Category Archives: Personal

Joelene Life Personal Politics

The Hardest Job There Is

April 13, 2012 – 7:40 am

One summer during college I was stringing together temp jobs in order to make money so that I could afford to go out with my friends at night and play “Star Trek” pinball. (I would have preferred, of course, to spend my summer developing my idea for a “group couponing” website, but as the summer in question predated widespread adoption of the Internet, the decision was out of my hands.)

These were super-boring temp jobs, involving things like data-entering anonymous “secret shopper” surveys for Jersey Subs, filing papers alphabetically, and going through medical bills with a red pen to make sure that the prices didn’t exceed prescribed rates. (The last was the worst, as their computer system ran on OS/2, which some genius decided should have chess rather than Minesweeper, which made it very difficult to blow off steam after decimating a particularly tough bill, which is why I originally took up amphetamines.)

At some point the temp work simply dried up, possibly because there were no more medical bills, possibly because no one was willing to eat at Jersey Subs anymore, possibly because of the amphetamines. And so my dad arranged it that I could work for a friend of his who owned a warehouse of surplus metal parts.

What were these metal parts? I have no idea. They were large and heavy and in bins on pallets, and it’s possible they were used to repair trains, or in air conditioning, or as weapons. They came in various shapes and sizes and weights (heavy *and* very heavy), and every day orders would pour into the warehouse that some company wanted 137 of the metal pieces from bin A17. My job, then, was to retrieve bin A17 (which involved a forklift, which was sort of cool, except that I never got the hang of rear-wheel steering and always ended up crashing into things) and get an empty pallet and then manually choose 137 of the least-rusty metal pieces from bin A17 and pile them onto the empty pallet, all the while counting (and then double-counting) to make sure that there were indeed exactly 137 of them. Then I’d put the bin back and move on to the next order of 94 metal pieces from bin C29, and so on, and so forth.

(To this day, it is tough for me to imagine a job that is a worse mismatch for my aptitudes and preferences, except possibly for building model histories of men’s shoes.)

At the end of each day I would collect my pay (which was itself in non-descript metal pieces) and go home and take painkillers and try to scrub all the fine metal grit off my skin and try to cough all the fine metal grit out of my lungs and then cry myself to sleep and have nightmares about counting metal pieces. All of which, quite obviously, left no time for “Star Trek” pinball.

And so after a week, over the vociferous objections of my parents, who insisted that the metal pieces I was earning were likely to represent the difference between success and failure in life, I quit. Accordingly, I have blamed the various subsequent failures in my life on the metal pieces that never were.

So it stood until this week, when Hilary Rosen (who, for reasons inexplicable to me, is still allowed to show her face in public after her stint running the RIAA) made some crack disparaging Mitt Romney’s wife for being a stay-at-home mom. Tactically this was moronic, as everyone knows plenty of admirable stay-at-home moms, and also everyone knows that the most fruitful line of attack on Mitt Romney’s wife is that she married Mitt Romney, and let’s see how her “the angel Moroni pointed a shotgun at us and said we had to” excuse plays in the court of public opinion.

Which means that everyone and his brother is rushing to throw Hilary Rosen under one of a variety of buses. Bill Donohue, for instance, wants to throw her under some sort of “lesbian parent” bus, which I’m pretty sure runs on biodiesel, and I would love to throw her under the “she ran the RIAA, which means that nothing she says should ever be listened to by anyone ever” bus, but most people are focusing on the old “parenting is the hardest job there is!” bus.

It turns out, though, that I’m a parent, and so I happen to know that PARENTING IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE HARDEST JOB THERE IS. Metal piece warehouse was a harder job. Burger King was a harder job. Even MATH FREAKING GRAD SCHOOL was a harder job. (As some versions of the bus insist that only mothering is the hardest job, I double-checked with Ganga, and she agrees with my analysis.)

That’s not to say that parenting isn’t work. It is, and occasionally it’s even very unpleasant work, like when it’s 3am and the baby won’t sleep and will scream if you don’t rock her, and you still haven’t prepared your slides for your 8am meeting with Hilary Rosen to present your new plan for permanently ruining the lives of music-downloading teenagers, and all you want to do is sleep and use your dreams to figure out a way to pretend like you care about “artists”. Or when she poops on you. (The baby, not Hilary Rosen, although that also sucks.) Or when you’re trying to write a blog post making fun of Hilary Rosen and the baby won’t stop screaming in your ear and banging on your keywinevsoivdkdsvl

But parenting is also a lot of fun. It’s a huge joy when you finally teach your kid how to Chicken Dance, or when she learns to swear, or the first time she asks you “please can you read me one more chapter before bed, daddy?” of Atlas Shrugged. No metal part ever even asked me about The Fountainhead!

I recognize that it’s uncharacteristic of me to stake out the middle ground like this, but I guess having a kid has been a deeply moderating influence and has taught me the value of compromise. So can’t we all just agree that parenting is nowhere near as hard as sorting and lifting and counting metal parts, that Hilary Rosen has no place in polite society, and that babies love Atlas Shrugged?

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BIL Intellectual Property Life Personal

Why Have You Not Signed Up For BIL Already?

February 20, 2012 – 7:04 am

I’m sure you’ve heard of TED, which is a really expensive, really exclusive annual conference at which famous and/or accomplished people give lectures to wealthy and/or lucky people. Surprisingly, despite my fame, accomplishments, wealth, and luck, I have never been invited to attend or lecture. (Actually, it’s not that surprising, given that they once gave their TED Prize to Karen Armstrong, my mortal enemy, and that they seem to like Nathan Myhrvold, my other mortal enemy.1)

Luckily for me, there is a non-union, Mexican equivalent an open-source equivalent, the BIL conference, which costs only $50, and which is open to pretty much everyone. Three years ago they were kind enough to let me give my “Your Religion Is False” talk, and then two years ago they didn’t firm up the date until it was too late for me to make travel plans, and then last year they let me give my lukewarmly-received “How To Be Funny” talk.

This year I plan to outdo them all with my balanced discussion of intellectual property: “Hitler Loved Patents”. Although I have spent the majority of the past 10 years arguing on the Internet about intellectual property with various weirdos and libertarians and weirdo libertarians and libertarian weirdos, it has only recently become acceptable to express my views in public. And what better way than through a profanity-laden speed-talking Powerpoint presentation?

There will, of course, be a large number of other talks, many of which will be almost as entertaining and/or compelling as mine. There will also be, I’m told, a “sex-positive boiler room”2 and some sort of lockpicking workshop, one or both of which certainly addresses your hesitations about attending.

If it’s anything like last year, there will also be interesting breaks between sessions, where BILders socialize and where crazy people grab the empty mics and perform spoken-word-poetry-ish rants about free energy and capitalism, all the while people chuckle nervously and wonder whether this is a scheduled part of the performance or simply the result of too little security. There might be coffee too.

There will certainly be a huge assortment of burners, transhumanists, futurists, cryonicists, libertarians, anti-libertarians, polyamorists, monoamorists3, objectivists, subjectivists, artists, crossfitters, politicians, entertainers, hosts of invention-related television shows, hackers, humorists, Paul Grasshoffs, atheists, and doers and makers of all types. Many of them are my good friends, and many more will be by the time the weekend is over. (Also, many of them will be my enemies by the end of the conference, since you can’t exactly tell people that the industry they’ve dreamed of working in their whole lives is morally on par with the death gulags without alienating a few folks, but such is the price of progress.)

In addition, the whole event takes place on a boat, which has some sort of giggly significance that is lost on me but probably has something to do with some creepy anime that everyone except me downloads and watches illegally.

Anyway, Long Beach really isn’t that far from wherever you are, and $50 is less money than you’d spend buying a dozen Original Six Dollar Burger®s at Carl’s Junior, so why have you not signed up already? And in the event you need burgers that badly, Simone gave me this code for 20% off the registration, which will save you $10, which means you’ll still be able to buy two of those tasty, tasty Original Six Dollar Burger®s4 and have the conference weekend of your life.

So I guess I’m not really sure what your objection is at this point. Sometimes I hear “Joel, you’re biased because the whole event is organized and produced by your friends,” and sometimes I hear “Joel, surely you’re on the take from the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau and/or Carl’s Jr.,” and still other sometimes I hear “Joel, you recommended that I attend the Libertarian National Convention in Anaheim in 2000, and that really sucked,” to which I can only respond, “were you at the same Libertarian Convention I was at, because I guarantee you that that was the most fun that anyone’s ever had in Anaheim in the history of mankind.”

So can you just go ahead and sign up already?

1. I’m only ten and I already got two mortal enemies.
2. No, I have no idea what this is either, although I suspect it has something to do with high-pressure stock trading.
3. Monoamorists. It’s a word. Look it up.
4. Six-dollars is what you put on your tax return, but the cash price is closer to $4.

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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!

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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.

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Libertarianism Life Personal

Too Much Grope

March 4, 2011 – 1:50 pm

The last time I flew anywhere was January May 2010, which predated all of the “don’t touch my junk” craziness, toward which I’ve maintained an extremely passive sense of outrage.

Somehow I assumed that only some small fraction of travelers were getting X-rayed, but I arrived at Sea-Tac this afternoon and discovered that every security line was being routed through an imposing-looking “RAPISCAN” machine.

I stuck my computer and luggage and shoes on the belt and then cheerfully informed the TSA lady that I didn’t want to be X-rayed.

She gave me her best “are you fucking kidding me?” look, shunted me off to the side, and then told her compatriot “we’ve got an opt-out.” She said “opt-out” in the same tone that a teenager might say “mom, you’re embarrassing me.”

So I stood there and stood there and stood there, all the while my computer and luggage and shoes were sitting unattended on the far side of security, until finally the TSA lady from the next line over noticed me and asked if I was “an opt-out,” after which she fetched a male groper.

The groping itself wasn’t too bad. The TSA guy who did the groping was polite enough, I guess. The idea of getting groped bothered me, but apart from that it wasn’t particularly upsetting. I don’t, however, look forward to explaining to little Joelene why the TSA agent gets an exception to the “no one should ever touch you like that” rule.

Anyway, other than the first TSA lady’s look they didn’t give me much trouble for opting out. If any part of it was distressing, it was this: the whole time (~10 minutes) I was hanging around the security stations, not one other person opted out.

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Life Personal Writing

Spreadsheet Book Now Available

February 26, 2011 – 9:50 am

One reason I haven’t been posting here very much is that I’ve been scrambling to put the finishing touches on my spreadsheet manifesto. I’m pleased to announce that it’s now available:

I’m hoping this means more time to write about non-spreadsheet-related topics.

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Life Personal Seattle

I Hate Running

January 15, 2011 – 4:21 pm

I hate running. I ran on the Cross-Country team in high school, primarily because I thought it would look good on my college applications. I was totally one of those kids who did things because he thought it would look good on his college applications. (Adopting a Cambodian orphan sounds like it might be fun, but it turns out it really cramps the high school experience.) Little Joelene will not be one of those kids, in part because I plan to spend the next 18 years casually instilling my views on the worthlessness of a college education, and in part because my understanding of the Mayan Prophecies leads me to suspect that colleges as we know them will cease to exist sometime around the year 2012.

In some sports you actually have practices where they teach you how to get better, but in Cross-Country our “coach” would tell us a route to run and then follow us around in her car (!) to make sure that we were actually running instead of (I guess) eating donuts or renting videocassettes or smoking. So I never particularly got better at running, although I guess I got pretty good at not eating donuts and not renting videocassettes and not smoking. (Similarly, when I took “Walk, Jog, Run” as part of my PE requirement at college, I got pretty good at hiding in the music school for an hour.)

Almost every cross-country meet was held in a hilly cow field somewhere in the South part of the county. We’d ride there on the school bus, run a lap around the cow field (which was what distinguished our sport from track), drink imitation Gatorade, and then ride the bus back. There was the usual locker-room cameraderie, like making fun of people’s genitalia and duct-taping less-favored teammates to a bench. I didn’t get duct-taped the first time, but the writing was on the wall, and so I quit the team and got a job tutoring SAT students instead, which lasted until the company founders took millions of dollars that were supposed to buy #2 pencils and vanished.

So right, I hate running. But Ganga likes running and so every month she signs us up to run in the Magnuson Series. I don’t train, and I don’t practice. I just show up every month and run my 5k and then go to Jak’s and eat Sweet Southern Steak Hash with fried eggs on top and then go home and take a nap and pretend like I’m not going to have to do it all again a month later. After the first couple of times I knew that physically I was perfectly capable of running 5k, which has made every subsequent race more of a mental exercise. I have a lousy sense of timing (which is probably why none of the bands I drummed for ever made it big) and so I never know how fast to run, and so each month I pick someone who seems to be running a reasonable speed and try to keep up with him or her. (This morning it was “Asian kid in the yellow shirt,” to whom I attribute sole blame for my subpar time.)

Running requires music, and alas the only music player I have right now is my iPhone, and the only way to get music onto the iPhone is using iTunes (please someone tell me I’m wrong about this), and most days I’d rather stick a pen in my eye than use iTunes, which means that there’s very little music on my phone, and in particular there are only 3 running-appropriate albums: “A Night at the Hip-Hopera,” “Blood * Sugar * Sex * Magic” and “Them Crooked Vultures,” all of which I’m super sick of. Maybe next time I go to Home Depot I’ll pick up a day laborer and pay him to get the rest of my music onto my phone, but I only have another 6 months left on the AT&T contract, so maybe I’ll just keep exercising to “A Night at the Hip-Hopera” until then and then get one of those newfangled Zune Phones.

They say that once you start running you’ll start to develop this really awesome feeling afterward and it will totally become part of your life and you’ll crave it and you won’t be able to get through a day without thinking of it. I sort of understand this, as it kind of describes my feelings toward fried eggs, which I only started eating about a year ago in order to defuse Ganga’s constant “but you don’t even like eggs!” objections to my plan to raise chickens. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine any way to associate this feeling with running.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I hate running, although I really do like fried eggs.

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Life Personal

Lessons Forgotten

December 20, 2010 – 8:36 pm

1. Recently I gave a talk at Ignite Seattle on “How to Be Funny.” For the most part the talk went well, although I had technical difficulties. To be clever, I had put an animated GIF on one of the slides. This somehow caused Powerpoint to get “stuck” showing that slide while (in its head) still advancing the remaining slides on schedule.

So by the time I realized the slideshow was stuck and asked them to “advance” it manually, it was actually several slides ahead, which ruined the punchline of one of my jokes and made it so I had to get them to manually rewind by several slides.

(This never happened when I was practicing the talk.)

While I was dying on stage, I was suddenly struck with the realization that this had happened to me before and that I should have known the rule “NEVER USE AN ANIMATED GIF IN POWERPOINT.” I have no idea when this happened to me before, but I’m pretty sure that it did and that I forgot about it until it bit me.

2. Every month Ganga signs us up for a 5K race at Magnuson Park. This Saturday she wasn’t feeling well enough to run, so I gave her my keys so she could sit in the car and listen to the radio. Because she is not particularly good with cars, I warned her to make sure to turn the key to “accessory” and not “run.”

I finished the race and returned to the car and tried to start it. It failed to start, and all the gauges started vibrating like crazy. I iPhoned these symptoms and found nothing. I looked under the hood and found all sorts of weird crap on the battery terminals. Thanks to a faulty prior, I assumed these symptoms (the vibrating gauges and the battery crud) represented some sort of fried electrical system thanks to a key in the “run” position.

So, I called my insurance company to see if I was covered for a tow (I was) and then we waited an hour for the tow truck to arrive. When the driver got there, he asked me if I’d tried to jumpstart the car. No, I told him, since I’d assumed something was deeply wrong with the electrical system. He thought it was worth trying, and in fact it worked. The battery crud, he suggested, was just normal battery crud that could be dissolved with some Coca-Cola. This turned out to be the case, although I’m still anticipating some sort of bad consequences from pouring Coca-Cola under the hood.

While I was driving home and reprogramming the radio and kicking myself (for I have jumper cables in my trunk and could have gotten a jump at any time instead of calling for a tow truck if I hadn’t fixated on an incorrect diagnosis), I remembered that my old blue car had also had a problem with battery crud, and that jumpstarting always worked on that car.

In my defense, the old blue car always “tried” to start and never exhibited the strange “vibrating gauge” behavior. (And then its transmission failed and then its timing belt broke and then I got rid of it.)

I still have no idea why the car worked just fine in the morning and then went completely haywire an hour later. Perhaps it will remain forever a mystery.

3. I wonder what other important lessons I’ve forgotten.

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Education Life Personal

Correlation and Causation

September 27, 2010 – 9:24 am

Another day, another plan to spend more money on education:

President Obama said on the “Today” show Monday morning that American students attend school a month less than kids in other countries — contending that the school-year gap puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. “The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense,” he said, when asked if kids should go to school year-round.

The logic here is pretty sound:

A) Other countries have longer school years.
B) Other countries produce more “competitive” graduates.
C) Therefore, we need a longer school year.

There are a number of other attractive policy prescriptions that follow from the same reasoning. For example, here’s a similar plan to increase standardized test scores:

A) Asian students eat more rice than non-Asians.
B) Asian students do best on standardized tests.
C) Therefore, we should feed our students more rice.

–

Just so we’re clear, it’s certainly possible that spirit-crushing, year-round education is in part responsible for the “competitiveness” of other countries’ graduates. It’s certainly more likely to be true than it would be if we observed that countries with year-round education produced “less competitive” graduates.

Nonetheless, in the absence of a clear causal mechanism, it’s possible that there are other differences between those countries and ours that are much more reponsible for any differences in “competitiveness.” Maybe they have smarter students, or they don’t put lead in their school lunches, or they don’t make their 8th-graders play “concussion ball” in gym class. It’s always worth checking to make sure you’ve got causality correct before you eliminate summer vacation.

–

Another key plank of Obama’s proposed reforms involves “evaluation of teachers based on their students’ test performance.” This is fine, I suppose, if you want to define a good teacher as one whose students perform well (or perhaps better than they used to) on tests. It’s not clear to me that this is the best criterion, but I never paid a whole lot of attention to most of my teachers anyway, and I always liked best the ones who taught interesting things and who let me sleep in class when I was tired.

And in some ways this aspect of the debate seems silly, because back when I was in school everyone knew which teachers were good and which weren’t. We didn’t need Value-Added Analyses or Professional Observers or DNA Tests, we just knew. Everyone knew. Students knew. Parents knew. Other teachers knew. Everyone knew.

Not that it mattered, since you didn’t get to choose your teachers. Sure, if you signed up for Latin then you were going to have the Latin teacher, and if you signed up for German then you were going to have the German teacher, and if you signed up for Calculus BC then you were going to have the Calculus BC teacher.

But when you signed up for 10th grade World History (which you would, since it was pretty much required) you were going to end up with a crapshoot of a teacher. Maybe you’d get a good one, maybe you’d get a bad one. (I got an awesome one, who insisted that Turkey was a de facto US colony since we had missile bases there, and who let me sleep in class, but that was pretty much just dumb luck on my part.)

The same was mildly true in college, where freshman science and engineering majors had to take a year-long “survey course in the humanities.” Since there were lots of science and engineering majors, there were lots of course sections of HUMA 101 and 102, taught by anyone who couldn’t talk his way out of it.

My first semester (Bible, Plato, Homer, Virgil, Canterbury Tales, etc…) was taught by a Women’s Studies professor from Germany who always brought her “friend” to class and who made most of the works about Women’s Studies. (Our crowning achievement, if I may brag, was that we convinced her to let us bring in a boom box and listen to “Achilles Last Stand” as part of our discussion of the Iliad).

My second (Shakespeare, Descartes, Kant, Flaubert, Kafka, etc…) was taught by a Continental philosopher who used terms we didn’t understand like “cathectic” and “I-thou duality” and hated every paper I wrote except for my final one, a giant clusterfuck of buzzwords tying together Kafka, the Tower of Babel, “modernity” [another of his favorites], and all sorts of other bullshit that I made sound like one of his lectures as much as I could. (I still preferred him to the first professor, though.)

Neither of them really instilled any sort of appreciation in me for the stuff we read, whereas the “American Literature of the 1970′s” course I took (“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”) was taught by a grad student with no agenda other than that he really loved the books, and so I grew to love some of them too. It was, as you might guess, not a required course, and if it had turned out terrible I might well have dropped it.

The HUMA courses, though, were both required and capped at ~20 students, which meant you needed to fight for a slip of paper with a time that worked for you and then just put up with whatever luck-of-the-draw teacher that worked out to. I guarantee you that if there were any actual choice involved then the first teacher’s class would have (after a semester or two during which institutional knowledge was being generated) been routinely empty, as it deserved to be.

Anyway, my point is that everyone knows which teachers are good and which aren’t, and all this talk of “testing” and “value-added analysis” and whatnot is just a way of pretending that we don’t. If you were to let students and parents choose which teachers they wanted, I bet things would get sorted out really quickly.

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Personal Politics Seattle Writing

Using Statistics to Coddle Vagrants

September 22, 2010 – 1:02 pm

I left Microsoft at the end of May, largely so that I could write my opus magnum book on Excel. At the time I set a September 1 deadline for having the first draft done. That seemed like the right amount of time, but I failed to predict that I’d spend a substantial chunk of August doing consulting work, and so I slipped the deadline.

I shifted it two weeks later, to September 15, which I slipped again due to unavoidable commitments like going to the Puyallup Fair and drinking beer and napping. Finally I pushed it to September 17, which I met by arbitrarily deciding that several components of the book were “not part of the first draft.” Right now I’m letting people read it for feedback, after which I’ll revise it, beg famous authors for blurbs (*cough* Philip Roth *cough*), and start selling the heck out of it.

While the book is out for alpha testing, I’ve shifted gears for several days to focus on other things like fiction-writing contests and shaving and working on an Ignite Seattle talk.

Ignite Seattle is a 4-times-a-year collection of 5-minute talks. As best I can tell, you submit a proposal, and “they” choose their favorites to actually give the talks. I attended the last one, and a surprising number of the speakers were introduced as “my longtime friend” or “my frat brother from college” or “my concubine,” which makes me suspect there’s a cronyism element involved. There also appears to be some sort of sex-quotaism, as they back-patted themselves for exceeding the (presumably court-imposed) 40%-female-speakers requirement.

I didn’t get the sense that the people picking the talks were demographically identical to the people listening to the talks, which sets up something of a political-primary dynamic: play to the base to get through the first round then pivot back to the center.

In any event, I think I need a more congenial title than “How Do You Like Obama Now, You Kitchen-Composting, Vagrant-Coddling, Prius-Driving Useful Idiots?” Maybe something more geek-friendly like “Eleven.com: Using Statistics to Model Elections in Washington State” or Seattle-friendly like “Home Composting Projects That Also Help Vagrants” or even a mixture of the two like “Using Statistics To Coddle Vagrants.” [Insert your own p-value joke here.]

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