Homeward

On the plane tomorrow, long flight.  Not really looking forward to it.  The flight over was very uncomfortable.

Adding to the pain, airlines have taken to leaving the seat belt sign on for the whole flight.  They don’t seem to care if you get up and walk around, but if you fall and hurt yourself, they want to make sure the light was on, so it is your fault, not theirs.

Yeah,  Lawyers,

 

 

The Mob Boss’s Daughter Wins the Beauty Contest

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has today publicly stated that it is “extremely likely” that the observed warming is the result of mankind.   Or maybe it was peoplekind.  The media is, of course, treating this as a news story.

No contest, really.  I mean, it is not like they were going to come to any other conclusion.  These people either get paid for researching climate change – something that would stop if they admitted it did not exist – or they are politicians using it for money and power grabs.  The media, of course, goes along with it because, well, scary stories sell and scary stories that align with their ideology (man is evil) are always going to be published.  Hyped.

People, being people and not experts, buy into this sort of thing.  Still, I do believe it is changing and that, fifty years from now, history will look back on the global warming furor the same way we look back at phrenology.

 

Hail and High Water

Once more, Colorado is in God’s cross-hairs, despite all the evangelical groups that are headquartered there.  Or maybe because of them.  Quite the sense of humor, that God guy, really.  First, major fires that take out hundreds of homes – fires, of course, caused by years of drought.  which are now ended, maybe, with massive flooding, which is taking out thousands of homes.  To add to the fun, some portions of the front range got a hail storm yesterday that required people to get out their snow shovels.

A friend of mine wants to blame this all on global warming because, you know, everything bad is caused by global warming, while everything else is just weather.  This all is actually nothing new for Colorado.  Back in the sixties, Robert Heinlein – just before he moved to California – stated, “we just finished seven years of drought with seven inches of rain in two hours, and one was about as disastrous as the other.”  In his case, though, he only left Colorado because 1) his wife had developed long-term altitude sickness and 2) NORAD has parked the primary nuclear target right outside his front window.

Most of the damage seems to be caused by that old urge of humanity to build where they shouldn’t.  (“Dad, why does our mountain have a flat top?”  “Shut up and keep picking grapes!”)  As Colorado grew – actually, as California shrank – people started building wonderful houses further and further up the wooded slopes, while others started building cheaper houses closer and closer to the creeks.  Well, trees burn and creeks flood – thus endeth the lesson.

I suppose the logical thing would be to build out to the east, onto the plains, but admittedly farther from the water sources and less interesting from an esthetic standpoint.  A bit dusty, too.  But that is not going to happen anyways; FEMA and the insurance companies will help these people rebuild in place.  They will add requirements that no tree be within so many feet of the house and roof shakes be made of particular materials and that will hold everyone until the next disaster and they will invent still more rules.

Don’t see a good end to this, but it would be nice if they came up with some market-oriented solution, where people paid for their mistakes, where your inability to get insurance would tell you something, and taxpayers did not bail out stupidity.  Won’t happen.  Meanwhile, you can probably buy a good house for cheap, right now – if you are willing to take the risk.

 

School is Out

Just finished reading an ebook – actually, more of a long essay, but the price is right – by Ron Harrington, a retired Oklahoma school teacher.  It is called, “Instead of School.”

While people in my end of the political pool tend to be against the public school system – and rabidly so! – Harrington goes quite a bit beyond that.  He comes out strongly against schools of any kind – public, private, religious.

His reasoning is very sound.  I will explain it in my own way.

Imagine to yourself going to visit friends with teenage children.  You sit at their table, parents and two or three teenagers.  You marvel at how adult these kids are, how mature, well-behaved, polite, and engaged.  You remember them as screaming toddlers, obviously long in the past.  You wish there were more kids like these sitting in front of you.

A normal reaction, because most of our experience with kids is not in small groups, it is with large groups.  You have seen them in schools and sporting events.  You have seen a dozen or more cruising the mall together, amongst other groups of a dozen.  You have shared movie theaters and pizza parlors with them.  They are all misbehaved, shouting, shoving, causing damage, snatching merchandise off the shelves, throwing popcorn at the screen.  It is all very horrid and nothing like your friends’ teenagers, with whom you enjoyed a lovely evening.

But the truth, as ever, is sad, because those wonderful teenagers would likely be – and probably sometimes are – exactly the same as the mall kids, when they are hangin’  with their homies (if I got that phrase right).  The social dynamics of children are such that they egg each other on, constantly, whipping each other up and daring each other to higher and higher flights of youthful abandon.  In a Rebel-without-a-cause manner, they most respect the most disrespectful.  They create and inhabit a world of chaos, seemingly without a choice.

This is something we all really know, both in our heads and in our hearts.  Yet, we insist on gathering kids together in large groups – not for a couple of hours at the mall, but for seven hours a day, five days a week – and then try to teach them things.  This is full and complete madness.  The kids persist in being kids and very little learning actually happens.

When you have buildings full of hundreds of kids, control is not an option.  From the point of student safety and staff liability, control will always have to be the first priority.  And the long-held holy grail of individualized instruction to meet the needs of the individual student, will always fall afoul of both the need to control and the need to measure results.  For more on this, read Harrington.

He is quite clear that, while private and religious schools tend to do a better job at educating children – more selective with fewer restrictions – that they do, in the end, suffer from the same problems and, as a consequence, are not able to educate children to their true abilities.

Here is a thought for you:  set the Way-Back Machine to colonial America.  Or Europe during the same period.  Where in any of this period do you ever see large groups of children together with only a couple of adults in charge?  Or even without adults?  Pretty much never.  When not at home, kids are out with their family.  Maybe they are out with a couple of neighbor kids.  Mostly, when not at home, they are in church or helping their parents shop or attending festivals.  In all these cases, except playing with neighbors, they are with large swaths of adults and distinctly in the minority.  If I am to believe Mark Twain, the only time they are likely to get in trouble is when playing with other kids – or in school, because Twain saw the beginning of the school revolution.

I mention all that because, if you talk about doing away with public schools or just schools, one of the first arguments you will hear is about socialization.  It seems, one of the only lessons that is taught well in schools is the supposed value of schools to society.  Children need to be taught, we are told, to socialize with other children.

Why?

Why is socializing with children a required life skill?  Where did we get this idea?  Why teach a savage how to act with other savages?  Isn’t the point of childhood to learn how to be an adult?  Today, all kids really worry about is how to get along with other kids, trying to fit in, trying to be cool.  Screw the textbook!  I need those new jeans!  And all of what they do and truly care about becomes useless to them the day after graduation.  If they graduate.

Harrington’s solution, which he details brilliantly, is to return to the time-honored tradition, used throughout the history of civilization, of tutorial.  That is, mostly self-study, with a tutor meeting the student one-on-one a couple of hours a week.  Certainly, modern technology should be able to improve on the Lincoln-reading-by-candlelight model by quite a bit.  Real individual education at a fraction of the cost, in an atmosphere that actually rewards learning.

Yes, kids will still have the opportunity to meet with other kids in groups: sports, scouts, 4H, church.  But they would also have the opportunity to meet with adults.  A girl wants to learn how to quilt, she joins a quilting group, learning the skills in a cross-generational manner and, in the process, learning how to socialize with adults – a far more useful life-skill.  Apprenticeship would probably come back into vogue, a great way to learn a career and an even better way to learn that you don’t want that career, before you have years invested in training.

Of course, you know all the reasons that this can never be allowed to happen.  There are teachers unions and party politics and subsidized day-care for working parents.  There is the whole equal access to education thing.  There is the phony heroics and idolatry of high school sports.  There is the school as the de facto town square thing.  And socialization.  Don’t forget socialization.

In the end, the schools were only ever good at one thing: training a couple of generations of factory workers.  Absent the overt need for highly-regimented workers, the schools lose most of their arguments.  Meanwhile, year after year, kids are living through a hellish Lord of the Flies environment, which gives them very little in the way of life skills and from which some of them never fully recover.  It out and out wastes over a decade of their lives.

Yet we all grew up with it.  It all seems normal to us.  How do we solve the agonizing problem of the schools when people, at most, think they are simply being badly run and are not the cause of the problem in the first place.

I am not seeing a solution here, but I think I am going to widen my criticism of public schools to a criticism of schools in general, as opposed to actual education.  Maybe we should make Lord of the Flies required reading.

Oh.  Wait.

 

A Slow Summer

I was going to write something else – and may still after this – but as I checked my email and websites and logged into WordPress, I was once again reminded of something:  The Hamptons suck!

Bandwidth, that is.

I imagine this is a common refrain for anyone who lives in a seasonal tourist area, but it is a fact that our population out here swells amazingly in the summer, especially on the weekends, and to a somewhat lesser amount during Spring and Autumn weekends.  The puts a strain on resources – roads, utilities, stores, restaurants – during the tourist season that otherwise doesn’t exist.  Nobody wants to build more resources for minimal return.

So too the cable and phone companies.  From their perspective, there is simply little to be gained by building out their infrastructure out here for just a handful of days of use.  So, during the weekend, the internet is slow.  Cell phone calls are garbled and dropped.  It is enough to make one question the wisdom of working in The Cloud.

I guess I should look into what a satellite connection would cost, though I doubt it would be worth it – again, because we are only talking a handful of days.  Maybe I should just use Judo and find a place to go in Manhattan on the weekends, where I can “borrow” somebody’s wI-fi.

Or…  I could stage a festival of hopelessly self-indulgent and expensive art somewhere in Brookhaven Town and never be bothered out here again.

 

 

Password Protection

Not having an original thought in my head of late, I will simply copy the letter below from The Consent Chronicle, in the hopes that more people might see it.

For a dozen years, the FBI and NSA have spied on Americans and shredded the Constitution. They say the Patriot Act “authorizes” their abuses. That means…

If you repeal the Patriot Act, they have NO authorization!

This is increasingly urgent, because their snooping is only getting worse…

– The feds are demanding web firms hand over master encryption keys that shield my private Internet activities (http://shar.es/kR364)
– and they even want my passwords! (http://shar.es/kRHgV)

Hacking into my private data and communications is THE SAME THING as going through my possessions and papers without a court-issued search warrant… BRAZENLY stomping on the Fourth Amendment.

But even if the Fourth Amendment never existed, this activity is IMMORAL…
– It’s immoral to force Internet companies to break privacy agreements with customers
– A State that spies on its own people creates a culture of fear and self-censorship

I DO NOT CONSENT to this morally bankrupt behavior!

Rein in snoops like the FBI and NSA. Cut-off funding for their programs that violate the Fourth Amendment.

And REPEAL the Patriot Act!

A Huge Waste of Time

A year and a half ago, a house burned down in town.  The husk of it remained standing until this past Friday, when it was finally knocked down and carted away.

Now it should be noted that this house stood on our main north-south route in this tourist destination and that it was very close to the center of our town.  It was, in fact, the first residential building when leaving town.

After the fire, it became clear in a few days that the house was beyond salvage.  Yet, there it sat, for a year and a half, through one whole summer tourist season and the beginning of this one, a huge frigging eyesore.

Why?  I don’t know.  Could have been dueling insurance companies, it could have been the Building Department (!).  Nobody seemed to be in any hurry to tear down the once-lovely structure or to reuse this prime real estate.  But I would be willing to bet, based on past experience, that there was at least one poor soul who had to jump through dozens or hundreds of administrative hoops before he was allowed to finish a job that was obviously needed for over a year.

So much of our time these days is wasted on such nonsense these days.  It took longer to approve the Pentagon rebuild of two wings in 2001 then it took to build the entire building sixty years before.  Our roads and bridges are in an increasing state of disrepair and actual new roads are a rarity.  Construction projects of anything more than a standard house take many years to approve and complete.  Approving a new drug can take longer, no matter what it might cure.  Yet it is hard to see where any of these time-wasters actually make us safer.

How do we get out of this death-spiral?  How do we revolutionize our productivity, to the betterment of all?  I don’t quite see the path.

 

Trek Tech

Saw the latest Star Trek last week.  Not horrible.  Not overly compelling, but not terrible.

But I was struck once again by the JJ Abrams view of future technology.  I would hardly be the first to complain about the busy, nonsensical bridge set or, far worse, the engine room, which looks more like it needs a plumber in charge than an engineer or physicist.

It is okay, however.  Abrams has left himself an out, if he wants to use it, to get himself out of dutch with the trekkies, the old tech nerds that remember the easy, simple sets of the original series (admittedly the result of low budgets) and how the look was updated, but aligned with, in the follow-on series over the decades.

Technology – and again, I am far from the first to say this – goes through three distinct phases.

Phase One is a simple device that barely does the job.  Whether steam engine or integrated circuit, it is enough to prove the concept and only maybe enough to do some meaningful work.  It is weak.  Inefficient.

Phase Two attempts to overcome the inefficiency with add-ons.  A pipe here, a gear there, a jumper wire on that big grey thing.  Layer after layer of complexity is added to the simple device to try to correct the inefficiencies.  Over time, more layers get added.  This is the current state of the automobile engine and the state shown of JJ Abrams’ warp core.

Phase Three happens when somebody figures out, after looking over the Phase Two devices, how to create the simple device that the inventor had wanted to build, but couldn’t quite figure out, in Phase One.  It is a clean design.  Elegant.

So, if Abrams wants to mend fences with the Geek Squad, who screamed when they saw Scotty being flushed through a large cooling pipe in the engine room, he could make it part of his next story.  Somewhere in the next movie, either some Federation inventor or some alien species they come across could have a very simple, non-complex warp core.  It just sits there and quietly pulses light while providing power to the engines and weapons.  Scotty falls in love.  This new design, in some way, becomes important to the plot – or at least a subplot – of the movie.

When the fourth movie starts, some years down the road, we are shown that Enterprise has been extensively renovated.  Not only does the warp core look like something Matt Jeffries would be comfortable with, but so do the engines, the sick bay, and the bridge, all remodeled to take advantage of the new technologies.  The trekkies are happy, the new fans are happy, Abrams is happy, and Paramount is happy.

Why not?  It is win-win.

 

To Make Regular

A discussion on another blog last week is still in my mind.  The upshot was about how regulations are interfering in our lives in hundreds of little ways that you might not even realize.

The “for instance” in this case was gas cans.  Sure, you’d play hell trying to find an actual metal gas can anymore, but the plastic ones last longer anyhow and have generally worked well.  Until recent years, that is.  Somewhere in the last few years, they removed the tank vent.  So, you are pouring gasoline from your new plastic gas jug into your hot lawn mower and, as the gasoline comes out, it has to be replaced by air.  But there is no air vent!  So the air has to come up the spout.  The same spout you are pouring out of.  What happens?  It chugs, of course.  The flow of gasoline stops for a moment, the air is sucked in, and then the flow restarts at a temporarily rapid rate, either missing the lawn mower’s tank or quickly overfilling it.  This is not what you wish to have happen with a hot engine.

This did not use to happen.  The gasoline jugs had vents – holes with little caps that you opened when you were using it.  So why did they get rid of them?  Well, safety, we are told.  Or emissions, possibly.  Whatever it was, it must have been a terrible problem, if they were willing to risk irregular and random dispensing of flammable liquids.

But then, you will remember all the horror stories of people maimed and killed because some gasoline spilled out the tank vents.  You don’t?  Well, neither do I, but I am sure it must have been happening a lot, if they saw fit to eliminate the vent.

But it does seem like they were regulating just to regulate.  Or maybe they were just throwing a bone to the trial lawyers.  Who is helped by this kind of numbskullery?

It is not just gas cans, however, it is a lot of things.  Been having trouble getting your clothes or dishes clean in recent years?  It might be because they regulated the phosphates right out of the detergents.

I have had to deal with two refrigerators that kept icing up.  Know why?  Turns out, it was Energy Star, the program to lower the electric requirements of various appliances.  What’s the easiest way to lower the amount of electricity a refrigerator requires?  Pull out the defrost coil.  That may be fine in Arizona or Colorado, but go somewhere with humidity and you soon have a real problem.

More and more, from cars to computers to appliances, mechanical products don’t seem to work very well.  Normally, this gets blamed on corporate greed, planned obsolescence, or foreign manufacture.  But I wonder how often the things that are going wrong go wrong because of the myopic or underhanded requirements of the regulators.

Meanwhile, you will be glad to know that there are thick plastic water jugs on the market – and they have vents!  Mark carefully.

 

Storm Warnings

Not that I’ve had much to say lately, but I will probably be off the air for a few days.  Sandy.

Right now, the worst looks like Monday night, with winds tapering by Tuesday afternoon.  But we have three days of heavy rain forecast, which should soften the ground for any trees that want to relocate.

Got get going with prep.  Gasoline, money, nailing down the chickens, taking down my wonderful gazebo tarp.  Rain starts in six hours.  Will try to write tonight, if time and power permit.