It's absolutely nuts how issues that were long since settled have crept up again. Teaching Creationism in schools? Freaking out because Janet Jackson showed a nipple on TV? Eavesdropping without warrants? Racial profiling (discrimination)? Arresting people who say things you don't like? Arresting people without charges? Disappearing people into the black abyss of secret prisons? A divinely chosen and inspired leader? Torture for crying out loud?!?!
All this stuff was settled. There were memos. There were meetings and conventions and zines and flamewars. Hell, there were at least a dozen real wars. We figured out the right answer ages ago. So what is happening with people going on TV with perfectly straight faces rolling the clock back on centuries of progress like it never happened, like years and years of blood and fire and pain and destruction didn't teach us all exactly what was wrong with all of that, and people take them seriously? How did this happen so easily and so quickly? Is the veneer of civilization really that thin?
If all that stuff's back on the table, how is anything off-limits? Am I going to see Sean Hannity expounding at great length about the benefits of child labor? Maybe Bill O'Reilly will tell us all what a good thing it would be to bring back debtors' prisons. Will Rush Limbaugh tell us that women don't really need the vote? Are we going to see Khalid Sheikh Muhammed subjected to trial by ordeal? "He drowned, so he's innocent!" Forced conversions? Religious taxes? Slavery!?!? It took so little to regress these last 5 years. Where will they stop?
But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.
I don't know art, but I know what I like. Even so, I challenge you to say these lovely works of A4 paper are not art. I have seen few things as creative. I especially like Dead Bird, Distant Wish, Looking Back, Snowballs, Traces in Snow, and The Impossible Meeting.
Nick Hornby's latest novel, A Long Way Down, is a bit of a departure from his previous novels. While one would never say his stories are happy ones, they tend to be more positive than this one. Four people, all intending solitary suicide, meet on New Year's Eve at a popular spot for doing the deed. None of them follow through that night, having had the moment disrupted. In spite of having little in common, and not being particularly likeable people, they nevertheless stick together and stumble through the bizarre and awkward aftermath of almost.
Hornby's lucid and direct writing is again at work, as showcased before. He has a real talent for readable prose that tells a story and gets out of the way, sprinkled with the occasional, bitingly funny observation. The characters' dialogue is also standard Hornby fare, very chatty and colloquial. The story is told alternately from the viewpoints of each of the four main characters. Hornby does a good (but not great job) of shifting voices and perspectives to match.
The overall tone of the book is different, as I mentioned, being somewhat darker. There isn't the uplifting, life-affirming message that will no doubt pollute the inevitable movie version, but something both more and less. As always with Hornby, there's more than a hint of the autobiographical, though this time it takes a bleaker form. As an author, Hornby is certainly not stretching himself here. The Long Way Down is certainly a good book, but he'd do well to push his boundaries a bit further.
The Internet has made cheating on papers far easier than it was in the past. You could read this NY Times article about it, if you wanted. My point is less about that there is cheating and more how one could automatically detect it. Right now, it seems like it's ad hoc, relying on the grader's intuition and checks against sources like Wikipedia.
I think that instructors should use statistical analysis of a student's work to come up with a rough model of their writing patterns, including vocabulary, phrases, sentence structure, and the like. Then they should compare the student's work against that corpus. These profiles should be shared across courses and semesters. It would make it much harder to copy other people's work because it would require copying from the same people each time. That's tough to do with an external source, and also tough to do with a classmate, as their profiles would be available for comparison as well. Or the cheat supplier would have to emulate the cheater's profile, which is not easily done. That's still in the realm of possibility, so schools would have to make sure that at least some of the work in the profile was the student's. That would be accomplished by having regular, in-class writing exercises, under supervision, hand-written, and without the aid of computers or the Internet. Those pieces would be scanned in and added to the corpus. Obviously, none of this would make cheating impossible, but it would hopefully make it harder than just doing the right thing.
It occurred to me that detecting cheating as I just described could make for a fine business. You run it over the web, where professors, instructors, teaching assistants, etc. could upload their students' work
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. There would be a remote API that allowed custom front ends on the submissions, for example to perform scanning and OCR on hand-written work. The service would be paid for directly by the institutions using it based on the volume of material submitted. They could also get added value from paying for comparisons across institutions and against sources like Wikipedia or published works pertinent to the topic. The general approach could probably be extended to check student work other than written essays, such as computer programs.
I like this because it's a real business solving a real problem that relies on none of the trendy "Web 2.0" features. There are no tags, no social networking, no mashing up, etc. The business model is simple and brings in money from the beginning. There are many ways to extend the core idea as well as integrating with related jobs such as grading. Of course, just because I like it doesn't mean I'm going to do it. It's too much work for too low a chance of success, and I have a little girl to play with.
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Eventually, the students could just submit their work electronically through the site itself.
We got caught up with the Harry Potter movies last night. They definitely got better as they went along. That's due in part to the source material getting better as the series progressed. They refined the movie process as well, though. They had less silly, happy happy joy joy kid stuff in them, and also less fan service like Quidditch
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. They got all that out of the way in the first couple of movies, so they could prune and smooth.
As much as they improved, there was still a clear sense to me of something missing. The books cover a lot of ground, with less fluff than, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You definitely can tell a lot was cut. 2-3 hours is just too short. I think a television program would be a good option. Consider the advantages. A 26 episode season of a half-hour program is about 9½ hours in total. The books are episodic already, so breaking them into half hour chunks would work well. A television schedule would also coincide nicely with the books; all the action takes place between the end of summer and the start of the next. There also wouldn't be the multi-year breaks between movies that are so hard to avoid, which have resulted in a rather deep-voiced and burly Ron Weasley. Daniel Radcliffe is less obviously too old, but only Emma Watson seems age appropriate.
The likely downsides of a television program are three. First off is the redundancy. We have books and movies already telling the same story; why have a television series as well? There would be little surprise and predictability. That's acceptable to some extent with a movie, but over the course of a season, it could get boring. Second is the quality would probably slip. That's inevitable given the budgeting and time constraints, but also the economics; since the revenue would be steadier, they'd get less marginal benefit from making a great series rather than just a good one. Finally, with a half-hour television program, it's hard to imagine it being general interest rather than kid-focused. Still, it would be nice to get a full treatment.
As an aside, an annoying aspect of Harry Potter is that the villains are obvious. Bad people look and act bad from the beginning. There are a couple of exceptions, but they seems like exceptions designed specifically because Rowling noticed this pattern, and rather than changing the pattern, took the lazy way out.
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Quidditch is a dumb game. Read the rules. It's not unsalvageable; I think two simple improvements would be to reduce the number of formal roles to just the Keeper and everyone else, and to make the Golden Snitch worth 50 points instead of 150. There are other kind of silly things in the books that could be improved with a little effort, like the Triwizard Tournament being something open to all that eliminates contestants progressively. J.K. Rowling's talents are not in world-building, sadly, and to whatever extent she has improved she is boxed in by early bad choices.
Last month I hit 17 months in my current job. That is the longest I have held any job except my newspaper route during high school, which lasted 3 years. My previous tenures were (in order) 16½ months, 6 months, 1 month, 17 months, and 9 months. I guess graduating just before a recession can be a little dicey.
If you're in a hurry to get some water hot, fill up four pots each with ¼ of the water and heat them all at the same time on separate burners. When they start to boil, (carefully) combine them into a single pot.
The singer is off key and the drummer is off beat. The acoustics are bad and the speakers are too loud. The songs are different from the well-worn groove in your head from listening to the CDs hundreds of times, and rarely in any interesting way. When they talk to the audience, it's obvious why they get paid for their music instead of their speaking. They play none of the songs you like. The band members either stand around dorkily or dance around dorkily. It's boring watching someone play a guitar. Your back hurts from standing for hours and you can barely see anything anyway. The air is smoky and foul. When your obnoxious fellow fans aren't singing along badly, they stumble into you, spilling $5 cups of Bud Light all over your clothes. You paid way too much to be there. Live music sucks.