My undergraduate college had its own radio station, KTRU. No one listened to it except for the girl on our floor who dressed all in black and wore Skinny Puppy t-shirts, mostly because the music was programmed by DJs like the girl on our floor who dressed all in black and wore Skinny Puppy t-shirts, whose musical tastes (like those of the other DJs) were best described as “inaccessible.”

When Skinny Puppy was a new DJ she got the all-important 3-5am shift, and one night Cesar and I stayed up really late so we could listen to her show on a novelty radio that was designed to look like the Tropicana orange. We quickly decided (partially on account of the late hour, and partially on account of the lousy reception, but mostly on account of the “inaccessible”) that we’d rather listen to “Kilroy Was Here,” which for the rest of our college career (and beyond) we continued to prefer to KTRU.

Of course, it was always my dream to be a radio DJ, but my proposed “Huey Lewis Hour” was received coldly, as were “Joel Sings Karaoke On-Air,” “Dramatic Readings of Ayn Rand Stories,” “Men at Work at Work,” “The Best of Rush Limbaugh,” and the eerily-ahead-of-its-time “Who’s Hooking Up With Whom?” Eventually I turned my attentions to campus politics and making fun of things, one of which turned out to be probably the most valuable skill I learned in college.

Most students cared less about the radio station itself than about its black and yellow “ktru 91.7fm rice radio” stickers, which could be cut and pasted to make clever political statements like “death from above” and “lovett sucks” and “keep houston unbearable.”

Alas, all inaccessible things must come to an end, as today Facebook brought us the news that the KTRU transmitter has been sold to the University of Houston, who astutely noticed that while Houston has both a “Tejano” station and a “Super-Tejano” station, there’s still a huge market opportunity for a “Mega-Tejano” station.

Apparently KTRU will keep “webcasting” online. This doesn’t really help the 4 people who listen to KTRU over the airwaves, although maybe their hurt feelings will be soothed when the proceeds from the sale are used to acquire something useful, like a commemorative statue of Edgar Odell Lovett.

Nonetheless, there is a larger issue here, and that’s that colleges shouldn’t change things from the way they were back when my Facebook friends and I attended. I’m pretty sure this is an idea we picked up from older alumni, who always seemed disappointed to learn that we no longer continued their cherished traditions, like the “Charles Manson Party” and the “Stagflation Ball” and “sex.”

Then a few days ago we were at the mall, so we popped into ToysRUs again to see what was new on the unnaturally-colored monkey front. This season they’re showing eerie 3399FF monkeys. I picked one up and discovered the following Happy-Fun-Ball-esque sticker:

Warning: Contains lead. Maybe be harmful if chewed on. May also release dust that contains lead.

Presumably this describes my monkeys as well, as they appear to be the same species as the poisonous ones. The way I see it, there are two (non-exclusive) possibilities:

(a.) Gulab and Jamun contain trivial amounts of lead, and the stickers represent CPSIA-ish overcaution.
(b.) Chinese people and/or ToysRUs are trying to kill me.

Alas, as many baby showers as I’ve ruined by using the traditional “wish the mom well” time for diatribes against Henry Waxman and the CPSC², I can’t rule out the second possibility.

Accordingly, Gulab and Jamun are going in the trash³.

Farewell, my deadly friends. We’ll always have that episode where Jeff Goldblum matched his wits against those of a clever criminal and somehow came out on top.⁴

1. Technically, I’m the one who likes monkeys.

2. And also diatribes against circumcision, although those aren’t particularly relevant to this story.

3. “Everybody in the kitchen. We’re having a family meeting.”
“We never had a family meeting before…”
“We never had a problem with a family member we can give away before.”

4. By “always” I mean “until I die from lead poisoning.”

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

In fact, this is already true today. When I used to bus-commute across the bridge, every bus ride that I didn’t spend reading pirated young-adult Star Wars novellas or playing “Angry Birds” I spent watching “iTunes U” lectures from Stanford and MIT and iPorn about “Machine Learning” and “Computer Science” and “The Naked Female Body.” If only I could somehow put these on my resume, I’d be able to talk my way into all sorts of jobs I’m not really qualified to do. BillG has got a plan for that too:

He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

Now, there is a cynical school of thought that says that the value of a MIT degree is not that it signals that you learned dozens of MIT-lecture-worths of things; rather, it’s that it signals that you were admitted to and jumped through all the hoops necessary to survive four years at MIT, in which case the hypothetical third-party credentials “watched a bunch of MIT lectures on the bus” probably aren’t that useful to employers.

Furthermore, being lectured at is frequently not the best way to learn something. Nonetheless, I join BillG in applauding this trend. If it puts competitive pressure on colleges, it will be a good thing.

It seems to me that it’s even more promising for K-12 education. Rather than having centrally-assigned, underqualified teachers trying to lecture 30 students who learn at varying paces (and several of whom are disruptive), each student could find the lecturer and lecture style that works best for him. In many cases these might be no lectures at all. Think of the innovations that would ensue! I bet BillG is most excited about this:

He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.

But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

Wait, what? K-12 education needs to be “place-based”? I mean, I understand that the internet can’t yet teach kids valuable life skills like “staying in your seat” and “raising your hand before you speak” and “not going to the bathroom without getting permission first” and “getting duct-taped to a bench in the locker room for being too slow at running laps.” But surely virtual locker rooms and virtual duct tape are only a few years away!

(Also, for those of you who don’t know, I am delighted to report that the post-college years contain a huge number of parties, including Oktoberfests, Nights of Decadence, 80′s Parties, Bacchinaliae, Shut-up-and-Drinks, and Lovett Casino Parties.)

It’s tough to assert with a straight face that competition (from the internet or otherwise) will provide vast benefits for students in grades 13-16, but has no role to play in grades K-12. If Bill ever decides to spend his vast fortunes improving education, hopefully he’ll revisit his opinion on this first, before he wastes billions of dollars.

They run for election every few years, filling our medians with campaign signs festooned with grade-school-evocative clip-art like apples and rulers and dunce hats. Their voter’s guide blurbs affirm their commitments to teacher-unionism, to social promotion, to eco-awareness, and to our children.

In Denver, it turns out, they have an additional responsibility: entering into financially catastrophic $750 million derivatives contracts with JPMorgan Chase in order to shore up massively overpromised pension funds:

To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how a bunch of educators and schoolparents got taken for a ride by some Wall Street salesguys with slick PowerPoint presentations whose area of expertise is taking people for a ride with slick PowerPoint presentations. Luckily, it’s not actually their money at stake, and the people of Denver (some of whom likely have kids in the school system) ought to be happy to pony up for the difference.

After all, half-billion-dollar loans to pay pensions to former employees of the public school system are the cornerstone of democracy.

Insofar as pretty much everyone is my political and/or religious opponent, I find myself without an axe to grind, leaving me to fall back on my default position of blanket opposition to the opening of new religious facilities. As a good libertarian, of course, I default to letting people do whatever they want with their property; however, if you ask my opinion I’m happy to tell you that the world probably doesn’t need any more phony-baloney churches or synagogues or mosques or celebrity centres.

Let it not be said that I am without sympathy for the Muslims of Manhattan, who (I understand) lost their cherished World Trade Center Mosque when it was (along with the rest of the facility) destroyed by so-called “terrorists” with unknown motivations. I do feel a little bit churlish for not being more enthusiastic about their rebuilding plan.

Nonetheless, a sky daddy who insists that you live your life according to the dictates of a magical fairybook is a sky daddy who insists that you live your life according to the dictates of a magical fairybook. Couldn’t we build a Trader Joe’s instead?

I’ve got my trusty old REI bicycle, an aftermarket memory-foam seat designed to stave off groin-numbness, an iPhone full of motivational music (mostly A Night at the Hip-Hopera on repeat), some ugly pink battery-powered speakers from Best Buy, some ugly “for kids” handlebar pouch to hold the speakers and my keys and wallet, the cool Schwinn helmet I bought back when I was briefly the custodian of Mateo’s Target bike, a weird eyeglass-mounted rearview mirror that’s probably more distracting than it is helpful¹, a tight-fitting (and consequently gut-enhancing) bike jersey with rear elastic pockets that feel too unfamiliar to trust, the completely-inappropriate-for-serious-cycling Keen sandals I trekked all over India in, and a huge variety of performance-enhancing drugs like Singulair and Benadryl and Claritin. My goal is to ride 50 miles on the first day and 300 miles on the second, although I also have secondary goals of not getting hit by any trucks and not getting car-doored.

If I don’t come back, avenge my death.

1. The first time I tried it, all the people I was riding with asked me how I liked it. “Well,” I offered, “you know how sometimes you get an extra sense and it takes a while for your brain to figure out how to integrate its inputs with your pre-existing sensory data?” Not a transhumanist in the bunch, it turned out, and so they all looked at me like I was crazy.

This “Contract on America” is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that most of the bullet points sound pretty damn appealing, and the worst of the bunch — “cap liabilities for the oil spill” — is something that I’ve never heard “Tea Party” types advocate (and even the “evidence” the Democrats cite for that bullet point seem to have nothing to do with “capping liabilities,” but rather consist of skepticism over the President’s authority to dictate the terms of the liability). Taken as a whole, it’s much better than what either the real Republican party or the Democrats themselves are offering to do, and a candidate who actually offered the “Contract on America” would — even with its flaws — be my preferred candidate.

The second reason it’s interesting is that it departs from the usual narrative about how the Tea Party is just a bunch of racists whose primary motivation is hatred of Black people and Brown people. (Sometimes Red people too.) Curiously, none of the ten “Contract on America” items have the slightest to do with Black people or Brown people or Red people. Reading the list, you’d be tempted to conclude that Tea Partiers were motivated by beliefs about things like “the proper role of government” and “economics” and “political economy” and “tax policy.” If you didn’t already “know” that Tea-Partyism was an offshoot of racism, you might never figure it out from their list!

And, of course, the third reason it’s interesting is that it somehow manages not once to use the juvenile slur “teabaggers.” I bet someone gets fired for that.

While the age of consent for a sexual relationship in Washington state is 16, it is criminal for a teacher or anyone else in a position of power to have sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18.

Now, despite some titillating … um … videos I might have seen, I can understand the arguments why you don’t want teachers having sex with students. For instance, it’s a big distraction from the school’s goals, like not teaching math, not teaching reading, and planning periods. It’s also a big distraction from the students’ goals, like trying to have sex.

Nonetheless, if the students are otherwise old enough to consent, this is an argument for firing said teachers, or possibly even for not hiring them in the first place. It’s not a particularly compelling argument for making them subject to a different age of consent than everyone else, which (if you think about it) means that a teacher could conceivably go to prison for the same actions that her non-teaching neighbor could perform quite legally.

Admittedly, as injustices go, this is a pretty small one, and anyway I’m sure if I thought about it I could find some way to blame it on the teachers’ unions, who I imagine would be reluctant to endorse my “fire teachers who break the rules” program.

I was thinking about all this when I read an article about the “problem” of sports agents trying to influence college athletes:

In January, Illinois will become the 39th state to adopt the Uniform Athlete Agents Act, which calls for stiff penalties for anyone who passes himself off as a representative without a state license or for anyone who pays a college athlete with eligibility remaining. Since California, Michigan and Ohio already have their own non-UAAA laws, that leaves only eight states (Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont and Virginia) that don’t regulate agents

The penalties for “sports-agenting without a license” I at least understand, being familiar with analogues in the taxi industry, the hairbraiding industry, the eyebrow-threading industry, the florist industry, the interior-design industry, the moving industry, and the healthcare industry.

The other is pretty impressive, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a very selective law. I can legally give money to college students who aren’t athletes. I can legally give money to college athletes whose eligibility to play sports has expired. I can legally give money to college-aged athletes who aren’t college students. But the instant I give money to someone who’s a college athlete with eligibility remaining, I’m a criminal.

More disturbingly, college eligibility is determined solely by the rules of the NCAA, which is (last time I checked) a private organization. Private organizations are, of course, welcome to punish their members, although usually not with prison time. Obviously, the NCAA has no jurisdiction to punish me, seeing as how I’m not a college student. So basically they’ve convinced 39 (and counting) state legislatures to pass laws ensuring that — even though I have no association with their organization other than through the video game “NCAA Football 11″ — I can go to prison if I violate their privately-chosen rules.

Several sports-columnists seem to be applauding this state of affairs, although I’m sort of dreading the moment when all the other private organizations start realizing they can get their private rules written into law. The day when the American Mathematical Society’s proscription on Proof by Contradiction becomes a felony will be an especially bad one for me.

During a subsequent Facebook discussion, I came up with an additional “reason” why developers might enjoy Congress: developers hate testing their code, and Congress never tests before shipping. Of course I was being flip, but the idea has since gotten stuck in my head.

In software, when you want to make changes to code, you test them. You change small pieces and use unit tests to make sure they don’t break existing functionality. You develop a spec outlining what the code is supposed to do, and then you check that it does those things before you ship it. You have code reviews so that other coders can inspect your code looking for possible unintended consequences. You let normal users try to break the code before it ships. You try using the code yourself for a while before you inflict it on your customers. When you know that people will try to “game” your final product, you model their behavior and try to account for it in your design.

In particular, if you want to stay in business you don’t show up the night before release with thousands of pages of unreviewed, untested, hodge-podge code written by the very people hoping to hack your systems, full of hidden side effects, functionality that wasn’t in the spec, backdoors, and billion-dollar bugs. Unless you’re Congress, of course, in which case you stay in business no matter how sloppy your “coding” habits are.

So while I still don’t think Congress would be particularly improved by the addition of software developers, it sure as hell could benefit from some testers.

With spot market prices for gold at nearly $1,200 an ounce, Heller estimates that he’ll be filling out between 10,000 and 20,000 tax forms per year after the new law takes effect.

“I’ll have to hire two full-time people just to track all this stuff, which cuts into my profitability,” he said.

Plus there’s two new jobs we can add to the “created or saved” list!