On the one hand, yes, it's definitely great news that there are Linux distributions that people can install and use without much technical knowledge. Even if you do have the requisite technical knowledge, it's nice to have something that's working and pretty right off the CD, and since Ubuntu is Linux, you can always tweak it to your heart's content once you start acquiring the knowledge.
On the other hand, I wince when I see tutorials online that boast that you don't need to learn anything about that awful, awful command line. Or, the one guy in my sysadmin classes who was noisily a big fan of Ubuntu, and who would occasionally say things like how he decided to "geek out" and look at a config file. (He was a bright guy, but a little too tied to the GUI.)
On the gripping hand, I also wince when I read rants about how Ubuntu should jettison OpenOffice Writer in favor of LyX, or jettison Evolution and Thunderbird in favor of mutt, or otherwise move in the direction of painfully hard to configure and use, on the grounds that Linux is about suffering for perfection. Not everyone needs to be a professional system administrator, and we can make it easy for people to learn to be system administrators without forcing people who aren't interested to learn.
I'm an Ubuntu user, and I just finished an introductory course on Apache. The course, naturally, assumed default Apache layouts and default installations, except where it walked us through simple customizations.
So, at first I found the Ubuntu package for Apache a bit perplexing. There were a lot of changes from the Apache defaults, that I found useful and reasonable -- once I figured them out. For instance, the configuration files are rearranged, so that the basic configuration that you would expect in httpd.conf is in apache2.conf, with the expectation that local customizations will be in httpd.conf (initially an empty file). Virtual hosting is pre-configured, with a default virtual host pointing at the document root. Some of the supporting programs were renamed, e.g., apache2ctl instead of apachectl, and there were some supporting scripts added, e.g., a2enmod and a2dismod, for enabling and disabling modules.
I didn't have that much trouble figuring this out, and I'm sure someone with more experience would have figured it out more quickly -- or would have just snorted, and compiled from source. My one real complaint about any of this was that there wasn't an overview of how the Ubuntu installation differed from the Apache standards. Indeed, the documentation never once mentioned that it differed.
That wasn't nearly as frustrating as it was to discover that Ubuntu doesn't use System V-style runlevels and associated scripts, that we spent two weeks going over in a system administration course. Thank goodness for virtual machines.
My general rule is that one should stick to default settings unless one has a good reason to vary from them, if for no other reason than to remain close to the documentation, for the sake of other poor slobs who may have to maintain your system, and that nontrivial variations should be documented.
I've found, consistently, that the best computer mice are the basic mice at the bottom of the product lines for Logitech and Microsoft. I like scroll-wheels, although clicking on them is difficult. Optical mice were a great improvement over mechanical ball mice. But, if there are more than three buttons, I don't use them. I want as little fussing with the mouse as possible.
The "gaming mouse" nonsense has gotten out of hand. What is with advertising mice that have ultra-high resolutions, when computers can't actually process any more input from them than they can from basic mice? (Rhetorical question.)
I'd had NoScript installed for a while, as I kept running across arguments that it was a security necessity.
However, I quickly found that almost every Web site I visited made extensive use of scripting, which meant that I was permanently whitelisting sites I visited regularly, and temporarily whitelisting almost every other site I visited, which was a frigging nuisance.
I've found AdBlocker Plus blocks the annoying ads well enough for my purposes, so NoScript was redundant.
Also worth mentioning is that while it's easy enough to detect tampering with ink or paper, digitized data can be overwritten perfectly and undetectably.
One thing Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels brought home to me was that Antarctica is a natural paradise compared to any other place off Earth. Antarctica has breathable air, gravity that we can handle, and water. Food supplies, medical care, and other resources are a few hours away by plane. Yet I'm not hearing of any rush to colonize Antarctica, given that it's a frozen desert, even though it's more inhabitable than Mars or any other place in the solar system.
The only way I see people "living" on other planets is through some sort of remote-controlled robots. Human-like AI seems to me more probable than extensive human colonization of other planets -- and I have doubts about human-like AI. Humans are adapted to the narrow range of conditions on Earth -- narrow and fragile. People need to get over the idea that, as on Star Trek, the universe is full of LA-suburbs, that just need a little yard work.
Writing facilitates deeper thinking, because writing allows more complex thoughts supported by more evidence, more thorough-going criticism, and wider circulation of ideas. The Internet is fundamentally a literary medium, which encourages all of the foregoing elements.
The recurring complaint that Twitter's 140 character limit is an indication of shallow thinking misses how frequently Tweets are used to post references to articles, essays, or longer pieces, themselves referencing longer works.
Literature works as a sort of inverted pyramid: you read the short, pithy statement first, then decide if you want or need to read the supporting detail and the related works. A book has an introduction; the introduction has a summary paragraph; the paragraph has a topic sentence. Dedicated academics read and write precises and summaries. Long books include references and bibliographies. One chooses the appropriate depth to which to read.
The article was interesting in discussing the use of nationalist youth groups, and suggesting that hackers may act in the same way.
I'm left wondering: if several national governments, including the US, and the UN, are devoting significant resources to the problem of "cyberwarfare," wouldn't one of these entities have detailed what they mean, exactly? I saw the point of the analogy of the bigger catapult to the bigger tunnel-sniffing dog, but what, then, are the cyberwarfare people actually proposing to do? Even if defending against cyberwarfare is fundamentally a stupid idea, it can't be completely devoid of content.
Cynical jokes aside, what's most distinct about humans, as compared to other living things, is the human capacity to learn. The mass of the brain is there less for calculating than for acquiring and linking more information.
We've had an enormous breakthrough in rapidly disseminating information and enabling self-education. That some people make blunders and that some mistaken ideas are more widely circulated does not contradict this. Asking whether the Internet makes us smarter is like asking whether providing light, water, and enriched soil makes plants grow better.
Years ago, there was an incredibly awful country song, "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning," by Alan Jackson, with the lyric, "I'm just a simple man/I don't know the difference between Iraq and Iran." At the time, whenever I heard the song, I'd think, "So put the microphone down, go the library, and find an encyclopedia, dumbass." These days, whenever I hear anyone ask a question for basic information -- where is Turkmenistan? who is K. D. Laing? -- the answer is frequently, "I'm not sure -- check Wikipedia," or, "Google it."
Simple ignorance is more easily overcome than in the past. Willful ignorance is harder to defend.
The riots in 1992 didn't happen because of one incident of police brutality. They happened -- in multiple cities -- because of years of systematic racist brutality. Countless people of color identified with Rodney King, not just because they saw an outrage on video "out of context," but because they had themselves been harassed, beaten, or imprisoned by racist police.
Marx and Engels were at some pains to not give a complete definition of what communism is. They gave some broad outlines -- as in, control of the means of production by the associated producers, and from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs -- but generally argued it wasn't their place, nor that of any political theorists, to define what communism was, because communism would be defined by the associated producers once they were in a position to decide how they really wanted to organize things. They did argue, after all, that there's a dialectical relation between ideology and material circumstances, with material circumstances leading the dance as it were, so it's absurd to produce an ideology in advance of the material basis for that ideology.
That said, I think it was pretty clear that, from the little that M&E said communism would be, or for that matter what Lenin said communism would be, that the USSR, PRC, etc., moved away from communism, not towards it. A dictatorship by an elite, focusing on rapid industrialization and capital accumulation at the expense of all other considerations, is a form of capitalism.
However, I do think that a lot of socialists tend towards the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, in that they tend to spend less time then they ought on thinking through what went wrong in places where, after all, a lot of people spent sweat and blood in what they believed to be a socialist system moving towards communism.
One of the major problems with socialists in the US is that most are so afraid of redbaiting that they won't admit they're socialists, and use elaborate workarounds to present socialist ideas. This cowardice gets us nowhere. It's really rather absurd, when in the US we rarely have more to fear than harsh criticism -- as opposed to imprisonment, brutality, and death that socialist activists often face elsewhere. And hiding makes it look like there are fewer socialists around than there really are.
As far as redbaiting goes -- yeah, people will denounce your socialist ideas. But, as is well known, people will denounce the socialist ideas of people who are not socialists at all. Moderate liberals are denounced as socialists. Moderate conservatives who endorse an occasional moderate political reform are denounced as socialists. And what do those denouncements amount to? A public announcement to conservatives that they don't like you. Big deal. It may cost you the Rotary Club endorsement, but that's it. Why worry about it?
So, yes, Marx and Engels were concerned about ecology. They were also concerned with labor organizing, universal suffrage, and abolishing slavery. They had more to say on those subjects than they did on Five Year Plans. Maybe it would actually help our discussions if we neither sanctified M&E nor demonized them, but actually referred to them as the insightful and interesting, if imperfect, thinkers and activists they were. Maybe mentioning some of the political issues they actually worked on and wrote about would help clarify both those issues and how they may be interrelated.
It was the perception that a lot of good causes were taken up by socialists that led to my being a socialist.
Really, it'd be nice if we opened up the popular political debate, in such a way that it actually referred to the actual political questions in our atomized individual heads, instead of the absurdly narrow and constrained political discourse we're stuck with.
Soil depletion was a critical economic and political problem in Marx's day, and influenced Marx and Engels significantly. They understood nature as cyclical processes, and the relation between culture and environment as dialectical processes. Changes in one changed the other, as parts of a larger whole.
One of the best accounts of materialist thought, on this very subject, and one of the best books I've ever read, is Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, by John Bellamy Foster.
It was brutally driven home to me that the worst thing I could do was "stand up" to bullies. As I recall from elementary school, bullies came in packs. Their modus operandi was that one or two of them would shove me and kick me a bit. If I resisted in any way, they'd call out, and four or five kids would run in, knock me down, and then the group would encircle me and keep kicking me while I tried to protect my face.
The school would not try to protect me; instead, they blamed me. The school "yard duty" teacher would usually ignore the beatings, and would insult me if I asked them for help. The only way I could find to defend myself was to avoid the bullies and stay in the library during recess -- at least I found librarians and school bus drivers sympathetic. A few times, the school administration called me in, and asked, all sympathy, what it was I was doing to provoke other children into attacking me. The bullies were never disciplined, as far as I know.
My parents took the position that I was being beaten up because I was a coward, and therefore deserved to be beaten.
I'm really glad my stepsons go to a school where they actually intervene in incipient bullying long before violence appears.
Given that the meaning of the questions on the test is so transparent, it really works out to asking the test taker if they think it's important to be empathetic.
Assuming it's the same test used over time, I think it's significant that more people make a point of not being empathetic than in the past. It shows some sort of cultural shift.
Whenever I've looked at old issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, I'd read this enthusiastic accounts of technologies that really never got off the drawing board, described as if their adoption was both inevitable and imminent.
Wired was like that, on drugs. Not only would they describe some "futurist" fantasy technology as if it was inevitable, they would describe those fantasy technologies as if they had already been achieved, as if everyone already knew about them and used them, and in fact would condemn people for their lack of vision in not using technologies that hadn't been developed yet. It was a lot of, "everybody's transhuman, except you luddite morons who haven't enhanced yourselves with nanotechnology yet!"
There was a comic book online, that unfortunately I can no longer find, an autobiographical account of the author's daydreams of future human liberation via technology, rendered in a 70s "groovy" style. Later, as a starving unemployed college graduate, he managed to get into a convention for enthusiasts of future technologies, and met several people that I believe were supposed to be recognizable as computer industry figures, including someone who I think was supposed to be the founder of Wired. The author is disillusioned, realizing that these people didn't care about human welfare -- they were just rich snobs showing off their toys to each other and claiming it made them better than other people.
There was a funny bit about the author deciding to live just like a 50s working class intellectual, up until he gets offered a job that lead to him eventually becoming a Web designer.
Someone recently told me that SFSU, the four-year school I had been planning to attend, had just such a program. It does make a lot of sense.
I do think there are some serious problems with the models of higher education we're following. As I said, I was an English major twenty years ago, and for one thing, I think humanities majors take far more humanities courses than is useful even for an academic career, and everyone else takes too few humanities courses. But that seems true of most fields.
Part of what really puzzles me is that it seems as if most people who have degrees, retain almost nothing of what they studied. I don't know if it's that most people are cheating their way through college, or that people completely forget all that material they spent thousands of hours studying. I was reacting to the examples of programmers, but I've met former classmates from humanities classes who can't seem to remember anything, either.
The other part that really puzzles me is mathematics. On the one hand, nearly everyone I've talked to agrees that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way mathematics is taught. I found Lament of a Mathematician very persuasive on this point.
But on the other hand, what I can't fathom is how, when I was in a math course, I'd see the other students racing through transformations of an abstraction based on an abstraction based on an abstraction, requiring mastery of all the underlying transformations of abstractions -- an intellectual task surpassing anything else I've ever encountered. And yet, these students seemed to have no curiosity about the subject, and when I'd run into them in other classes, they'd be scratching their heads over much simpler problems.
Slashdot Mirror
As you pointed out, it's rich people buying the damned SUVs.
Please mod this up -- it's a pretty direct answer.
Tim Horton's is great. I wish they'd expand to California. It's astonishingly hard to find decent doughnuts in San Francisco.
We were visiting relatives in Canada, and they were amazed we'd never heard of Tim Horton's before. From what I saw, Tim Horton's outlets were more common than Starbuck's and MacDonald's combined.
I loathe most final boss battles.
Most often, the final boss battle is fundamentally unlike any of the combat you've faced up to that point. The final boss is often hyper-detailed, in which case, the game which ran smoothly up to that point is stuttering just at the most tactically challenging fight in the game. There's often some implausible, repetitive maneuver you have to use to defeat the boss.
The Half-Life series of games, otherwise brilliant, is particularly obnoxious about final boss battles (with the exception of Half-Life 2: Episode 1). Even the short masterpiece Portal was marred by the final boss battle -- why didn't GlaDOS just switch off her damned rocket launchers?
A particular irritant in final boss battles is that there's usually some long, dramatic speech or cinematic just before the battle -- and when you die, as you do frequently in this scenario, you generally reload to go through the damned cinematic again.
On the one hand, yes, it's definitely great news that there are Linux distributions that people can install and use without much technical knowledge. Even if you do have the requisite technical knowledge, it's nice to have something that's working and pretty right off the CD, and since Ubuntu is Linux, you can always tweak it to your heart's content once you start acquiring the knowledge.
On the other hand, I wince when I see tutorials online that boast that you don't need to learn anything about that awful, awful command line. Or, the one guy in my sysadmin classes who was noisily a big fan of Ubuntu, and who would occasionally say things like how he decided to "geek out" and look at a config file. (He was a bright guy, but a little too tied to the GUI.)
On the gripping hand, I also wince when I read rants about how Ubuntu should jettison OpenOffice Writer in favor of LyX, or jettison Evolution and Thunderbird in favor of mutt, or otherwise move in the direction of painfully hard to configure and use, on the grounds that Linux is about suffering for perfection. Not everyone needs to be a professional system administrator, and we can make it easy for people to learn to be system administrators without forcing people who aren't interested to learn.
I'm an Ubuntu user, and I just finished an introductory course on Apache. The course, naturally, assumed default Apache layouts and default installations, except where it walked us through simple customizations.
So, at first I found the Ubuntu package for Apache a bit perplexing. There were a lot of changes from the Apache defaults, that I found useful and reasonable -- once I figured them out. For instance, the configuration files are rearranged, so that the basic configuration that you would expect in httpd.conf is in apache2.conf, with the expectation that local customizations will be in httpd.conf (initially an empty file). Virtual hosting is pre-configured, with a default virtual host pointing at the document root. Some of the supporting programs were renamed, e.g., apache2ctl instead of apachectl, and there were some supporting scripts added, e.g., a2enmod and a2dismod, for enabling and disabling modules.
I didn't have that much trouble figuring this out, and I'm sure someone with more experience would have figured it out more quickly -- or would have just snorted, and compiled from source. My one real complaint about any of this was that there wasn't an overview of how the Ubuntu installation differed from the Apache standards. Indeed, the documentation never once mentioned that it differed.
That wasn't nearly as frustrating as it was to discover that Ubuntu doesn't use System V-style runlevels and associated scripts, that we spent two weeks going over in a system administration course. Thank goodness for virtual machines.
My general rule is that one should stick to default settings unless one has a good reason to vary from them, if for no other reason than to remain close to the documentation, for the sake of other poor slobs who may have to maintain your system, and that nontrivial variations should be documented.
In the new universe, trigonometry will be easier, and equations will always look good in print.
I've found, consistently, that the best computer mice are the basic mice at the bottom of the product lines for Logitech and Microsoft. I like scroll-wheels, although clicking on them is difficult. Optical mice were a great improvement over mechanical ball mice. But, if there are more than three buttons, I don't use them. I want as little fussing with the mouse as possible.
The "gaming mouse" nonsense has gotten out of hand. What is with advertising mice that have ultra-high resolutions, when computers can't actually process any more input from them than they can from basic mice? (Rhetorical question.)
I'd had NoScript installed for a while, as I kept running across arguments that it was a security necessity.
However, I quickly found that almost every Web site I visited made extensive use of scripting, which meant that I was permanently whitelisting sites I visited regularly, and temporarily whitelisting almost every other site I visited, which was a frigging nuisance.
I've found AdBlocker Plus blocks the annoying ads well enough for my purposes, so NoScript was redundant.
Also worth mentioning is that while it's easy enough to detect tampering with ink or paper, digitized data can be overwritten perfectly and undetectably.
One thing Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels brought home to me was that Antarctica is a natural paradise compared to any other place off Earth. Antarctica has breathable air, gravity that we can handle, and water. Food supplies, medical care, and other resources are a few hours away by plane. Yet I'm not hearing of any rush to colonize Antarctica, given that it's a frozen desert, even though it's more inhabitable than Mars or any other place in the solar system.
The only way I see people "living" on other planets is through some sort of remote-controlled robots. Human-like AI seems to me more probable than extensive human colonization of other planets -- and I have doubts about human-like AI. Humans are adapted to the narrow range of conditions on Earth -- narrow and fragile. People need to get over the idea that, as on Star Trek, the universe is full of LA-suburbs, that just need a little yard work.
Writing facilitates deeper thinking, because writing allows more complex thoughts supported by more evidence, more thorough-going criticism, and wider circulation of ideas. The Internet is fundamentally a literary medium, which encourages all of the foregoing elements.
The recurring complaint that Twitter's 140 character limit is an indication of shallow thinking misses how frequently Tweets are used to post references to articles, essays, or longer pieces, themselves referencing longer works.
Literature works as a sort of inverted pyramid: you read the short, pithy statement first, then decide if you want or need to read the supporting detail and the related works. A book has an introduction; the introduction has a summary paragraph; the paragraph has a topic sentence. Dedicated academics read and write precises and summaries. Long books include references and bibliographies. One chooses the appropriate depth to which to read.
So, presumably, if you installed two of those cards, you could hook up twenty-four monitors.
The article was interesting in discussing the use of nationalist youth groups, and suggesting that hackers may act in the same way.
I'm left wondering: if several national governments, including the US, and the UN, are devoting significant resources to the problem of "cyberwarfare," wouldn't one of these entities have detailed what they mean, exactly? I saw the point of the analogy of the bigger catapult to the bigger tunnel-sniffing dog, but what, then, are the cyberwarfare people actually proposing to do? Even if defending against cyberwarfare is fundamentally a stupid idea, it can't be completely devoid of content.
Cynical jokes aside, what's most distinct about humans, as compared to other living things, is the human capacity to learn. The mass of the brain is there less for calculating than for acquiring and linking more information.
We've had an enormous breakthrough in rapidly disseminating information and enabling self-education. That some people make blunders and that some mistaken ideas are more widely circulated does not contradict this. Asking whether the Internet makes us smarter is like asking whether providing light, water, and enriched soil makes plants grow better.
Years ago, there was an incredibly awful country song, "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning," by Alan Jackson, with the lyric, "I'm just a simple man/I don't know the difference between Iraq and Iran." At the time, whenever I heard the song, I'd think, "So put the microphone down, go the library, and find an encyclopedia, dumbass." These days, whenever I hear anyone ask a question for basic information -- where is Turkmenistan? who is K. D. Laing? -- the answer is frequently, "I'm not sure -- check Wikipedia," or, "Google it."
Simple ignorance is more easily overcome than in the past. Willful ignorance is harder to defend.
This.
is Monty Python's Flying Circus?
Or, it's my misunderstanding an Internet convention.
Bullshit.
The riots in 1992 didn't happen because of one incident of police brutality. They happened -- in multiple cities -- because of years of systematic racist brutality. Countless people of color identified with Rodney King, not just because they saw an outrage on video "out of context," but because they had themselves been harassed, beaten, or imprisoned by racist police.
This.
Marx and Engels were at some pains to not give a complete definition of what communism is. They gave some broad outlines -- as in, control of the means of production by the associated producers, and from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs -- but generally argued it wasn't their place, nor that of any political theorists, to define what communism was, because communism would be defined by the associated producers once they were in a position to decide how they really wanted to organize things. They did argue, after all, that there's a dialectical relation between ideology and material circumstances, with material circumstances leading the dance as it were, so it's absurd to produce an ideology in advance of the material basis for that ideology.
That said, I think it was pretty clear that, from the little that M&E said communism would be, or for that matter what Lenin said communism would be, that the USSR, PRC, etc., moved away from communism, not towards it. A dictatorship by an elite, focusing on rapid industrialization and capital accumulation at the expense of all other considerations, is a form of capitalism.
However, I do think that a lot of socialists tend towards the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, in that they tend to spend less time then they ought on thinking through what went wrong in places where, after all, a lot of people spent sweat and blood in what they believed to be a socialist system moving towards communism.
One of the major problems with socialists in the US is that most are so afraid of redbaiting that they won't admit they're socialists, and use elaborate workarounds to present socialist ideas. This cowardice gets us nowhere. It's really rather absurd, when in the US we rarely have more to fear than harsh criticism -- as opposed to imprisonment, brutality, and death that socialist activists often face elsewhere. And hiding makes it look like there are fewer socialists around than there really are.
As far as redbaiting goes -- yeah, people will denounce your socialist ideas. But, as is well known, people will denounce the socialist ideas of people who are not socialists at all. Moderate liberals are denounced as socialists. Moderate conservatives who endorse an occasional moderate political reform are denounced as socialists. And what do those denouncements amount to? A public announcement to conservatives that they don't like you. Big deal. It may cost you the Rotary Club endorsement, but that's it. Why worry about it?
So, yes, Marx and Engels were concerned about ecology. They were also concerned with labor organizing, universal suffrage, and abolishing slavery. They had more to say on those subjects than they did on Five Year Plans. Maybe it would actually help our discussions if we neither sanctified M&E nor demonized them, but actually referred to them as the insightful and interesting, if imperfect, thinkers and activists they were. Maybe mentioning some of the political issues they actually worked on and wrote about would help clarify both those issues and how they may be interrelated.
It was the perception that a lot of good causes were taken up by socialists that led to my being a socialist.
Really, it'd be nice if we opened up the popular political debate, in such a way that it actually referred to the actual political questions in our atomized individual heads, instead of the absurdly narrow and constrained political discourse we're stuck with.
Soil depletion was a critical economic and political problem in Marx's day, and influenced Marx and Engels significantly. They understood nature as cyclical processes, and the relation between culture and environment as dialectical processes. Changes in one changed the other, as parts of a larger whole.
One of the best accounts of materialist thought, on this very subject, and one of the best books I've ever read, is Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, by John Bellamy Foster.
It was brutally driven home to me that the worst thing I could do was "stand up" to bullies. As I recall from elementary school, bullies came in packs. Their modus operandi was that one or two of them would shove me and kick me a bit. If I resisted in any way, they'd call out, and four or five kids would run in, knock me down, and then the group would encircle me and keep kicking me while I tried to protect my face.
The school would not try to protect me; instead, they blamed me. The school "yard duty" teacher would usually ignore the beatings, and would insult me if I asked them for help. The only way I could find to defend myself was to avoid the bullies and stay in the library during recess -- at least I found librarians and school bus drivers sympathetic. A few times, the school administration called me in, and asked, all sympathy, what it was I was doing to provoke other children into attacking me. The bullies were never disciplined, as far as I know.
My parents took the position that I was being beaten up because I was a coward, and therefore deserved to be beaten.
I'm really glad my stepsons go to a school where they actually intervene in incipient bullying long before violence appears.
Given that the meaning of the questions on the test is so transparent, it really works out to asking the test taker if they think it's important to be empathetic.
Assuming it's the same test used over time, I think it's significant that more people make a point of not being empathetic than in the past. It shows some sort of cultural shift.
Me too.
Whenever I've looked at old issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, I'd read this enthusiastic accounts of technologies that really never got off the drawing board, described as if their adoption was both inevitable and imminent.
Wired was like that, on drugs. Not only would they describe some "futurist" fantasy technology as if it was inevitable, they would describe those fantasy technologies as if they had already been achieved, as if everyone already knew about them and used them, and in fact would condemn people for their lack of vision in not using technologies that hadn't been developed yet. It was a lot of, "everybody's transhuman, except you luddite morons who haven't enhanced yourselves with nanotechnology yet!"
There was a comic book online, that unfortunately I can no longer find, an autobiographical account of the author's daydreams of future human liberation via technology, rendered in a 70s "groovy" style. Later, as a starving unemployed college graduate, he managed to get into a convention for enthusiasts of future technologies, and met several people that I believe were supposed to be recognizable as computer industry figures, including someone who I think was supposed to be the founder of Wired. The author is disillusioned, realizing that these people didn't care about human welfare -- they were just rich snobs showing off their toys to each other and claiming it made them better than other people.
There was a funny bit about the author deciding to live just like a 50s working class intellectual, up until he gets offered a job that lead to him eventually becoming a Web designer.
Someone recently told me that SFSU, the four-year school I had been planning to attend, had just such a program. It does make a lot of sense.
I do think there are some serious problems with the models of higher education we're following. As I said, I was an English major twenty years ago, and for one thing, I think humanities majors take far more humanities courses than is useful even for an academic career, and everyone else takes too few humanities courses. But that seems true of most fields.
Part of what really puzzles me is that it seems as if most people who have degrees, retain almost nothing of what they studied. I don't know if it's that most people are cheating their way through college, or that people completely forget all that material they spent thousands of hours studying. I was reacting to the examples of programmers, but I've met former classmates from humanities classes who can't seem to remember anything, either.
The other part that really puzzles me is mathematics. On the one hand, nearly everyone I've talked to agrees that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way mathematics is taught. I found Lament of a Mathematician very persuasive on this point.
But on the other hand, what I can't fathom is how, when I was in a math course, I'd see the other students racing through transformations of an abstraction based on an abstraction based on an abstraction, requiring mastery of all the underlying transformations of abstractions -- an intellectual task surpassing anything else I've ever encountered. And yet, these students seemed to have no curiosity about the subject, and when I'd run into them in other classes, they'd be scratching their heads over much simpler problems.