Capella’s Constipation

The feeds brought me an article [Link] this morning that deals with college courses on Science Fiction. Hmmmmm.

The first problem is that, based on titles, none of these courses have to do with Science Fiction. Fantasy, yes! (Tolkien) SciFi (SyFy as it is now commercialized?), yes! Star Wars, Star Trek, and other video. But Science Fiction? No evidence.

I know there have been courses on science fiction, I’ve read about them in ANALOG and in the notes of collections, but these had to do with how to write science fiction, a chancy proposition given that those who major in literature and syntax are not usually given to actually do the Four Ts of any nerdish discipline, and those who are are not really inclined to study literature or syntax in college, which perhaps explains why those who teach the courses are nerds who have gone on to be successful writers of science fiction, which in turn raises the question of how many successful science fiction writers have been educated as litterateurs and syntacticians? Or the courses had to do with the technologies predicted in science fiction or the social concepts explored.

I have rather a problem finding that sort of insight provided in Star Wars, which seems to be primarily about Germanic architecture and the machinations of tyrannical despotisms. Star Trek, on the other hand, seems to be entirely healthier since it takes such a negative view of slavery, at least in its more obvious forms. Tolkien, on the other hand, does an admirable job of arguing the fundamentalism of good and evil in the context of severely dysfunctional but idyllic societies.

Still these are popular and obviously appeal to many, not just the geeks and the weaker minded and willed of the nerds. At issue is not whether those who read science fiction or Sci Fi or Fantasy are depraved but what the depth of that depravity is. Quantity, not quality. Although that is rather more difficult with the readers of fantasy since almost no magics are mathematical, at least as portrayed. [1]

When I was in shul, I never heard any intimation of courses on science fiction or sci fi, maybe fantasy. Such were limited to shuls with large private endowments, notably Ivy Leage and wannabe shuls. Shuls dependent on the whims and prejudices of legislatures could ill afford the death knell of that era, frivolity, being sounded by elected officials [2] in the state capital.

Besides, when you carry a triple major there is scant time to go wandering off too far on electives. As I recall the farthest I wandered was a few applied maths courses in the engineering shul. But we read science fiction in those moments when it would contribute to our getting our heads back. Read, not watched. Yes, we all trooped over to watch Star Trek, the original with villains Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley as heors, second string, and a goilem as first string. Of course the show got missed whenever classwork intervened; the program never missed was Laugh In, which was to be laughed with and not at.

So it seems the question is whether these courses are for bogs who want to understand geeks, or just geeks who want to avoid bogs?

[1] ‘Nerds do maths, Geeks talk about maths admiringly and worshipfully, and bogs disparage and denigrate maths.’
[2] Idealism and thievery are antithetical and inimical.

Once More

Back to the breaches, fellows! The indication of a ‘fifth force’ has arisen yet again. [Link]

And no, this is not related to Pluto.

Ignorance in Shul

Occasionally, especially rare these days as the traditional media is in recession, a chance group of articles meshes to provoke new direction of thought. The end of this week gave rise to such.

The starting piece on all this was a New Yawk Times piece [Link] on Freeman Dyson, which demonstrates, among other things, what education should be all about. All right, perhaps technical education – a sop to Capella – but isn’t that combination of creativity, independence, and integrity what education should be about but basically and definitely isn’t these days? I shan’t deny that in my estimation, valuing proper disrespect for false authority, that Dyson is a kultur hero or role model, not least because the modern establishment would quake in horror at that statement along many modes.

I also have to acknowledge being prodded by several excellent blots this week by Alexa Harrington [Link] who always has an uncanny grasp of separating pony from poo. In particular I found her blot on the issue of teacher recompense nudgeful and richtik. That was cemented by Melissa Lafsky’s article (if you get paid to be a journalist it isn’t a blog!) [Link] on our social degeneration and, in particular, our whacked educational system. I’m not at all sure I agree with her implied social engineering approach, an experiment that we have to repeat every decade or so to relearn its lemon-like nature – sweet smelling but the fruit is inedible. Nonetheless, the matter stands that the current shul system in this Yankee republic is broken and getting worse, as demonstrated by the recent triumph of the forces of darkness in Texas. [Link]

To contribute my unasked and probably unwanted 0.02$ Yankee currency, I want to look at what one has to learn when one seeks to learn physics, or any other nerdish discipline, and, I suspect, a lot of disciplines that aren’t technically nerdish, but being a nerd I am not very qualified to comment on such.[1] I have blogged on this taxonomy previously, [Link] and reproduce some of that here.

• Thoughts – the ideas associated with the discipline;
• Terms – the words used to express those ideas and their application;
• Tools – the means by which the discipline is practiced; and
• Techniques – how the other three T’s are combined to practice the discipline.

These are the ‘Four Ts’ and the point I want to make here is that to be able to teach these, you have to know something about them.

So if we look at this, and teachers who have sterling credentials of education – as educators – but pitiful education in the technical disciplines. Please note that I am not talking here about the people who teach children the basics of how to learn and the basics of human knowledge, the three Rs as it be except that such are outmoded today. That latter is another matter.

The fact remains that those who teach nerdish stuffs in high shuls and even in junior high shuls in our ‘certified educational system’ are woefully undereducated in those disciplines. I can recall as a Freshman and Sophomore taking maths and sciences classes of basic and introductory material alongside Juniors and Seniors majoring in the education version of maths and sciences. Yep, the sad fact then and apparently now, is that the folks who teach nerdish disciplines in high shul have about half (or less) or an undergraduate major in what they are teaching.

It may be argued that this is sufficient since what these ‘teachers’ were exposed to is less than what they are expected to teach in high shul. Balderdash! That would be accurate if those teaching understood what they were teaching.

If we go to the ‘Four Ts’ the only one of the four that half of an undergraduate major (or less) will provide those ‘teachers’ is (some of) terms. By limiting themselves to the introductory, often survey and service, courses [2] these education majors assure that all they will see is definitions and simplified problems. Neither of these contribute manifestly to the other three Ts.

In particular, the wanting of the certified education educated teacher is that they are unable, in these nerdish disciplines, to have obtained the first T. Simply put, they are incapable of thinking in that discipline and as such are incapable of teaching it. The best they can do is push out rote presentation of the terms and simplified tools and techniques that they learned, most at the level of high shul algebra.  And that is failure on the part of the teacher and on the part of for the students.

Err not, being a teacher is not easy, but our present system sets our society and its young members up for failure. The current system of highly educating future teachers in education matters and woefully inadequately in the discipline they will teach, at least in high shul, is inverted and suicidal. If we are to reform education and its apparat then part of that reform has to be to hold the teachers of nerdish disciplines primarily accountable for knowing and understanding and living, at least mentally, their disicpline. That means something of the order of a real actual major in that discipline and a second minor in education stuffs.

Or we can resign ourselves to being no better than a third world nation in another generation. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
[1] Yes, Quadgop, I realize that hasn’t prevented me, or 0.9944 of my species from commenting such innumerable times in past and hence, we expect similarly in future.

[2] A service course is one that is taught as both an introductory course for discipline majors and minors and as a curriculum requirement for roundness in other disciplines. As such it is weak in the former and strong in the latter.

Frat Rat Darwin

We note, in this year of observation of the birthday anniversary of Charles Darwin, the Isaac Newton of biology, that the folks at Cambridge has uncovered the accounting records of Darwin’s attendance. [Link]

In reviewing this article I am not at all which of several nuggets to ingest. One is clearly the stuffiness of having preserved these records, uncatalogued and unattended for this length. Is this academic in general or British, or the intersection of both? And how accurate are they? My experience is that academic accounting is somewhere between abysmal and fascist.

But the encouraging thing is the message this set of entries conveys about Darwin himself. The picture is definitely one of a privileged and pampered – spoiled even – child who spends his days ding little more than (the equivalent of) attending fraternity parties and goofing off. Why the lad even had maid service, something unseen in this nation’s environs since before my father was an undergraduate.

And what is this with the vegetables? Another evidence of being a monied twit or the influence of a physician father? Clearly different from my undergraduate days of eating in dormitory cafeteria, whose prison guard workers assured that vegetables went on every plate along with an obligatory meat, but that was long before vegetarianism was more than a furrin aberration, or on my own, which primarily meant sandwiches or frozen food boxes. Of course that may be why my digestion is unstable these days just like Darwin’s was in his advancing years.

Anyway, here we have a record of a young man who was clearly as frivolous and wastrel as the scion of any fraternity house, heavily committed to his primary goal of partying but no more than tepid to actual learning, and went on to set the foundation for biology and the structure for modern debate between religion and understanding.

There may be hope yet for our own vapid, inept, apparently useless young.

Post Scriptum

Oh, and since the thesis is that buying a PC with WINDOWS OS is cheaper than buying an APPLE PC, which is the only way to get a PC that runs MAC OS (easily), let’s extend the thesis a bit to ‘buy a PC with UBUNTU or some other form of open source LINUX on it and save even more!’ [1]

[1] ‘let’s’ is a contraction of ‘let us’.

Sermo Tumidus

Who died and left MegaHard title to “PC”? The latest bit of idiocy advertising from MegaHard [Link] has resurfaced my question of how did MegaHard get intellectual property rights to the acronym PC? And I am not talking about that intelligent design opium dream “politically correct”, I am talking about the term invented by the HAL company, “personal computer”.

To me the term is highly specific and has about the same kind of meaning as the  term “personal toothbrush”, that is, an device that I use to perform some activities that is mine and that except in exigent circumstances I do not share with other people. Although I do acknowledge that I do not worry about sterilizing my PC quite as much as I would worry about doing so after loaning my toothbrush to someone other than FD SCP.

As I note the term was originally invented by HAL but it got stripped from them in the same way that “XEROX machine” doesn’t mean the paper copying machine was made by XEROX. Although in the interregnum between HAL coming up with the term and when it lost the term there was a lot of entertainment in the names that other manufacturers came up with for their boxes.

But it is implicit now to the use of PC that it means, at least in this context, a personal device. That means that an individual owns it and does not regularly share it with others, otherwise it isn’t personal although I might acknowledge it is a computer. And I am willing to loosen up enough to let dependents claim their computers as personal even though they may actually “own” it. But I draw the line short of a “family computer” that is used by all or most of the family members resident together, and I draw the line short of computer used in the workplace that are owned by the organization. Those are not PCs. [1] The are OCs or FCs or something else.But let us not call them PCs as that is a horribly misleading, inaccurate, and potentially dangerous misuse of the term.

But I still come back to the question of who decided that a requirement for a computer to be a PC included that it run some form of WINDOWS OS. The bishop of Rome? Richard Dawkins? The current administration of the Yankee government? The United Nations? The obnoxious lout who hawks crap on TV?[2]

I should like to remind MegaHard (and that lout!) that even though the Yankee government has delayed the transition to digital television, a decision apparently ignored by much of the corporate television apparat, the lifetime of my analog televisions is now a near term given and hence the reticence to heave a brick or other reasonable dense artifact through the image tube is under less restraint. And if I do that you can rest easy at night with the expectation I am going to mail the remains to you postage due.[3]

Although, after watching the commercial and seeing some shiksa schmendrik pick out a laptop based on “how it looks”,  I am thinking that it might not be a bad idea to give MegaHard intellectual property rights to all the people who think that way.

[1] Note, no apostrophe here! PC’s is possessive, not plural. Lesson for all you folks who can’t get this straight

[2] Note, crap here refers to retail goods, not per se fecal matter although they are remarkably similar if one analogizes manufacturing and alimentation.

[3] Usually I just glue the artifact to a return post card and dump it in postal box but in this case I will actually make mailing labels. And yes, I know that is an old MASH gag. From the books, not the television or movie versions.

Thin to Death

An article [Link] on thin client office computing came in my eLetters this morning. Somehow this seems rather expectable given that the new administration is (modern) democrat? After all, isn’t that what social engineers are all about: reducing everyone who isn’t a social engineer to monomodal serfdom and establishing all the social engineers as mystical aristocrats? Of course the same might be offered for (modern) republicans except it would be consumer serfdom and corporate aristocracy. Of course the high priests of that latter mysticism, the ones in the big banks around the old Dutch fortifications in New Yawk City, have all been found to be manipulative heathens and hedonists.

The problem with thin client computing is that it tends to be a reduction to the lowest absurdity.  I have discussed this in terms of the individual member previously, but this time I want to take the approach of cost trade-off. When you go to thin clinet computing what you are basically doing is moving all the clients onto a server so that instead of the member loading a program off his/her hard drive they load it off the server hard drive. So the difference is that instead of needing individual client licenses for each member box, you now need server licenses for all the clients you provide.

Notice the subtle difference there between what clients members have (and need) and what the organization provides. There is a cost trade-off between individual licenses and server licenses. Just on the basis of instances of the client, that break even point is usually somewhere in the range of 1E1 to 1E2 (10 to 100 for the notationally challenged.) If your organization needs less than that break even number it is cheaper – just on a client license basis – to have individual licenses. Of course there are other costs like support. These tend to accentuate or intensify the sharpness of the trade-off since it is usually cheaper for small numbers of clients for the using members to provide their own support rather than have centralized support.

So in an organization that has typical client requirements, everybody uses some clients, everybody (or many members) use a few clients that only a few other members use, you end up with a mixture situation. In a traditional environemnt built on stand alone boxes networked, this is not too big a problem, the organization just buys multi-install licenses for the common clients.

But when you move to a thin client environment all that changes. The common clients stay pretty much the same just moving from a multi-install license to a multi-instances license. But the few user clients now become a pain. That pain takes several forms. One is that the number of clients of a particular client may be below the break even number so that providing that client to those few members increases in cost. This increase is intensified, deepened as it were, by shifting from individual to central support. And while just supporting one client may be a flea bite, the combination of all for a diverse organization (e.g., lots of nerds doing different things,) become a Tyrannasaurus Rex nibble. Sipmly put, it is not unreasonable that the bill for software more than doubles in client diverse organizations.

This problem is made worse by a combination of management mental ossification and the nature of the cost saving promise of thin client computing. That promise has two components: software, which has been discussed; and hardare. The hardware side of the promise is that thin client hardware is cheap and it is, but it also won’t run software that isn’y hosted on a server it’s connected to.

So a quandry develops. If everyone uses only the same clients the thin clinet computing saves lots of money on hardware and software with only a modest rise in centralized support cost. But if the organization is client diverse, then the savings are reduced because you have to choose between providing the members who need low density clients with stand alone machines, or you have to pay extra for multi-instance licenses for those low density clients. Either way, savings are reduced.

Now in the rational mind a decision about thin client computing would be an assessment of client requirements and a detailed cost analysis of options that preserve the information handling capabilities and needs of the organization. But that assumption of a rational mind is not often compatible with the management mind, and less so the higher up the management mind is in the herarchies of management minds. Any activity of low density is of low benefit and generates low revenue. That is not what the buisness shuls really teach but that is what superficially successful management minds learn and more disastrously, practice.

So management, based on this fraudulent principle and the arrogance of management (that’s why it’s so like politics!) decides to change over to thin clients and eliminate any and all clinets not used by a cost effective fraction of the organization, say 0.5 of the population. After all, everyone who isn’t a senior manager is just a serf and doesn’t need anything but a shovel or a hoe. And all the lower managers need are whips.

I shan’t burden you with describing the cosequences. That is left as a trivial exercise. but I shall remind you of the parable of the farner and the mule.

Ignored Consequences

Yesterday was a lovely day – overcast, rainy, a concomitant increase in the number of Kamikaze drivers, and a round with the medical apparat. As a result of all this encouragement, I am going to descend into commentary on political matters.

I observed last evening as part of the news reading on the acousto-optical visualizer/receiver that the administration has issued a fiat that the medical apparat will computerize its records by some near date. Given that the present administration is contemporary democrat social engineers I have grave doubts over this.

Those doubts arise from the fact that we have not had a progressive administration since Roosevelt – the first one. And this sort of thing is definitely not progressive. I fear in fact that it will be like so much of what the modern democrats enact and further sap the rights of the citizenry and their freedoms. As opposed to just sapping their riches like the contemporary republicans.

When they tell the medical apparat to computerize their records what they are really directing is the computerization of our records. ‘Our” in this case mean the humans in the Yankee republic.

This computerization is being mandated based on some expectation of saving monies that may be redirected into providing medical care for the indigent and a reduction of error in treatment. Both are highly specious and ill considered arguments. This after all, is politics, not science or engineering, which it should be, perhaps.

The anticipation of saving money is based on a RAND study from several years ago. The study was performed under conditions of grave data absences and has since been impeached on numerous faults, flaws, and inaccurate assumptions. Since these impeachments are beyond the ken of politicians however, and the study supports the agenda of the administration, it is treated as if perfectly accurate and its “emperor’s new clothes” character is studiously ignored or suppressed.

The anticipation of reducing errors is also political “opium dreams”. Yes, electronic record keeping will indeed reduce the incidence of presently common error modes, such as reading and transcribing and interpreting handwriting. The handwriting quality of doctors is notorious, physicians included.

What is being ignored here are the “anticipated consequences” of adopting electronic records. Many of us are familiar with the ‘effects of unanticipated consequences” but we forget that managers, politicians more so, regularly discount and ignore anticipated consequences. Again, this arises from their inability to understand what they are about and an abiding and deep seated faith, with all the irrationality that word implies and connotes, that they are more knowledgeable than anyone else.

The matter is that going to electronic record keeping will introduce new error modes that will result in new types of errors. As an example, it is recognized that dyslexia and dyscalcula are over twice as common among physicians as in the general population. So incidences of poor handwriting will be replaced with incidences of letter and numeral swapping and substitution, and be considerably harder to identify or correct.

We should also recognize that in effect these records, which are so private now as to be even beyond the ken of their subjects, will now in effect be public information. The administration will argue that they may only be accessed by certified members of the medical apparat. If one however, considers how many people are part of the medical apparat in the Yankee republic, something of the order of 0.01 of the population, then that population is sufficiently large that no secrets may be kept and no barriers may be erected that are not instantly compromised. This centralization is an end of biological privacy.

The uninetended consequences may be considered, however inaccurately. The one that spring to mind first are actual decreases in insurance coverage now that all synergisticly negative (and it is not at all clear there are any positive!) conditions become effectively transparent to employers and insurers. What this centralization is oding is insuring the livlihood of justicers for years in civil rights litigation. Another is that the cost imposed on small practices and businesses may be sufficient to force them out of business, further depleting and degrading the availability of quality medical care in the hinterland. This latter is, of course, of no interest to the administration since the hinterland is largely contemporary republican and hince less than irrelevant.

Anyone for emigrating to Canada?

Warning Order

Spring is also the time when the medical maze begins anew. As a result of several engagements involving the solitary contribution of bodily fluids or other exposures, the blogging will likiely be a bit scant the next few days.

Selah.

Smiling Denial

Tuesday is science podcast day, and there were a couple of gems this morning.

First, from (I believe) the Guardian’s science podcast, the English government interviewed a group of manufacturing executives and found that they were consistently and in the majority, denialists of climate change. This isn’t very surprising, at least to American experience since the only climate change manufacturing concerns here in the Yankee republic admit to is in advertising products that are allegedly “green”.

But what the interviews do lend some illumination of is the behavior of the previous administration of the Yankee government. Perhaps this does reveal just how well the (modern) republican party does represent their corporate oligarch masters.

Second, and this one comes from public radio’s “The World”, it seems that people in the Yankee republic smile too much. This is based on a multinational survey. One of the findings of the survey is that the more tightly structured the society, the less people smile to those on different structural levels, lest they unduly encourage the “riffraff” or seem “uppity” to their superiors.

It seems that in such societies those who smile outside their “social level” are considered to be dangerously whacked on the negative side. In line with this one conclusion of the study was that most nationalities consider Americans to be simple and stupid. I am not at all sure this is such a bad thing. There are great advantages to making people think you are less capable than you really are.

The smiling thing has always been big in this country among Southrons and diplomats. Smiling is a good way of avoiding saying anything. I recall when I was growing up hearing mothers tell their daughters to keep their smiles open and their legs shut around boys. Since this was the period when counter-reproductive phamaceuticals were finally effective and available, there was considerably more adherence to the former than the latter.

Unfortunately, this smiling craze has spread to the rest of the Yankee republic, and instead of just Southron belles [1] being thought vacuous and inept above the neck,  the degree of the emptiness indicated by the length of the drawl, that condition has spred across the nation and indeed across genders although along the way the indication of vacuity has changed from the paucity of words to the paucity of ideas. I sometimes wonder if this facade is also responsible for the indiscriminate use of people’s given names without benefit of permission and request for forgiveness.

I used to attribute this to craven commercialism on the idea that these people mistakenly identified pleasantness with trust. If anything, it engenders the opposite, people who cannot speak politely are either arrogantly competent or imbicilically inept. The latter is the more common these days. So perhaps those furriners are right and the Yankee republic has become a naton of smiling lackwits?

[1]  Or at least what passes for belles in those days and this, not the daughters of people who own thousands of acres and hundreds of other people, but daughters of people whose ancestors were beneath the notice of those except when work was to be done or wars fought. Sad that we cannot come up with a better term for the nubile daughters of people who exerted thier right to determination.