Right Wing Nation

What is it with technology that is deliberately annoying? Why do OS developers believe that I want the computer to do things on its own–without my telling it to? And even things that should operate on their own in the background, like anti-virus software, why does mine make me go through a little NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH game every day after it downloads an update and runs? Why does it have to ask me if I want it to clean or delete infected email? Why wouldn’t I? And if I didn’t want to, why would I be running anti-virus software at all? And somebody please explain why computers by default need to play stupid little ditties every time you open or close a window, or boot the machine, or do nearly anything at all. What the hell makes these software developers think I want to hear their stupid little tunes?

Why does the computer feel it necessary to ask me if I’m sure I want to do something every time I tell it to do something? If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t have told the computer to delete the damned file.

I despise the user-friendly tech culture–and that is fundamentally why I despise Apple and the Mac idiot box. That’s where all this “point and click” “let me do everything for you!” BS started.

But it’s not just computers. Do they make telephones that don’t beep obnoxiously when there’s a message? Yes, I know there’s a message. I don’t particularly want to listen to it now because I’m busy, but if I don’t that damned beeping will drive me off the deep end.

This “user-friendly” crap drives me nuts.

Thanks to Van Helsing for this (I’ll reproduce the whole story, since it will go away very soon, and it’s too good not to):

Wed May 2, 1:52 PM ET

OTTAWA (AFP) - Bigfoot, the legendary hairy man-like beast said to roam the wildernesses of North America, is not shy, merely so rare it risks extinction and should be protected as an endangered species.

So says Canadian MP Mike Lake who has called for Bigfoot to be protected under Canada’s species at risk act, alongside Whooping Cranes, Blue Whales, and Red Mulberry trees.

“The debate over their (Bigfoot’s) existence is moot in the circumstance of their tenuous hold on merely existing,” reads a petition presented by Lake to parliament in March and due to be discussed next week.

“Therefore, the petitioners request the House of Commons to establish immediate, comprehensive legislation to affect immediate protection of Bigfoot,” says the petition signed by almost 500 of Lake’s constituents in Edmonton, Alberta.

A similar appeal has been made to the US Congress.

Down through history, there have been numerous, if unsubstantiated sightings of Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch in North American folklore.

The beast is said to inhabit remote forests, mainly in the US Pacific northwest and western Canada, and many believe it could be related to the equally mythical Yeti said to have found its home in Tibet and Nepal.

While sometimes described as large, hairy bipedal hominoids, Bigfoot are considered by most experts to be a combination of folklore and hoaxes.

But the legend remains strong, and Bigfoot researcher Todd Standing, who was behind the petition, claims to have proof of its existence, and says he fears for its safety.

“When I get species protection for them nationwide, I will make my findings public and I will take this out of the realm of mythology. Bigfoot is real,” Standing told Global National television news.

He said he has 12 seconds of video footage of Bigfoot roaming Canada’s western Rocky Mountains included in a 30-minute documentary, but his detractors say it was staged with actors.

His supporters hail from Canada’s westernmost provinces, but Bigfoot sightings have been reported across the country, which is 90 percent uninhabited.

There are currently 516 plant and animal species at risk in Canada, according to Environment Canada. Another 13 species are already extinct.

I want to know who proposed the same nonsense to Congress, so I can give him a Clown Award. What’s next, reparations for alien abductees?

This doesn’t surprise me at all (hat tip to Powerline):

Mark Moyar doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on “The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936.” At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on “promiscuous bathing” and “attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations.”

It’s an example, some say, of the difficulties faced by academics who are seen as bucking the liberal ethos on campus and perhaps the reason that history departments at places like Duke had 32 Democrats and zero Republicans, according to statistics published by the Duke Conservative Union around the time Mr. Moyar tried to get an interview there.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a liberal honest enough to admit that yes, university (at least the particular university being discussed) discriminated when hiring based on political stance. I’ve had this conversation before, and got the same mealy-mouthed excuse I always get: Universities are not really discriminating, but “preserving the university culture” and “collegiality” (the idea being that if you don’t agree politically with your colleagues, they won’t want to work with you–”university culture” is merely another way of saying “foaming at the mouth Stalinists,” of course). The conversation went nowhere, as it never does, but I give this liberal credit for honesty (relatively speaking). Most liberals will not admit there is any sort of bias on campus.

Read the whole thing. Powerline has an interview with Moyar here (mp3 file).

I just stumbled upon my high school’s state website, and here are the stats for 2005-2006:

I have no idea what the difference between "free" and "reduced" lunch is, so don’t ask me. The attendance rate is high, but it’s a rural school. What else is there to do if you’re not in school? And life is still pretty traditional there. Parents expect their kids to be in school, and if they aren’t, there’s hell to pay. There are a couple of things I find interesting.

First, in 2005-2006, there were only 56 in the graduating class. According to the alumni page on the state school site, there were 88 in my graduating class (I distinctly remember the number 89, but maybe somebody is missing on the alumni page). Whether 88 or 89, 56 is a substantially smaller number, yet the population of the area has remained stable. My first assumption is that it reflects a higher drop-out rate, but the attendance rate for the school (95.7%) would seem to contradict that (though I don’t nkow how they compute that statistic). If it doesn’t reflect a higher drop-out rate, does it reflect a changing demographic?

More interesting, however, is the percentage of graduates pursuing a college education. In 2005-2006, 77% of the graduates went on to college (the state average for the same year was 76%). I downloaded my class roster and working purely from memory, and only those who I know went directly to college (I did not count several people who a decade or so later went to college, because the state doesn’t count them) calculated that 18.52% of my graduating class went to college.

77%, 18.52%. That’s quite a change, even over thirty-some years. But our class was full of farm kids, who went back to working on the farm once they graduated. It’s just the way things were. Still, a change of 58.48% is pretty dramatic, certainly larger than I would have expected to see. The obvious question, since the community hasn’t changed that much, is who’s going to be working the farms?

There was also a statistic for honors diplomas, but I have no idea what that means. We didn’t have honors diplomas. We had the top 10% of the class.

Reading through this math textbook has resurrected vivid memories of my high school math teacher, one of the best teachers I had at any level of my education. Allow me to indulge myself and tell you about her.

Mrs. Wilson–whom we always addressed as “Mrs. Wilson” (I suspect everybody would have been shocked if anyone, even the most non-serious student, addressed any teacher, but most of all, Mrs. Wilson by her first name), was about ten years younger than my grandmother. She was a stately woman, not as tall as my mother (my mother was 5′10), but close, probably 5′8, with white hair–permed, of course, and stacked high on her head, as was the norm for older women back then. She wore grey-rimmed glasses with a silver chain that wrapped around the back of her neck. She held herself proudly, and with a great deal of dignity, and just her appearance commanded respect.

Mrs. Wilson had a BS and an MS in mathematics, as well as an MA in education (which she had to get in order to continue teaching). I know this because when I was thinking of applying to colleges, I asked Mrs. Wilson for advice, and she told me.

Politicians can’t acknowledge this, but there have always been screw-ups in school, and there always will be. We had ours. But even the worst of the screw-ups respected and liked Mrs. Wilson. Even the students who struggled the most with math. Of all the teachers at my school, Mrs. Wilson was one of the most respected and one of the most popular.

I went to a very small, consolidated rural school. Compared with what teachers deal with today, our “discipline problems” were trite. Somebody passing notes, perhaps, or throwing spitballs. Things like that never happened in Mrs. Wilson’s math class. She did not have discipline problems. Nobody would have dared to pass a note in her class.

Her bearing was professional and dignified, she maintained a professional distance, she appeared strict, and when she walked into the room you sat bolt upright in your seat and the room fell silent. Looking back on her class now, after having taught all these years, I suspect her greatest difficulty was overcoming the natural intimidation she imposed and getting students to raise their hands and ask questions, but she managed to do it. Even the slowest student felt free to raise his hand and ask for clarification, and Mrs. Wilson always gave it, and gave it well, no matter how stupid the question.

She demanded a great deal from us, and she treated us fairly. She made the same demands of every student in her class. She would always begin class by reviewing what we’d done the day before, putting a problem up on the board and having us walk her through the solution. She would then lead into whatever the topic was (if we were starting a new one) with a question, like, “What if . . . how would we solve that?” and then introduce the day’s topic. She would do several problems, after the first one having us walk her through to the solution, assign a set of problems for us to do (quietly, and not in groups) over fifteen minutes, then call on us one by one to come up to the board and write down our solutions. She would then critique our solutions and our logic, and solicit comments from the class.

Mrs. Wilson would always ask if there were another way to do a problem. Mrs. Wilson would always put a similar, thought slightly different, problem on the board and ask us to compare the two. Mrs. Wilson always made us think about the mathematics.

Her desk was always open. If we were quietly working, and one of us had a question, he could always approach her, and she would always help. She was professional, somewhat distant, and formal, but she loved her students, and we all knew it. She was always quick to help any student understand.

Her exams were famously difficult, and in addition to the problems from the book she assigned, she also gave us additional problems. She wasn’t the only teacher in our high school who piled homework on us every night and over every weekend, but she was the only teacher whose students all did the homework. Not once did a student say he didn’t do it, or finish it, though many student did problems incorrectly. But every student did as much as he could for Mrs. Wilson, because she did everything she could for us.

I’m sure she passed away years ago. But in addition to math, I learned a great deal about teaching from Mrs. Wilson. I’ll never forget her.

I just got spam that begins with the line:

Do you want a more preposterous future?

Then continues:

THEN GET YOUR UNIVERSITY DEGREE!

The typo is funny, but the irony is hilarious.

Looking through my high school algebra text is really quite fascinating. The last time I saw this book, I was a high school freshman, and I don’t recall having any reaction to the textbook, other than reading it and working through the problems. My perspective now is very different, after having taught for over two decades and reviewed God knows how many textbooks.

This is New Math. Not New New Math, but Cold War space race New Math, the only math pedagogy that has ever been designed by mathematicians. Yes, it had its weaknesses, which I will get to sometime in the future, but none in common with the weaknesses of today’s math pedagogy. Whereas today, students cover far too many topics and only shallowly, New Math covered fewer topics to great depth (perhaps in some cases, too much depth, but that’s for another article). Whereas math today is self-consciously non-linear and non-logical, New Math was coldly linear and logical. Whereas math today has no methodology and allows Janie to figure out her own way to solve the problem, New Math drilled a strict, step-by-step methodology. But let’s turn to the textbook.

First, the text is accurately named: Modern Algebra: A Logical Approach. This is not just a math textbook. Formal logic is built into each chapter. I’ll address the logic-specific problems in the future. Now, I want to address the problems, and the method we were taught to use when solving them. By the way, not only did we not use calculators, but they didn’t exist (we learned to use slide rules in high school).

Let’s look at that example problem I scanned yesterday. Here it is:

Let’s look at the methodology, which is the same, and was in general the same as what we were taught to do all the way back in elementary school. One of the characteristics of New Math is that even in elementary school, we learned the basic principles of algebra (even though that’s not what they were called) because we tackled each problem with the same step-by-step methodology. By the time we got to freshman algebra, we knew what you did to one side of the equation you had to do to the other, and so forth. We just didn’t know what “algebra” was until we got to high school.

First, we declared the variable. This may seem needlessly formalistic, but it isn’t. What, say, if you have a problem with two variables? You have to solve one in terms of the other, then substitute. If you declare the variables, it’s much easier then not to get confused about which one represents which value in the problem. In other words, declaring the variable clarifies the goal of our solution, and focuses us on that goal.

Next, we set up the problem directly from the text.

Next, we multiply both sides by 35.

Let’s stop here for a minute. Why did we multiply both sides by 35–or more to the point, how would we know to multiply both sides by 35? Because we had thoroughly learned fractions and the principle of the LCD long before we got to freshman algebra. I mention this because both fractions and LCD are topics that have fallen out of favor in current math curricula. Our teacher would have, if working through this, asked us how we would have gotten rid of the fractions. We would have known that the way to do that was multiply both sides by 35, because we had already worked with fractions a great deal, and to a relatively high level of complexity. So to us, this step would not have presented a cognitive leap.

Again, the remaining steps were the same general methodology we had been using all through elementary school. There were no surprises. The only thing “new” about methodology in algebra was the use of variables. We had already learned the basic principles–without calling them algebra.

Focus on Part 2. From what I can determine, students today “check” problems by guestimating the answer. We didn’t. This problem exemplifies one of the two ways in which we had been taught to check our solution: We substituted the solution and worked it to see if we got the correct answer. Again, we had been doing this since elementary school. It wasn’t new.

The other way we checked problems was to work it backward, but in a different way (sometimes, there is more than one way to work a problem). For example, here is problem 12 from the problems I scanned:

The music department of Eastern High School bought 12 band uniforms and 3 hats at a total cost of $615. Later the department bought 3 uniforms and 2 hats at a total cost of $165. If the two orders were for identical items, what was the cost of each uniform and each hat?

To solve this problem, we would have first solved one variable (the cost of a hat, say) in terms of the other (the cost of a uniform), substituted it, solved for the cost of a uniform, and then repeated the process to solve for the other variable. This reinforces the cold, linear, logical methodology and thought process.

Note, however, that if you know the value of one variable and the total cost, you can calculate the value of the other variable without substitution (in other words, if you know how much you spent total and how much you spent on hats, then you can use simple subtraction to figure out how much you spent on uniforms). This is an example of a problem that has more than one route to a solution. When checking a problem like this, we would have checked it by taking another route backwards, instead of the same route we used when solving it.

Why? Because it reinforces that there is more than one logical progression of steps to the answer. Note that there is nothing “fuzzy” about this. Many problems can be solved in more than one way. New Math focused on the logical process and the mathematics behind the problem. Our teachers wanted us not only to understand the mathematics, but they also wanted us to see the different routes to the solution–because that’s when you really understand the mathematics.

My point here is the methodology and its consistency throughout the math curriculum. Going from elementary to junior high math, then junior high math to algebra was a smooth, continuous process because we focused on the linear, logical progression of steps, and we did this all the way throughout the curriculum. New Math was designed as a linear continuum, where new material was not some kind of a leap, but logically progressed from what we had already learned. We knew all about fractions and finding the LCD, so that was nothing new. We knew that what you did to one side of the “equals sign” you had to do to the other, so that was nothing new. We had already spent eight years of math classes in school extracting information from text and turning it into numbers (equations), so that was nothing new.

We probably covered more in less time in freshman algebra than we had before, though here, I’m working on very old memories, and have no elementary New Math textbook from the same era to check. But we didn’t do calculus in high school then. The college math track was algebra I, geometry, algebra II, and “senior math,” which was trigonometry and pre-calculus math. The closest we got to statistics was calculating averages, and the first I learned about probability was as an undergraduate.

Also, the cognitive, logical process we had been using since elementary school immediately transferred to other courses without our having to figure it out, even in high school. When I took my first year of chemistry, nobody had to explain the step-by-step logical process of balancing equations. The variables, constants, and symbols were different, but the process was exactly identical. The logic transferred. The same was true with physics. Nobody had to make that connection for us, because we had learned it so thoroughly.

And this leads me to what is, perhaps, my greatest objection to those who sneer at “drill and kill.” Forget being able to recall what 12*11 is, though that is important. It was precisely this “drill and kill” that taught us this logical, step-by-step process which we could take from math to chemistry and physics and yes, even writing. We learned an analytical way of looking at the world, dissembling a problem to its component parts, and working our way to a solution. And so-called “fuzzy math” can never accomplish that.

There’s this place down the road, the Barbecue Shack (I think), and I’ve driven past it thousands of times and always thought someday, I’d try it. Yesterday, I was driving past with my windows open and the stoplight turned red. I was sitting there, and the wind changed. I smelled not barbecue sauce, but hickory smoke, and without really thinking about it, as soon as the light turned green, I turned into the parking lot.

I discovered when I went inside that this is really a beer store (this is one of those socialist states where all alcohol sales are state-regulated) with a barbecue place built in. There are booths, but no sign that anyone has sat in one. Nobody was behind the counter. It looked empty, and that’s never good.

It wasn’t empty. There was only one woman working there, and she was selling beer. When she took care of the last customer in line, she asked me what I wanted. I’d been looking at the menu, and my rule when trying out a new barbecue place is always get the pulled pork. They sell pints of pulled pork for (I believe) $9.99, and quarts for $14.99. So I bought a quart.

I had needed to stop at the store anyway, so I picked up some buns there (Pepperidge Farm Onion) in addition to the other things I needed, and headed home. I put the pork in the microwave and nuked it for a minute to get it hot again, and put a bun on my plate.

The first thing I noticed when spooning it out was that there was the perfect amount of sauce, just enough to moisten the pork. I piled it on the bun, then picked it up and took a bite.

The sauce was a bit on the sweet side, but pleasantly spicy (not hot–then, people in this part of the country don’t seem to have much tolerance for hot). Had there been more sauce, I might have liked it less, but as I said, it was just enough to moisten the pork. You could eat a pulled pork sandwich of this barbecue without goo running down your forearm or falling onto the floor out of the bun. It was actually pretty good. I ended up eating most of one of the pints.

I’ll probably have the rest for lunch today. Not bad. Not bad at all. I noticed after I’d ordered that they offer three or four sauces, one a vinegar-based Carolina sauce. Next time, I’ll try that.

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