Auschwitz – the lunch room

There are time when I am glad to be an ORF. Getting up time is one of them, knowing that the only reasons I have to get up and scurry about to go someplace are not due to the servitude of employment. Meal time is a mixed bag but this week it has been largely positive, largely because of the ponderous inertia of the Yankee government and the predation of social engineers.

The primary cause of this joy was the announcement by the Yankee government, via the news media in my instance, of changes to the shule lunch regime. I came to reflect on the government’s, and social engineer’s, perversion of resistance is met with greater punishment rather than any type of kritik. The new regime is supposed to be healthier with more whole grains, vegetables (including catchup?) and less fat and sodium.

This despite test data from pilot shules that indicates the students will just not eat what they don’t like and thus instead of eating “healthy”, eat less, presumably making matters worse at home but on the ledger of government – good, parents – bad, a profit. (I regret I can’t find this reference. Mea Culpa.) There is even counter information on the obesity war front, a study [Link] indicating that shule junk food is NOT a substantive factor in causing obesity. Unfortunately, like the War on Drugs and the Global War on Terror, (and Vietnam,) any body is that of the enemy.

Sadly, the shule lunch program has always been a playground of social engineers and religionists. If the Yankee government can receive any credit for its heavy handed ways it is for relieving shule children of the confusion and stress of being subjected to one religionist doctrine at shule and (probably) another at home. This was not without some benefit, at least for the nerds. I recall in elementary shule being subjected to prayers at both the start of class and at lunch time. The former were standardized with variations but the latter were often delivered by one of the do-gooders and their deviations from our parents’ formulae gave the attentive, perceptive, and cognitive – nerds, in short – something to muse on over lunch.

The food at lunch was also a matter of social engineering. The elementary shule I attended was an old mill shule and had a long tradition of educating (training?) of grubby children fated to follow their grubby parents into wage servitude in the cotton mills. They were generally unprepared and under-responsive to the influx of children parented by ‘rocket scientists’. The best tried and did their best in the face of chronically inadequate budgets and college educated parents demanding what they considered minimum standards 10 dB above the shule’s previous best. The lunch room was not part of the best.

Children and parents alike uttered complaints about food that was unpalatable and unhealthy to thirty and forty years veterans of ladle and steam table. The requirement to clean one’s adult sized tray was confronted as criminal, making enforcement all the more strict. Criticize a bigot and you create a martinet. The lunch room prayers were abandoned after a Yankee army Judge Advocate General type descended on a faculty meeting and talked about criminal sanctions and what it was like to run a shule under martial law. Disgruntled, the do-gooders abandoned the practice entirely rather than dilute their rants.

The effect on the food was nil, largely due to the juju of the great god Budget. As a result, a class split occurred. The mill kids pretty much continued to eat the prepared food, but the rocket kids began to mostly eat brought lunches. There was a great contrast between green institutional plastic trays and colorful lunch boxes, with a few brown paper bags offering contrast. The ‘eat it all’ rule still held but brought lunches tended to have everything wrapped and even the girls had pockets in those days. And all in obedience to parental guidance that some of the food was to be saved for afternoon recess, or while waiting for bus after shule.

So I am glad now that all I have to do when I eat lunch is contend with the instructions form physicians, and FD SCP, and the battle to find foodstuffs across several grocery stores. Preparation is a joy compared to those days of childhood because now, at least, the only do-gooder that bothers me is my own conscience. But I know, deep down, that the kids are still stressed and strained at lunch in shule, and no wonder they eat too much or too little.

One of the strengths of homo sapiens is that we always teach our children the wrong things by intent and the right things by error.

Canonical’s Reich

One of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force, made a statement on Countenance-Scroll the other day about “the social trajectory moving into a region where all advertisements are false and predatory.” I asked him yesterday why he used the word “false” and he basically answered that he had hoped the bogs would comprehend if he used ‘false’ instead of ‘inaccurate’. I then asked if his hopes were upheld and he sadly admitted that they had not.

I personally find the idea encouraging, probably being at least as naive and set for disappointment as my colleague, that an era when all advertisements, regardless of source, will be viewed as their opposite will signal a new ear of human kritik. But I doubt it.

Yesterday I ran into a very good example of the basis of this cynicism. I got pointed to an article [Link] about Ubuntu advertisements. I viewed two of the four, my gorge was rising too high to go further, and seldom have I seen such a collection of misdirection and outright overt inaccuracy. Canonical, it seems, is no different from Megahard when it comes to misdirecting, entrapping propaganda.

I started off chuckling at the claim that Ubuntu is the largest subscribed of the Linux distributions. Since the introduction of Unity, Ubuntu is solidly on the road to middle of the pack. Last release it got whalloped by MINT, which is rather like saying Megahard got whalloped by BASIC.

But then other inaccurate claims were made, all apparently intended to alienate the nerd basis and attract bog neubs. What kind of business model is this? The only thing that makes sense is that Canonical thinks the neubs will pay for hand holding whule the nerd basis is moderately costly to maintain. Of course something in excess of half the production comes from the basis so one still has the impression of Canonical slicing off extremities with a dull piece of paper.

I also liked the claim that Ubuntu works with all the user’s devices. Really? I had to buy specific MP3 players to work with Ubuntu; my phones do not work with Ubuntu, nor does half the hardware in the house, including FD SCP’s sewing machines.

And yes, I am still using Ubuntu, but not Unity. This box is running Gnome 2 and I am in no hurry to blow that GUI away.

But I now have an anecdote of confirmation that no organization can be trusted. Period. And any of their advertisements.

And, no, I am not going to quit brushing my teeth – I trust my dentists if not their professional organization’s advertisements – or going to gym – the Yankee government was already suspect – because the refereed research papers support it.

Distrust and verify.

Oil Drop Anniversary?

Strange morning. Cooler just now dispersing seed for the tree mammals and dinosaur descendants than it was when I motored to/from Scant City. This put me in mind of an article [Link] cited in an email yesterday.  The article is about Robert Millikan’s oil drop experiment.

The experiment has very little to do with oil, or automobiles, or anything obvious from the name. It is all about the charge on an electron. And I need to mention that this is all happening back at the turn of the last century, back in Tom Swift time, which is appropriate because this effort is almost a classic Greek hero story.

The basic postulate was that the electron has a fixed charge and this experiment was intended to measure that charge. What Millikan set up was a can with a simple capacitor – two plates – and a perfume sprayer full of light oil and a charged screen to put charge on the drops. There was a hole in the can to which a telescope was attached (although we might as well call it a rich field microscope) that could see the space between the capacitor plates.

The prescription was to find a drop that had the right size and a charge on it, then watch it fall a measured distance (angle) with the capacitor grounded, then charge the capacitor and watch the drop rise throgh the same distance, note the times, and then repeat until the drop got lost. And you repeat this a whole lot of times.

The basic idea is that the drop has some number of electrons on its surface and therefore its rise time would be determined by that number of charges. So you can do a combinatorics analysis to figure out the charge on a single electron.

The work is very tedious, and needs be done in a cold environment to minimize the giggling of the droplets. I had to do this experiment as a sophomore in undergraduate schule about this time of year. I recall the room the apparatus was in had its heat turned off and the window open. It was very straining to use the equipment and about twenty hours of observation were expended after a couple of hours of learning procedure. Getting droplets to take charge and finding them is a strange skill that I am not sure I want to claim. Anyway, that was basically all the slack time I had that week which was all we had to do the experiment in since the next week we had another experiment to do. I did have a lab partner and we took turns looking and recording, about a half hour per shift. Recording was boring while observing hurt – eye and muscle strain.

I suppose today a video camera would be attacked to the telescope and the muscle strain eliminated and the recording could be automated so that the experiment could be done by an individual. Since no real teamwork was involved this would not be a bad thing.

But I still have a great deal of respect for Robert Millikan doing this experiment.

I’m not sure how this is an anniversary thing but it is the right time of year for me to have a memory storm.

Rainy Night in Arab

Nasty night. Much wind and rain and sleet. A righteous, bodacious storm, even. Nonetheless, I slept better than I expected, only really interrupted by the failure of the Arab Electron Uncooperation at about 0230 hours. Power was restored about 0345 but unstably for some time so I made a decision not to assay the trip to gym. No point in risking treacherous roads to discover an unelectronified gym.

Thus fortified, I now may confront the week in. Starting is an article [Link] by an editor of Nature (the journal) entitled “Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism”. I read the piece and it is clear, as I have come to expect from British journalism, but misconceived. I will offer that the list is not just things misunderstood but rather unacceptable and unconscionable. Since it is a list I cannot resist the urge to cherry pick and make like a bridge (i.e., pontificate – I said it was a rough night.)

• The standard structure of news stories doesn’t work for science – the lack of understanding here is why anyone should be wedded to a format that is inappropriate, or who would try to use it inappropriately. The former is humorous given the slavish acceptance of the formats demanded by different journals. The latter is an indictment of journalism that they would abuse confidence and information just to fill inches.
• Change my colourful quote at once! – The humor here is that any nerd would think of anything they say as colourful!
• You can’t cover my work. I forbid it – This one comes closest to hitting sound. But it dependson who owns the intellectual property. Anyway, unless it’s a condition of employment you can always refuse to talk to the journalist.

My experience with journalists is one of the reasons I am cynical. It is not so much that they don’t know but that they aren’t willing to put in the effort to know. I recognize this is in the nature of the work but it is also why they are being extinguished.

Next, we have an article [Link] that indicates a recent meteorite strike in Morrocco did originate on the planet Mars. I have to give some kudos to this journalist. These articles crop up about once a year and leave the nerds among humanity asking how did the matter escape the gravitational field? This fellow, the first I have seen, answers the question.

Mars got hit by something massive and fast and kicked out all sorts of gibble. Millyuns of years ago.

And finally, we have an article [Link] from Scientific American. Starts off by saying that people don’t trust atheists. Curiously, it doesn’t answer the obvious questions: do atheists distrust atheists; and do atheists distrust religionists? The World Wonders.

But then they go on to advance that the distrust arises from some innate human need to feel like we are being supervised. Some of the data supposedly indicate an interchangeability between government and deity, which is intriguing when one thinks about all the propaganda abut rulers being deities, or at least the chosen of deity.

The other intriguing question is whether the distrust extends to those who do not believe in a personal deity? Or do they get a free ride?

The rain has ceased, for now and the waters are receding, slowly and squelchingly. The stench of flooded sewers is abating as the wind freshens after dawn with the renewed insolation.

Good Question

This [Link] brings up the question:

Which do we want: internet or Hollywood?

I vote Internet. Hollywood hasn’t done anything worth while in years. Just another corporate leech.

Sundae Pourri

It being sundae and a day of imposed rest since the religious discrimination is heavy upon the land, at least here in Greater Metropolitan Arab and probably throughout the Old Confederacy, time is arrived to clear tabs. I rather hate to admit that this has been a very tabbing week. Happily most of them do not merit much discussion, if any.

The starting is is an article [Link] about an Ubuntu tablet. A year ago I would have thought this a wonderful idea and snapped one up even if I had to ante up a half kilobuck. Why? Because then I would have a tablet I knew I could do stuff with. Now, given the way that wannabe master Mark and his pseudo-church instrumentality have vertically copulated Ubuntu, I could not find a pole long enough, and light enough for me to touch the thing.

I have had discussion with my colleagues, most with similar bents and creaks to myself, who own tablets what they do with. I find that they largely use them as an alternative to a smart phone. (Many are like I and in denial over the cost of rate plans from pirate cell providers – or is that redundant?) This actually makes them more attractive but not compelling. I prefer my phone to do little more than let me talk – an occasional text in tornado season when the service is flattened is about all.

But an Ubuntu tablet. Shuttleworth needs to quit recycling his body fluids.

Next, more engagingly, news [Link] of a simulation of the early universe by boffins in Nippon. The cherry here is that the simulation indicates that normal stochastic fluctuation can collapse the nine spatial dimensions into three nerds and six bogs; that is, three robust dimensions and six empty, vapid dimensions. This raises question of why there are so many bogs today?

Next, an article [Link] in the Economist on fragmenting bullets. Underwhelming. What is amusing and entertaining is the demonstration of how little journalists, at least this one, understand Clausewitz. Usually the Economist does a better job. Hopefully this is just an off day for the fellow.

They do rather make up for it in a nice article [Link] on differential equations. Gotta get a copy of the real paper but if it’s half as interesting as the journalist wrangles, it redeems the rag.

Closed Path

Guk! Exasperating morning. I got up at my usual hour, not to go off to gym, which is closed today because of religionist discrimination, but to swap out KVM switches on my desk boxes. My old unit had been acting up so I had sprung for a new unit a couple of months ago. The problem is that the shelves where I keep my desk boxes is low to floor, has gibble sprouting in front of them, and is a worm orgy behind. But last night I maundered with my conscience and resolved to rise this morning and snarfle the garthog.

I did, but got masticated in the derriere. The new KVM switch uses a keyboard sequence to switch boxes and I was unable to get it to talk to my keyboard. Any of my keyboards. So then I had to reverse the whole process. And I managed to misinsert the moose and squirrel connections so that both boxes went into input device paranoia. And I was trying to be quiet to not disturb FD SCP’s slumber.

Anyway, back to where I was last night with only minor fraying of my nerves and other hardware.

Anyway^2, on to the necessities of the day.

Saturn’s Soaking

Through the turbulent boundary layer into the period of tab extermination. One of my colleagues, Magnetic Inductance Force sent me a link [Link] on just what the Anonymous did to the Yankee government and the information parasites. The list is impressive; they seem to have taken down the Hooverites web site?

As a word of caution, you can intimidate and frighten politicians, but mostly all you can do is frustrate and madden civil servants. Yes, you can frighten them but mostly only from within. The two strongest scares you can use with civil servants is RIF and pension reform, the latter being an euphemism for vertical copulation. Also, bear in mind that civil servants don’t really mind if you abuse the politicians so long as the civil servants don’t get stupid work taskings as a result. Pray also remember that justicers like the Hooverites carry firearms, and while they aren’t very lethal, those folks are quite proficient in their use. Not as good as on the television programs but good enough.

Anyway, knowing how politicians and their slimy corporate masters work this is not done. They are going to keep being fluid and looking for a way to enslave the ‘net. I noticed last evening that they have already suborned the journalists who call the whole thing excessive. Not unexpected, after all the journalists have been in the pockets of business from the get go.

On a more enjoyable azimuth, I got a link to an article [Link] on open source counterparts to advertised corporate overlord software clients. Another reason they want to throttle the ‘net – so that those who build better software can be divided and enslaved. But I was reminded of what is missing in Linux. Now most Linux software is better than Winders software in that it is easier to use and easier to use well.

My experience with Winders users is they either use lots of software, none of it at all well, or they use software well but only a small number of clients. This follows from most Winders software being hard to learn to use and often hard to remember how to use. The whole thing is not helped by software training companies who string things along over too many courses with minuscule information density so that your brain dies in the wait between first fact and second fact, and the absence of manuals.

I did learn several years ago that the client-human interface on Winders software, at least the kind produced by big companies, is designed by experts in how not to be human friendly. Linux software, on the other hand, is designed by coders, with some help from real psychology nerds, so the interface is at least logical. This almost always proves to be adequate and efficient in use. Usually you can teach yourself half of what a Linux client can do just by thinking about what the program should do and exploring the command tree. I find the only time I have to download the manual is when what I want to do is more than three branches down the tree.

But there are warts on the face of Linux. Despite claims to the contrary there is no adequate WYSIWIG LaTeX GUI. Lyx is impressive but just flat not enough. I should comment that there is only one Winders client that satisfies this criterion and it won’t run right under WINE because the manufacturers don’t do the graphics right.

Next, I am informed from the campus of the Boneyard that when you exercise your muscles produce stem cells. [Link] This is evidently a big piece of why “when you exercise you live longer” although I have to admit to being embarrassed to repeat that statement. It is meant stochastically – statistically, if you will – but that distinction isn’t drawn. Strictly, to make the statement, you would have to know when someone was going to discorporate, then after they had exercised redetermine that date and if the difference was positive, you could make the statement. Instead, it’s all about mean values.

Which means that there is a probability that if you exercise you’ll discorporate sooner.

Nice rainy day, flooding is predicted and all the climate change denialists are looking forlorn, as they should be. So the interesting question is what can we find to achieve the same effect on the intelligent design fanatics?

Tale Heard by a Fool

Returned to the inner boundary of the week we are. Yes, a bit of Yoda-ism here to point up some of the fantasy of at least some of what is to come.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues, Total Angular Momentum Magnetic Inductance, sent me an article [Link] about how Apple had crushed the whole textbook thing, marketplace dominating established textbook publishers and underpaid textbook writers and overburdened students……….., by introducing something called iBooks 2 and iBooks Author.

The idea is un-new although you would not learn that from reading either the Apple press release or the slobbering news article. That idea is that if you make all textbooks, and perhaps note taking, electronic then you get rid of the bookbags, and the bend backs, and perhaps the elevation of the brain infuses the mind with an energy and capacity to learn better and Amerika will start educating its young again and the steady slide downhill into third world state will be reversed!

I should insert now that the core idea, of making all textbooks electronic, and maybe the note taking, is rather dated, back to my memory at least to the first SONY eReader that used book cartridges. This evolved over the years, pushing on the manufacturers of screen technologies and pulling software developers. Much of the tablet and eReader instrumentality of today would not exist had not this dream been grinding onward.

And now that everyone thing eBooks are here to reign the oligarchs of corporate over-government are ready to hide the idiot maiden aunt in the closet.

Before proceeding on this herring chase, let us consider a basic question. How big should a textbook be? What should it contain?

The second is very easy to answer. A textbook should contain what will be covered in lecture plus a bit more that is basically what the pretty good students will read beyond lecture. And, of course, any exercises, and hints, and answers to exercises. And that is all. [1]

Hence the answer to the first question is however long to cover the above. Obviously, if the course is multi-term, the book has to be bigger than for a single term.

Now let’s discuss the warts on this. Back when I was an undergraduate the textbooks were bigger than this. No course ever covered more than half of a book. Why? Two reasons that we could figure. One was that the guys who were good teachers and had a yen to write a really good textbook were going to write the textbook to what they wanted to cover, not what they would teach. This theory was confirmed to me by John avid Jackson when I took his non-linear mechanics course and he explained why he never taught electromagnetic theory courses that always used his textbook. In some ways it is like being a sculptor; you look at a piece of rock and see a figure, then you remove what isn’t figure.

The second reason textbooks are too big is the publishers. They want to sell lots of books. It’s a fundamentally capitalist thing. So they want to book to scratch everybody’s itch. In effect they find out what every lecturer of a given course will teach, take the union of all those selections, and then that’s the textbook. That’s why textbook are 3-4 times as massive today, course by course, as they were when I took the course. And I carried my books in a satchel because if you wore a back pack you got hazed by the ROTC guys and the hippies.

ON which note, let us understand the bent back problem a bit. To do so we need to plagiarize a bit from Chad Orzel, “Uncertain Principles”, [Link] who has a rather compelling taxonomy of course types that I will not do justice to here. There are two types of college courses, which largely but not entirely track with discipline. By this, most disciplines’ (college departments essentially) are of one type or the other. Some disciplines are mostly one type or the other but have a few courses of the opposite type.

The first type are courses where the students read the textbook (assignment) before coming to class, and class is devoted to discussion of what has been read. The second type are courses where the students come to class to be exposed to a lecture that primes them to go away and read the textbook. The disciplines of the first type are primarily the liberal arts, education, and business ones. The disciplines of the second type are primarily the sciences and engineering.

As a rule of thumb, anything with equations and graphs is type 2. The example that comes to mind of a mixed state is management. Almost all management courses are based on reading some management exposition and then dissecting it in class. But there is always one (maybe two) class(es) where things like linear regression and statistics and numbers get thrown in so that the managers will have some idea of how to communicate with the token statistician that will likely work for them.

One of the other things we need to make note of is that the minds of the folks who do well in these courses are different. Maths nerds are different from scholar nerds. Commonality is possible but not common. But what this bears on is what textbooks look like and what burden do they present.

First, neither group should have to take their textbooks to class. For Type 1, the book having been read before class, the material has been learned and there is no need to take the book to class. For Type 2, the book will not be comprehensible until after class so there is no need to take the book to class. But both types of students take their books to class. Why? My hypothesis is: (a) insecurity, especially on the part of Type 1 students and frustration on the part of Type 2 students; and (b) because the students just don’t get note taking. I won’t comment further on (a) but I will observe that I had to work hard, largely on my own with only a smattering of older student mentoring, to grasp note taking. But by my junior year I often dispensed with lugging textbooks. I still had to lug integral tables and library books, but not textbooks.

But from what I can tell, students today can’t take notes. Or they try to take notes on a laptop or tablet. Unwise choices. eTextbooks will not fix this problem. Nor, I suspect, can Apple.

The other thing is that students today lack a refuge. I seldom had more than two classes sequentially. I could go to my dorm, or once I moved off campus, my car, and swap out carry stuff. Today everyone carries everything in a backpack. And will have spine problems before 45. This is a failure on the part of the colleges.

Now let’s talk about why Apple’s iBooks Author is a sham and a conspiracy. First, there are lots of eBook formats. The best is still PDF which is why there are so many formats because no one wants to deal with Adobe. Most of these formats support text and that’s it. The only one that truly supports graphics is: Adobe! Oh!, and the new iBooks Author? It supports video but not equations.

This is key with textbooks. eTextbooks for Type 1 courses is trivial, the ultimate in low hanging fruit. eTextbooks for Type 2 courses is overwhelming and counter to big profits. Numerically, there are a lot fewer students taking Type 2 courses than Type 1 courses. And publishing type 1 textbooks is a whole lot cheaper than producing type 2 textbooks because even with pretty pictures equations cost more. So book publishers make a lot more selling Type 2 textbooks than Type 1 textbooks, maybe twice as much summed over population. So even though very few students study science and engineering, the book publishers make about 2/3 of their profits off them.

Now let’s add in that science and engineering majors know how to hack DRM, and run scanners. But scanners take more time and effort to run, so scanning paper textbooks is harder than copying eTextbooks. So the publishers, evil oligarchs that they are, are all in favor of SOPA and PIPA and hanging students who copy textbooks. And they want to keep selling paper Type 2 textbooks because they make more money that way.

So no eBook file formats to support equations.

iBooks Author does not support equations. It also doesn’t support LaTeX, which is the format for maths and science and engineering publication and generates PDF trivially.

That’s why it is a sham. It’s not a war against the publishers, it’s a war with the publishers and the students are the ones getting whacked.

Incidentally, the whole home grown eTextbook thing is a sham too. The current paradigm of college as business doesn’t leave professors time to turn lecture notes into home grown eTextbooks trivially published.

The Apple is still rotten.

[1]  The reason you don’t supplement to the really good student level is that you want to make the really good students, who you hope will become subject majors, to go to library and read beyond the textbook.

Life Lesson

One of the things I have learned by repeated collision of my head with a mental wall is that humans who think themselves as fundamentally practical also tend to view maths and often, the sciences, as frivolous and irrelevant.

“Whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad.”