Intellectual Property Law Libertarianism Politics

What Part of Your Oath Do You Not Understand?

December 20, 2011 – 5:09 pm

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to something something anymore!

It all started with Wil Wheaton1, who used to be the bartender (I believe) on “Star Trek”, but who is now some sort of Twitter celebrity. I myself have zero tolerance for Twitter celebrities, but one of the “data scientists” I follow “retweeted” the following into my newshose:

The SOPA/NDAA, in case you have more important things to do than follow politics, is the latest power grab by the content industries, and would allow the President to use unmanned drones to assassinate you and/or the Internet without a trial if he suspects you’re selling counterfeit handbags or illegally downloading Hall & Oates MP3s or waging jihad. It is indeed an abomination, which is why it is only supported by heartless, baby-killing monsters like record company executives and United States Senators. And it certainly seems plausible that a President who signed such a bill would be in violation of his oath to “defend the Constitution.”

You know what else is in violation of his oath to defend the Constitution? JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING HE’S EVER DONE. Invade Libya without declaring war? NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION. Illegally traffic guns to criminals in order to drum up popular support for eviscerating the Second Amendment? NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION. Override state medical marijuana laws? NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION. Force people to buy private health insurance? NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION. And so on. If it takes the NDAA to get you to care about Obama’s oath to defend the Constitution, then either you’ve been living in a cave in Pakistan for the past 3 years, or YOU DON’T ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION.

As it happens, I’m not one of those libertarian types who pounds the table about what is and what isn’t in the Constitution. Of course I’d rather the government lived up to its promises not to quarter soldiers in my condo, not to take away my guns, and not to censor my XXXXXXXXXXX. But they don’t, and no one seems to care that they don’t, and in fact most people are quite happy to let the government quarter soldiers in their condos as long as it gets them something they want, like endless war in Afghanistan, or patents on being aware of medical best practices, or subsidized pharmaceuticals for wealthy old people. In any event, I don’t treat the Constitution as holy writ, or think something is necessarily a good idea because it’s in the Constitution or necessarily a bad idea because it’s not, or consider it a good use of anyone’s time to yell “READ THE CONSTITUTION!” to people who don’t particular care about what’s in the Constitution.

But I will pound the table when some Obama-endorsing, juvenile-name-calling Twitter celebrity suddenly starts chastising people as if in this one case the Constitution is the most important thing in the world. You don’t get to do that. If you didn’t care about the Constitution back when activist judges insisted that deep in its penumbrae one could divine secret rights to funnel taxpayer money to politically-connected banks and carbuilding unions, then no one is going to take you seriously when you pretend to care about it now. Oh, they’ll pretend to care about your pretending, and maybe they’ll even mention to their friends that “that bartender from the Starship Enterprise had some great tweet where he pretended like he cares about the Constitution, and he used #hashtags and everything, and it was really such a stellar example of pretending to care about the Constitution that I favorited it and retweeted it and @replied to it, so you should check it out!” But they know that you’re posturing and that you know perfectly well that the President and the Congress perfectly well understand their oath to “uphold the Constitution”, they JUST DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS ABOUT IT, and they also know that 364 days out of the year NEITHER DO YOU.

What’s extra-sad is that this guy had a particularly unpleasant run-in with the TSA last spring:

You’d think that might have indicated to him that the “teabaggers’” fear of government power was maybe not so off-base after all. The bartenders at the places I hang out certainly would have noticed this, so maybe it’s that all the cosmic rays in space kill brain cells.

All that said, the NDAA and SOPA are both horrible laws and we’re worse as a society for passing them (or for being about to pass them) and the people defending them are heartless, baby-killing monsters who you should probably go out of your way to spit on if you encounter them. But they’re also perfectly predictable consequences of having the kind of busybody government that you’ve been loudly clamoring for your whole life. It wasn’t so long ago that you were blogging a stupid “CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN” graphic and telling people to vote for this jerk. To the extent you care about preventing the next SOPA, you might consider next time listening to the libertarians instead of just calling them vulgar names and putting sugar in their gas tanks.

1. Technically, it started when I read the article about Sheila Jackson-Lee stopping a SOPA hearing so they could discuss whether someone had insulted her on Twitter, and I realized that I was the one with the “crazy” politics for not being eager to subject myself to thousands of pages of laws written by emotional preschoolers.

Tags , | Permalink | Comments (4)
Education

Doubling the Compost Box

December 7, 2011 – 9:13 pm

If you are on Facebook you have probably seen the articles about the unnamed school board member who couldn’t do any of the math problems on the math standardized test (and who couldn’t pass the reading section). Most of the discussion drew the conclusion that the tests were too hard for 10th graders and covered topics that were irrelevant to success (at least, if “success” is defined by being an unnamed school board member).

(There was also an unspoken undercurrent that, as standardized testing had been embraced by the Pepsi party, maligning it was a good signal of one’s allegiance to the Coke party.)

The article, of course, did not give any examples of the questions that were too hard, leaving open the alternative hypothesis that perhaps one simply doesn’t have to be very bright to serve on a school board. (Having casually observed the Seattle School Board over the last several years, I am inclined toward this position.)

You probably didn’t see the follow-up article outing the test failer as someone with a Bachelor’s in Education (which he describes as a “Bachelor of Science”, making it sound like he has a science degree, which he doesn’t), a Master’s in Education, and a Master’s in Educational Psychology. Given my prior that each of these degrees is worthless (except, of course, for its value in jumping through some sort of public-servant-pay-grade hoop), I feel even safer about my alternative hypothesis.

Luckily, the second article names the test. It’s the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, and the state of Florida has thoughtfully provided sample questions on the web. The questions are not particularly interesting, nor are they particularly hard:

(Although the test is quite plainly biased against students from cultures that lack access to composting.)

What is interesting is his final criticism:

The math section, he said, tests information that most people don’t need when they get out of school.

There is a sense in which this is true. Most people never compute the volumes of composting bins. (Although if the city of Seattle gets its way, soon we’ll all be forced to.)

There’s also a larger sense in which it’s false. Solving word problems is a valuable skill (that most people sadly lack), and word problems have to be about something. And whatever that something is, probably most kids will never have to know its specifics again.

But there’s a bigger sense in which it’s irrelevant. Most of what you learn in high school (insofar as you learn anything) is information that you’ll never need again. I myself have forgotten almost all of my American history (although I remember our teacher’s stories about her redneck neighbors, who used to jump out of their second-story door after their deck collapsed), almost all of my chemistry (although I remember that the teacher had a toy stuffed mole named Avogadro), almost all of my English lit (although I remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to use “flower imagery”), almost all of my Spanish (although I remember listening to cassette tapes of commercials for “Pal-mo-LEE-vay”), almost all of the pep rallies (although I remember that DHS Wildcats are “paw-some”), almost all of the motivational assemblies (although I remember the “what thou see-est, that thou be-est” guy), and almost all of my classmates (although I remember Josh Adams, because he visits Seattle every 10 years or so).

And the things you do need to know vary a lot from person to person. While it’s important to me that the Wildcats are paw-some, it might be equally important to Josh Adams that when the Wildcats rock the house they rock it all the way down. A test that asks about one neglects the other, and vice versa.

To the extent that most of what you learn in school is useless (and, believe me, most of what you learn in school is useless), any test that makes sure you actually learned it is going to be testing information that you don’t actually need. Blaming the test for that hardly seems fair.

And to the extent that your fancy degrees in education are useless (and, believe me, your fancy degrees in education are useless), then they’re not going to help you answer questions on a test. Again, blaming the test hardly seems fair.

All that said, standardized tests are essentially a 19th-century technology, and fixing education will almost certainly entail getting rid of them (although merely getting rid of them will not fix education in the slightest). I don’t mean to offer a blanket defense for them, only a defense against the criticism “I have three degrees and can’t do the test and therefore the problem is with the test.”

That leaves only the unresolved issue that you don’t have to be particularly competent to be on the school board, although if progressive Seattle is cool with it, then I imagine everyone else is too.

Permalink | Comments (2)
Fiction Philosophy

Fiction: The Difference Principle

December 3, 2011 – 9:29 am

Jessica pointed at a pile of rags beside a dumpster.

“This is the guy?” I asked.  I looked up and down the filthy alley we were standing in.  “This is a person?”

“It is,” she said tentatively, and then she checked the little brown Moleskine she carried everywhere.  “It is,” she repeated more confidently.  “A lot of them aren’t even this clean, so you’d better get used to it.”

“Sir?”  I crouched down closer to what I assumed was his head, trying to ignore the stench of cigarette smoke and sour beer and body odor.  “Sir?”  I asked again.

“Go ‘way.”  The voice sounded rusty, as if it weren’t used very often, but it was indeed coming from where I’d guessed his head was.  “Leave me ‘lone.”

“Keith Runson?” I asked.  I’d memorized the name on the drive over.  The pile shifted.

“Who’s askin’?”

“My name is Harry…”  Jessica kicked me, and I immediately remembered that we weren’t supposed to tell them our names.  Shit.  But this guy didn’t seem like he’d remember it, so I kept going. “We’re from Original Position.”

He poked his head out of the blankets. His hair and face clearly hadn’t been washed in months, he had the decrepit teeth common to those who prioritized drug abuse over hygiene, and his eyes were pretty much the saddest I’d ever seen.  The computer clearly knew its business.

“The char’ty?” he asked.

I puzzled over my answer for too long, and Jessica stepped in.  “Original Position is not a charity.  It’s a fundamental part of the social contract.”

“I never no signed no contract,” he objected.

“No,” Jessica explained, in a tone indicating that she’d delivered this exact explanation countless times before, “but you would have…”

“I never would have signed no contract,” he insisted.

“Maybe not in your lifetime,” she told him, “but before you were born you certainly would have. This is well understood.”

“Before I was born I ain’t would have signed no contract!”

“Before you even knew who you were,” Jessica patiently explained.  “Back when you didn’t know if you’d be the President or if you’d be … well … you.”

“I am me,” he growled.

“You’re not just you,” Jessica told him.  “According to our computers you’re the worst-off person in the United States.”

“Well, fuck you!”  He spat at her, but she didn’t flinch.  She’d warned me that they often got angry.  It was an occupational hazard.

“Don’t spit,” she patiently chided him.  “We’re here to help.  Before you were born, back behind the Veil of Ignorance, you would have wanted to live in a society that focused on the well-being of the worst-off-person.”

“I’m not that ignorant,” he objected.  “And you don’t know what I would have wanted.”

She ignored his objection.  “Right now you are that worst-off person.  And so we’re here to make you better off.  What would you like?  Within reason it’s yours.  Food?  Shelter?  Toilets?  A job?”

“Booze,” he wheezed.  “I want booze.”

Nine times out of ten they want booze.  They’d warned us in training.  I opened the unlabeled messenger bag Original Position had given me and pulled out a bottle of cheap whiskey.  He grabbed it out of my hand, opened it, and started drinking before I could say anything.

“Congratulations, Mister Runson,” Jessica told him.  “You’re no longer the worst-off person.”  I don’t think he even heard her.

“What did you think of your first assignment?” she asked me as we walked back to the car.

I thought for a while before I asked, “Was it really a good idea to give him whiskey?”  I didn’t feel like we’d been particularly philanthropic.

“A good idea?  Probably not.  Possibly he’ll end up on our list again someday.  But for the meantime he’s no longer the worst-off person, which means that our attention is needed elsewhere.”

“I didn’t realize it would be so depressing,” I told her.

“Rawls didn’t call his book A Theory of Why Justice is Fun.  Just wait until you get a quadriplegic.”

I tried not to think about that.

“Let’s see who’s next.”  She opened up the Moleskine.  “Ooh, child abuse!”

Permalink | Comments Off
Politics Technology

Pets.com But With Guns And a No-Knock Warrant

October 27, 2011 – 9:54 pm

The government has a CIO, it turns out, and when he’s not hassling us to change our passwords again or to stop BitTorrenting on company time, he’s got a plan to re-invent government itself:

On Tuesday, VanRoekel said that he wants to overhaul the federal bureaucracy to become more agile in an age of services delivered via mobile apps, and where information is atomized so that it can be mashed up by anyone to provide deeper insights. He also wants to break down massive multi-year information technology projects into smaller, more modular projects in the hopes of saving the government from getting mired in multi-million dollar failures.

[...]

“Going forward, we need to embrace modular development, build on open standards, and run our projects in lean startup mode,” he said.

No one can argue that he doesn’t grasp the lingo. However, a career Microsoftie is maybe not the best choice to run anything in “lean startup mode”. As someone with a fair amount of startup experience, I offer him the following pieces of advice:

1. Never say “lean startup mode” (or “agile” or “mashed up”)

Each of these buzzwords sends a clear signal that either you’ve been in a coma since 2006 or that your “startup experience” consists entirely of eavesdropping at a coffee shop where programmers hang out.

2. Also, “mobile apps” are very 2009

I’m not saying you couldn’t hit the jackpot and sell several million copies of “Angry Birds D.C.” or “Laws with Friends” or even “Doodle Congress”. But the odds are against you.

3. Startups have to convince investors to give them money

This is part of what makes startups startups. It’s tough to stay “lean” and “agile” (let alone “mashed up”) if you can simply close a funding round at gunpoint each April 151. If VanRoekel can somehow make it so that government has to make PowerPoint slides and beg us for money each time it needs some, that would be a huge win.

4. Startups have to at least pretend to have a revenue model

It doesn’t have to be completely realistic. It can in fact be pretty ludicrous, like “we’ll sell ‘$50 of junk for only $25′ coupons and then only give the merchants half of the $25.”

But it does have to involve revenue. For instance, “we’ll use the funds to subsidize our friends’ failing businesses and also to bail out our other friends’ failed businesses and then to send troops to Africa and then finally to imprison some recreational drug users” is not a revenue model. Could you maybe add some sort of group shopping component?

5. Startups need an “elevator pitch”

At some point you’ll be in an elevator with someone, and he’ll ask you what your startup does, and you’ll have to explain it to him in terms of something he already knows (and recognizes as a success for venture capital).

For instance, a startup might be “Flickr but for dogs” or “Facebook but for cats” or “Pets.com but for group shopping deals.”

Obviously, none of these describes the federal government. Coming up with these analogies is more of an art than a science, but you might consider “Enron but bigger” or “Swoopo but mandatory” or “Pets.com but with guns and a no-knock warrant”.

6. Startups fire people

Part of being “lean” and “agile” and “mashed up” is that you can’t afford to keep the wrong people *cough* Tim Geithner *cough* Janet Napolitano *cough* Eric Holder *cough* Steven Chu *cough* in their jobs when they suck at them. If the CIO is empowered to make this change, then good for him!

7. Startups have a “fun” culture

fun not fun
ping-pong table metal detectors
free popcorn the toothpick rule
catered meals Supreme Court cafeteria
geek shootout Waco shootout

8. Startups usually fail and go out of business

I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the most exciting part of the “government as startup” plan.

1. Can we dispense with the fiction that taxes are due on April 15? Multiple times I paid my taxes by April 15 and yet was still “penalized” because I didn’t “estimate” and “prepay” them sooner.

Permalink | Comments Off
Education Science Technology

Machine Learning Beverage

September 29, 2011 – 9:40 pm

Although my formal training is in subjects like math and economics and animal husbandry, most of the money-work I do is in subjects like data science and fareology and writing over-the-top religious polemics. This is one of the reasons why I’m so sour on the value of college, as my multi-million-dollar investment in tuition and pitchers of Ice Dog beer and Tower Party t-shirts didn’t even provide me the opportunity to learn any of these.

I did get to take an “Artificial Intelligence” class. The only listed prerequisite was the “Intro to CS” class, but a brand new professor was teaching and she decided to make it a much more advanced class, and then I was going to partner with my friend who was a CS major so that he could handle all the more advanced programming aspects, but he dropped the class after a couple of weeks so he could spend his senior year focused on “not taking classes”, which meant that I got to spend my senior year focused on “learning enough about computer programming to not fail the class”, after which I picked up a bit of “how to sometimes beat the computer at tic-tac-toe” and “how to sometimes beat the computer at Reversi” and “how to narrowly avoid coming in last place in the classwide ‘Pac War‘ tournament.”

Despite that initial setback, over the course of my career I’ve managed to learn bits and pieces of what’s variously called “machine learning”, “artificial intelligence”, or “guessing stuff”. I suspect I would be more popular at data mining parties if I had a smidge more training in these subjects, and so I was very excited at the prospect of Stanford’s free online Artificial Intelligence Class and Machine Learning Course, both of which are offered this fall. (There’s also a Database Class, but I know too much about databases already.)

You don’t get actual Stanford credit if you take the classes online, but I don’t particularly want Stanford credit, which means that’s not a deal-breaker. You get some sort of certificate signed by the professors listing your rank in the class, which will probably be somewhere in the millions thanks to all the Chinese students who will be cheating on their assignments, but I don’t particularly want a certificate either. I wouldn’t mind some sort of bumper sticker (“MY COMPUTER ALGORITHM IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR STUDENT AND FURTHERMORE WON’T EVER BE UNEMPLOYED AND LIVING IN MY BASEMENT UNDER A CRIPPLING MOUNTAIN OF STUDENT-LOAN DEBT”), but that doesn’t seem to be part of the plan.

Most likely I won’t have enough time to devote to the classes anyway, what with work and training the baby to take over the world someday and trying to finish the novel about the boy who likes to play baseball but is no good at it. And this isn’t helped by the fact that both classes are going to have hours of online lectures that I’m going to have to sit through. Lectures!

I twittered the other day that if I have to sit through lectures then you’re not really transforming education. A lot of people (reasonably) interpreted this as a dig at the Khan Academy, but I was more angry at the Stanford CS department, which is tech-savvy enough to offer courses over the Internet to millions of cheating Chinese people and yet not tech-savvy enough to think of a better method of knowledge transmission than lectures with slides, which were invented by Moses or possibly even God, making them thousands of years old. I’m happy to take their quizzes and solve their problem sets and write their examinations, but the prospect of having to spend time listening to lectures is really glooming me down.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate what they’re doing, but if the Stanford Computer Science department really wants to revolutionize the educational process, they should figure out a way to upload information directly into my brain, or to embed it subliminally in Spider-Man cartoons, or to make it somehow drinkable. “Machine Learning Class” is the past; the future belongs to whoever first figures out “Machine Learning Beverage”!

Permalink | Comments Off
Life Politics Religion

I Am Tired of 9/11

September 11, 2011 – 11:42 am

Is it too soon to be tired of 9/11? Because I am.

I’m tired of not being able to bring my pinking shears on plane trips. I’m tired of conspiracy theories (except for ones involving reptilians.) I’m tired of pointless wars that waste trillions of dollars that could otherwise be funneled to unprofitable, politically-connected “green energy” companies. And I’m especially tired of having to refrain from referring to my penis as “the Top of the World observation deck” for fear of getting nasty looks from some girl who knows someone who knows someone who almost went to work that day.

I’m also tired of all the people constantly (by which I mean annually) exhorting me to “NEVER FORGET” what happened that day. All sorts of terrible things have happened to me over my life. There was that time I got tricked into watching Napoleon Dynamite, and then there was some sort of incident involving Nancy Drew’s dog, and there was even that one time that I almost got killed on 9/11. But after tens of thousands of dollars of psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, craniosacral therapy, sandplay therapy, and reiki work, I’ve learned that “NEVER FORGET” is pretty much the worst advice there is, with the possible exceptions of “Be yourself”, “Girls can’t resist a guy who can chug a bottle of Tabasco sauce”, and “Vote for Obama”.

That doesn’t mean I can’t remember some of the lessons of that event, like “avoid Manhattan” and “don’t ignore the ‘STAY HOME FROM WORK TODAY JEWS!’ phone message” and “don’t wait too long to see that tourist attraction, lest some Muslims hijack and crash an airplane into it.” But these are lessons to put into practice everyday, not just in early September, and not just in years that end in a 1. And the more you “NEVER FORGET” the last crisis, the less prepared you are for the next different one.

So, sure, wear your patriotic shirt and eat your patriotic foods and click “like” on the “Like this if you are watching this on September 11th” comments on patriotic YouTube videos. But while you’re busy trying to “NEVER FORGET” what already happened, I’ll be thinking up jokes for what’s happening next. Advantage: Joel.

Permalink | Comments (3)
Economics Education Politics

College Savings Plans are the Modern Dowry

August 7, 2011 – 8:11 pm

Because baby Madeline is half-Indian and half-regular-person, she has both Indian friends and regular-person friends. The parents of her Indian friends worry about dowries, which are expensive gifts that they have to hand over when their daughters marry, and that they have to save for until then. The parents of her regular-person friends worry about college savings plans, which are expensive gifts that they have to hand over when their daughters matriculate college, and that they have to save for until then.

Both represent fairly nasty Prisoner’s Dilemmas. “Save for dowry/tuition” is a dominant strategy, which leads to the unattractive “Everyone saves for dowry/tuition” equilibrium, which is pareto-inferior to the (non-equilibrium) “No one saves for dowry/tuition.” To sustain the “no one saves” optimum you need some sort of rule-changing side-deal.

Because the government of India is run by a bunch of amateurs, they introduced a (revenue-neutral) law that bans dowries. If they had any political savvy at all, they’d instead be selling revenue-generating pre-paid dowry plans. (If you’re reading my blog, Indian government, I suggest a clever name like Dowry Opportunity Provision Experience.)

A common objection to this line of thinking is that a dowry buys your daughter something useless (a husband) whereas a college savings plan buys her something useful (a degree in “Chican@ and Latin@ Studies” and also tens of thousands of dollars of nondischargeable debt to pay the tuition and fees above and beyond what’s in the college savings account). This is a subtle point, which I’ll explore in my future posts “Student-Loan Debt is the Modern Indentured Servitude” and “Dressing up as a Sheep and Waving a ‘Mattress Sale’ Sign is the Modern Working at Borders.”

Permalink | Comments (2)
Personal Technology

Google, Plus

July 11, 2011 – 7:38 am

If you have been living in a cave without Internet access, you might not be aware of Google Plus, which you might think of as Google’s answer to Facebook (if Facebook were a question). After playing around with it a bit, it seems to have several advantages:

  • not operated by Facebook
  • your relatives aren’t on it yet
  • 90% of posts are about hot topics like Google Plus and how to use Google Plus and how cool Google Plus is, not boring topics like “pictures of my kids”
  • are able to “follow” people who aren’t actually your friends, which means you can get topics in your feed other than the Paleo diet, cryonics, and the Reichart and Garrett show
  • and most importantly, circles

Whereas Facebook makes you lump all your friends together in one feed, Google lets you segregate them into circles for browsing and sharing. If you curate correctly, it’s easy to share links only with the “Asian females” circle and to browse only the “people on my kickball team that I like” circle.

Unfortunately, at this early stage of the game you cannot nest circles, which means it’s important to partition your friends correctly. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve found the following scheme of circles works pretty well for me:

  • Asian females
  • People who hate libertarians but put up with me for some unspecified reason
  • People on my kickball team that I like
  • People on my kickball team towards whom I’m ambivalent
  • Former bosses
  • People who post about things currently happening at the college we attended, even though we all graduated 15 years ago
  • Jackie Passey
  • Tall people
  • People that I don’t know who they are, but we have a lot of friends in common, so I’ll pretend like I do know who they are, because probably I’m supposed to
  • Fictional characters
  • Kirez
  • People I met at the Rudy Ray Moore concert
  • Everyone else

If there’s a downside to Google Plus, it’s that it’s a lot of work to check it all the time, and to casually brag about how many people are adding to me to their circles, and to ask everyone their heights so that I know whether to put them in the “Tall people” circle or the “Jackie Passey” circle. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear at this point that circles are the wave of the future, which means that my decades-long investment in analytic geometry is about to pay off!

Tags , | Permalink | Comments (3)
Joelene Life Personal Uncategorized Writing

If Trees Could Scream

May 5, 2011 – 8:16 am

So far parenthood isn’t all that different from non-parenthood. I still eat at the same five restaurants and drink myself to sleep at night and occasionally get peed on. I just now have a car seat wedged into an upside-down highchair, am less discriminating about my liquor choices, and try not to let “careless urination” incidents turn into fistfights.

Jack Handey once Deep Thought,

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

I suspect that Handey had an infant in or near his life when he came up with the preceding. Baby Madeline doesn’t necessarily scream all the time, but quite often she has no good reason.

Or possibly it’s just that her reasons are so opaque. The scream for “I’m starving” sounds a lot like the scream for “I couldn’t eat another drop.” The scream for “I have soiled myself. How embarrassing.” is pretty indistinguishable from the scream for “if you remove my diaper, I’ll pee all over you.” And the scream for “please bring me my Sophie the giraffe” is quite similar to the scream for “I hate Sophie the giraffe, and if you squeak her one more time I’m going scream (which you might not be able to distinguish from this scream, but so be it).”

When she’s not screaming, she’s pretty delightful, although so far she’s shown no interest in Hilbert spaces, Objectivism, the Priory of Sion, or any of the other myriad topics I’ve tried to teach her about.

For entertainment she mostly enjoys being sung the “Where’s the Tiger?” song, which seems to be the Indian version of “Frère Jacques,” which (I figure) gives me license to sometimes sing it as “Where’s the Cobra?” or “Where is Gandhi?” or “What is Dharma?”

I also downloaded a bunch of rock-songs-as-lullabyes compilations, but once she realized the Dark Side of the Moon ones didn’t sync with The Wizard of Oz, we both lost interest and abandoned the project.

Anyway, she is a funny kid, and grooming her to take over the world someday really cuts into my writing and blogging time. (Also, not sleeping on account of her screaming really cuts into my writing and blogging energy.) But I now have a good idea for a parenting book, and an auto-repair manual, and a short story about a kid who likes baseball but is no good at it, so I’ll try to ease myself back into writing. Also, I’ve been criminally neglecting promotion for the spreadsheet book, so if you want to push a few copies of that on your friends, that would be kind.

Permalink | Comments Off
Education Joelene

On the Education of Joelene, Part I: Introduction

March 10, 2011 – 9:24 am

Although little Joelene is expected to arrive in about 10 days (which means that she could show up today if she really felt like it), I toyed with fate and flew down to Long Beach last weekend to attend the BIL conference, which is (in some sense) the open-source equivalent of the TED conference. It’s organized (to the extent it’s organized) by some of my beautiful and amazing friends, which means it’s also an opportunity to visit with them. And, of course, it’s a great chance to meet new beautiful and amazing friends, which I did, although none of them live in Seattle, which means most likely I won’t see them again until BIL 2012, at which point I’ll have a little Joelene with me.

BIL is a wonderful experience on its own merits, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t especially appreciate the myriad times people told me how excited they were that someone like me was reproducing. Closer to home, people are certainly excited for me, although there’s in addition an unspoken sense that being my kid would be somehow akin to being raised in a haunted house, or a museum of oddities, or possibly a laserium. BIL is full of people who (for lack of a better description) legitimately wish that they had been raised in a laserium (or perhaps even were raised in laseria).

Once you have a kid (or are close to having a kid), people start to ask you all sorts of questions about how you’re raising and educating (or planning to raise and educate) said kid. Fortunately, education is something I spend quite a bit of time reading about, thinking about, and delivering heretical soapbox speeches about.

As a result, when I wasn’t talking about “How to Be Funny” or rinsing out fruit juice jugs or hijacking charity auctions*, I was pontificating on education. As I told the same stories over and over, boring more and more people, I started to realize that I should write my ideas into blog posts. I suspect there will be about seven parts, but I may add or subtract one or two. It’s possible I’ll even get them all written before Joelene shows up.

In the meantime, you can watch a delightful video of the BIL experience, if you are so inclined. Part 2 (working title: “The Time Suck”) coming soon.

* The BIL ethos is “if you see something that needs to be done, do it.” The auctioneer (who is a dear friend of mine) was not living up to my expectations of how lively and aggressive and barker-y a charity auctioneer should be, so I barged on stage, asked him for the microphone, channeled my inner Fred Northup, and squeezed an extra couple of hundred dollars out of the audience. Many people, I’m told, assumed this was part of the plan all along.

Permalink | Comments Off

Next Page »

Next Page »