Arkansawyer

Here’s our last installment, and here’s today’s, in two parts:

But for math the ACCUPLACER says “you cannot go to college until you learn multiplication tables” – period. It is no wonder that many 19-year olds walk out and say “f*ck that!” and give up on college. They found their way to college, found their way through getting financial aid, got registered, arranged transportation, found the cafeteria, and yet, they are told that “college is not for them” by a f*cking computer program. And a computer program for which there is no negotiation – the advisors will never override the program – the student simply needs to go home and spend the rest of their life as an unskilled worker working for low wages.

This seems so unfair. I wish pundits would get more pissed about this as “fair access” / “social justice”.

Me, too. It’s lonely out here. And following on the heels of this:

I suggest a simple fix in the short-term and then some deeper analysis to fine-tune things.

His argument is specific to local conditions, but worth reading nonetheless.

Bonus link: Bob Moses (who is a one of my personal heros) and The Algebra Project.

Okay, I’ll bite. The ten(nish) books that most influenced me are these, which I read well before I turned twenty-one:

1. Billy Bass, by R. W. Eschmeyer From this book I gained two things in particular: The “fact” that fish don’t feel pain and a visceral revulsion toward pollution.
2. The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker, and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Brent and Harry Lazarus Our friend and veterinarian Doc Sturdivant gave me the Treasury when I turned six, and I discovered the Experiments in the St. Paul’s library in second grade. I still have my original Treasury. My parents gave me (over time) two copies of the Experiments; I know where one page of one copy is.
3. The Freddie the Pig series, by Walter R. Brooks These books fueled my imagination, with the Federal Animal Republic, the clockwork boy, the overt anti-communism, the whole enchilada.
4. Marie Curie, by an author I can’t place I also discovered this at St. Paul’s Lutheran in second grade and it’s stuck with me over time. One dreadful detail of fact haunted me for years: jura Znevr erprvirf Cvreer’f rssrpgf, vapyhqvat gur pybgurf ur jnf jrnevat jura ur qvrq, fur pbzrf npebff n fpnes ba juvpu cneg bs Cvreer’f oenva unf pehfgrq. (to translate)
5. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein These books bent my mind, in both good and bad ways, and the traces remain to this day.
6. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 7th Edition, edited by Judith Merril There are about a dozen pieces in this anthology who helped shape my thinking: Fritz Leiber, Shari Tepper, Fredrick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, James Blish, Leo Szilard, Cordwainer Smith, Maxine Kumin, Edward Gorey, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffery, Lawrence Durrell, Alice Glazer, Merril herself. All Merril’s anthologies were good, but this one was great, at least for me.
7. The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, and Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney These two books, as different from each other as War and Peace from Ulysses,  were the earthier side of my Heinlein obsessions.
8. Sometimes A Great Notion, by Ken Kesey It’s the best novel written in English in the twentieth century, in my opinion.
9. First Course in the Theory of Equations, by L. E. Dickson, and Calculus, third edition, by George B. Thomas These books opened my mind to higher mathematics. The Dickson book was a way of thought that I’d never before encountered; Thomas developed basic calculus in a way that eventually made real analysis much easier and much more meaningful.
10. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins Robbins’ unashamed sensuality and iconoclastic sensibility fit me perfectly at the time, and I hope does to this day.
11. Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Books full of lies, truths about lies, lies about lies, lies upon lies. Truly a case of the abyss staring back.

There are other, possibly more disreputable books I could put on, but this is my list. I’m not sure where I’d cut it. It seems Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon should be on there, too. There are also books I read much later which are, in their way, influential on me. What we read when we’re young, though, that’s what grooves into our brains. ”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a chlid?”

…to keep you healthy.

That is all.

For once, I don’t have words of my own to add:

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

Read the whole thing.

via Making Light

I’ve been meaning to link this since I first saw it. It’s exactly right and clear enough for a general audience:  Memo to Next President: How to Get Cybersecurity Right

Here is Schneier in a nutshell:

I have three pieces of policy advice for the next president, whoever he is. They’re too detailed for campaign speeches or even position papers, but they’re essential for improving information security in our society. Actually, they apply to national security in general. And they’re things only government can do.

• One, use your immense buying power to improve the security of commercial products and services…
• Two, legislate results and not methodologies…
• Three, broadly invest in research…

Yes, it’s really that simple. Read the whole thing.

Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Managment has an unusual index entry: bullshit, detecting, 268. He expanded on the topic elsewhere:

The first rule of BS is to expect it. Fire detectors are designed to expect a fire at any moment: they’re not optimists. They fixate on the possibility of fires and that’s why they save lives. If you want to detect BS you have to swallow some cynicism, and add some internal doubt to everything you hear.

Common sense, right? Well, it ain’t that common. Anyway, as to how Eve got that bum rap:

To recap from the book of Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, as pretty as it is, for they’ll die. He wanders off to do some unexplained godlike things, as gods are prone to do, leaving the very tempting, and non pit-bull or electrified fence protected, tree out for all to see. Meanwhile Satan slinks by and convinces Eve apples are good: so she and Adam have an apple snack. God instantly returns, scolds Adam, who blames Eve; resulting in everyone, snakes, people and all, getting thrown out of Eden forever.

Please note that in this tale nearly everyone lied. God lied, or was deceptively ambiguous, about the apples (they weren’t fatal), Satan misrepresents the apple’s power, and Adam, approximates a lie in his wimpy finger pointing to Eve. It’s a litany of deception and a cautionary tale: in any book that makes everyone look bad in just a few pages, is it really a surprise how the rest plays out?

It’s a lovely essay. Read the whole thing.

via Lifehacker

Consider me there!

The Bar Camp wiki.

What to expect.

The rules (such as they are).

Let’s hope that by 2009 we won’t need a Mendelev to fill in the gaps.

via Joho the Blog

…but programming is. Check out these linked posts from Nat Torkington: Teaching Kids Computer Skills and Programming and Teaching Kids Programming.

A few high-level takeaways:

Kids need strong positive feedback when they get it right, otherwise they rapidly lose interest.

A girl, whose parents firmly don’t want a computer at home, built an animated summary of the first chapter of her favourite book. Boys wanted to make guns that shot bullets.

They like the idea of a robot, they’re not so excited by the reality of it.

The older kids have patience and can sit through a brief lecture before playing. The younger kids have no time for talking adults and no immunity from distraction.

Knowledge workers who can’t program are like commuters who can’t fill up a gas tank or change a tire.

In the “Nat! My comrade in subversion!” dept.:

One of the most important classes (in my opinion) was on how to use Google. I taught the senior (8-10) and intermediate (6-7) kids how Google works, what kinds of things to search for, how to interpret the results page, and how to improve your search if at first you don’t find what you’re after. The ads part of the results page was, in particular, news to them. “Why would somebody pay to be there?” they asked. My demo search was “shark pictures” and at the time one of the paid results promised shark pictures but, if they clicked on it, they were taken to a page of software advertisements–no shark pictures. You could feel their disappointment, and it became a great teaching moment.

In the “Nat! I thought you knew better than that” dept.:

System administration has also been eye-opening: I had no idea how much work it takes to keep just nine machines working.

Welcome to my world! And I don’t even have to diddle around with printers, other than from my desktop. As I was telling a virtualization vendor (or was it my boss? maybe both), the reason to use Red Hat Linux instead of Fedora has nothing to do with the quality of the kernel or the relative price. It’s to get the Red Hat system management tools.

System administration is a bit like taking care of children: The first one is an incredible leap into the unknown. The second, not so much. Two people can manage a dozen easily.

D’Arcy Norman claims to blog infrequently about education, but when he does:

Fair Dealing, and open access, and creative commons, and all of the wonderful things that these entail. Only seen by faculty as ways to get content into their courses. A one-way trip. Roach motel.

I can see I’ve got a lot of work to do.

It’s quite good and not long–read the whole thing.