Life

The Logic of Children

My wife has taken off to a seminar that the kid's school is hosting titled "Adolescent Mental Health".  Now there's an oxymoron for you.

Yet my children are not entirely without logic.  My fifteen-year old daughter told me recently that her teachers are not impressed by her latest syllogism. It goes something like this.

     A: Knowledge is Power. (major premise)

     B: Power Corrupts. (minor premise)

     ergo Knowledge Corrupts. (conclusion)

She now takes this conclusion as the major premise for the next stage of her logic.

     C:Knowledge Corrupts (major premise)

     D: Teachers Convey Knowledge to Children (minor premise)

     ergo Teachers Corrupt Children (conclusion)

This conclusion now forms the major premise for her final stage.

     E: Teachers Corrupt Children (major premise)

     F: Athens, near the peak of its Golden Age, poisoned Socrates for corrupting

        children. (minor premise)

     ergo:  All teachers should be poisoned. ( final conclusion)

I can't imagine why her teachers would be unimpressed by such logic.  I am tempted to use it as a cure for the NEA, but so many of their membership can defend themselves as not being part of the set described by premise D.

One of the little known events in Aristotle's career is that the powers-that-were in Athens were contemplating doing him in, also on the grounds of corrupting the children. Aristotle, with great humility, declared he would save Athens from committing once again a sin against Philosophy and took off for Macedonia.  There, he tutored just one student and did one hell of a job of it, causing immeasurable death and suffering for much of the known world.

The charge of corrupting children has always been a great way to maintain the status quo.  Almost by definition,  anyone with new ideas is corrupting the children.  We still have vestiges of these laws,  but only in extreme cases.   If they were applied as they have been through most of history,  most of Hollywood would be in jail.  Not such a bad idea actually.  Gee, I guess I am a conservative.

The Thin Line Between Martyrs and Terrorists

It's back to school time again, when our children are brainwashed and indoctrinated into liberalism.  In the very first week of school, my daughter reported two specific incidents.

In the first,  her teacher said "There is a fine line between terrorists and martyrs." My daughter responded that no there isn't,  there is a very clear line.  Terrorists kill other people, martyrs are killed by other people.  She said her teacher just glared at her.

The next incident occurred in her AP US History class.  The teacher told the class that President Bush mentioning God in his State-of-the-Union speech made him uncomfortable.  My daughter responded by asking if, before forty years ago,  any President in US History had ever made a speech without mentioning God?  Again, she received only a glare from the teacher.

Students like my daughter are unfortunately rare.  Those who know better are often cowed into silence by the authority of the teacher and the threat of bad grades.  Most sit there and absorb these tenets of liberal dogma as if they were facts.  Since they are disrespectful of the traditions and culture of our country,  most teenagers probably remember them better than the actual facts the teacher presents.

The educational system in this country has failed and failed badly.  Not only are the students not learning what they should learn,  they are learning a great deal of false liberal dogma. 

The widely respected former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was asked during congressional testimony what the greatest problem facing America was.  The Representative asking the question, in the normal fashion of Capitol Hill demagogues, offered a choice between two alternatives. Chairman Greenspan ignored the choices and answered that the greatest threat was our education system.  Up to fourth grade , our children test on a par with other industrialized countries in math and science.  By the end of high school, they have fallen to the bottom.

According to Mr. Greenspan, Congress needs to forget about such band-aid solutions as banning outsourcing of jobs and promote education in the basics and in abstract  reasoning that workers will need to survive in a highly competitive job market.

    "Our school systems should be judged on the basis by which they produce a generic learning that enables people to be in several professions or jobs through their life work," he said. "It's so critical that we teach people how to learn."

So what is the problem,  why can't we seem to teach our children.  Steve Jobs, a rather liberal California billionaire perhaps best known as the founder of the counter-culture Apple Computer, said it best in a Wired Interview:

"It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."

The Liberals were bright enough to see that the cultural takeover of a society will work if they take over the schools and the media.  They have very successfully done both.  Free speech is suppressed on school campuses across America under the political correctness doctrine.  The NEA and other teacher unions promote mediocrity by opposing merit pay increases and resisting with all their might the firing of bad teachers.

Our teachers today are poorly educated in math and science, the keys not only to a competitive economy and jobs for our children, but also the keys to clear and rational thinking.  In fact, a great many of the teachers are neoluddites, who view basic skills in math and science as a bad thing.  And the problem is actually worse than this,  as this attitude became prevalent in the late 1960's.  The teachers today were largely educated by teachers with this same attitude and lack of knowledge and rationality.  We are in much the same situation as Red China after the Cultural Revolution, when they had killed off a generation of educated people and therefore had no one to educate their young.

The solutions are clear.   We need to get the liberal dogma out of the classroom and get basic academics back in, through voucher systems and enabling competition in the education system.   Otherwise, our children will continue to spend their schooldays learning how there is a thin line between martyrs and terrorists.

The More Things Change...

I marvel at the technological advances in education today.   My children look up their homework on the web,  do their homework using laptops, and take the finished product into school on tiny jumpdrives, half the size of a fountain pen, that can hold more than two hundred million characters. (That's a lot of five hundred word essays.)  Wow.

Unfortunately, the other day, our dog Patches got ahold of my daughter's jumpdrive and managed to thoroughly chew it up.   So even in this incredible technological age,  the dog still ate her homework.

Waking up is hard to do

As one gets older,  waking up each day actually becomes harder.   Now this may seem like an extreme statement in a house full of teenagers,  who make not waking up into an art form,  but this is more a stand on principle for them.

I knew today was going to be a bad one when I eased myself out of bed and my wife jumps up and said, quite seriously, “who’s shooting off a machine gun?”  Now I realize my skeletal system has been known to make the occasional pop and crack,  but a machine gun?  Come now.

After actually getting my body in motion, my next problem in the morning is to purge myself of my dreams.   I suffer from the combination of unusually vivid dreams and a thin veil between dreaming and wakefulness.  If the dreams are too close to reality,  I am given to become confused by them.  The worst example of this is one time when I, as chief architect,  was explaining to a number of senior managers that I had already explained something to them in an earlier meeting regarding a large software project.   There I was,  in an executive conference room of a Fortune 500 corporation,  recounting the earlier meeting,  “Then I told Norm about the problem with the print driver and then --- the --- dragon --- crashed --- through --- the --- wall (long pause) ah never mind.”   Unfortunately,  those words would come back to haunt me for years.  Word spread throughout the corporation and any time a manager would question what I was doing,   I would inevitably hear “and then the dragon crashed through the wall.”

So it has become important for me to review my dreams so I wouldn’t become confused.  Much to the chagrin of my teenagers,  part of this process has to verbalize some of (what I consider) the more amusing ones to them first thing in the morning.  Now to say teenagers are not in a receptive mood in the morning is somewhat like saying Democrats have a mild dislike for our President.

This morning however, my daughter was prepared to counterattack.  I told her of my dream of Vulcans running a neighborhood carwash in a secret scheme to wash all of their dirty towels because their planet was out of phosphates (sort of a laundry laundering scheme.)   She countered by telling me she was discussing Vulcan Pon Farr with a number of her friends, and the only ones that seemed to know what Pon Farr was were passing teachers.

This was an excellent tactic on her part for shutting up Dad,  because the last thing I want to hear from my soon to be sixteen-year old daughter is that she is standing around in high school corridors discussing Vulcan mating rituals.  So I forewent explaining to her that the reason the teachers got it was that Pon Farr is an obvious allegory for marriage. (You know, once every seven years, oh never mind.)  But I did blurt out that this is why no Star Trek series ever had a Vulcan captain.  The Star Trek franchise is based on the ability of the captain to have a romantic liason with every moon princess and vaguely female life form to come along (insert Janeway joke here).

So the morning rituals are done and with enough caffeine in my system to keep me afloat for a while,  another day begins.  Hope you have a good one.

Would You Go Back?

As another birthday nears,  I have fallen into my normal pattern of becoming morose, reflecting on my existence, and leaving the country so no one will know its my birthday.  Today, my perky twenty-something Spanish teacher found out my birthday.  She became all excited  that mi cumpleanos esta proxima.   Youth is great that way,  you actually look forward to birthdays.

I never was a big one for birthdays.  One of my first aging crises fell before I was even twenty.  It was the first time a Playboy bunny was younger than me.  (See, I actually do read the text.) One of the worst crises I ever had was when I was asked to talk to a class of eighth-graders at my old school.  I thought, sure, I just graduated a few years ago.   Then when we got to the discussion period, one of the little smart alecs pointed out none of them had been born when I graduated.   My wife will tell you I came home and bebo mucho cervaza,

There is one interesting test I have come up with over the years.  Like Britney Spears, many of us wish we had a time machine to go back and change our lives.  Given my knowledge of the history of financial markets,  I know I could go back to any point since late 1978 and make a couple billion dollars within a couple years.   So although I regret many of the investments I didn’t make (and quite a few of the ones I did),  would I go back?

Well if you go back to any point in your life,  you are then exposed to the vagaries of fate from that point onward.    Considering this,  you have to think,  what are the good things in life that you would not change?

My most prized accomplishment/gift in life has been a thirty-one year marriage to a wonderful girl.   Closely following are the three wonderful children we created together.  If I went back to any point before they were conceived,  it is questionable whether the same DNA would combine in the same way to make the same children.   I find, much to my amazement,  this totally rules out me going back to any date before late 1991.  Totally.  I would give the world for any of the three of them.

Now,  there have been lots of opportunity to make (and lose) billions since 1991,  so would I go back.   On reflection,  I see all three of my children, who are now all teenagers, are safe, healthy, well-adjusted, and well-educated,  which were our priorities (in order actually) when we conceived of them.   As I look around the world,  I see the chances of having three such teenagers seems to be considerably less than the chances of becoming a billionaire.   I know many people who have much more but have much less.

It may seem corny,  but no,  I wouldn’t take Britney’s top-secret De Lorean.  So I guess I’ll just go on to my cincuento y uno cumpleanos and count the blessings God has granted me. 

Thank you Lord.  In all seriousness, thank you.

Cognates and Other Curiosities

Some random observations from Spanish Immersion School:

Cognates are words that are the same in two or more different languages.  The word ‘bar’ is the ultimate cognate.  Although the names of alcoholic beverages differ substantially,  ‘bar’  translates across all the major European languages,  thus assuring Europeans will always be able to find the staples of their existence.

One must be careful of cognates though.  Sometimes words that look the same have entirely different meanings.  For example,  as an aficionado of Diet Coke,  I have a bad habit of ordering Coca Light over here.   It sounds more Mediterranean, don’t  you know.  Unfortunately,  the correct way to order in Spain is either Coke Light or Coca-Cola light.  If you order Coca Light,  they think you are trying to order low-calorie nose candy and give you very strange looks.

Other than that,  cognates are the language students friend.  No need to memorize the new word,  just learn a new way to pronounce the old one.

The Spanish are a lot of fun.  Any people that include vino in the base of their food pyramid (officially put out by the Organización Mundial de la Salud)  as the recommendation for “una vida larga y sana”,  a long and healthy life.  I can go with that.

Some of the Spanish words seem like they should be cognates, but are not.  For example,  ‘Inmobiliaria’  for government agency is much like the English word ‘ immobilize’ which seems just about right.  [ Editor:  It turns out this is wrong.  The translation is "estate office" not "a state office".  This is the Brit term for a real estate office, which makes sense if you think about it.]

Oh, and for any of you who read my rant on being an Americano,  I happened to be looking in the Spanish-English dictionary provided by the school whose teachers have been berating my arrogance.   Guess what it gives as the translation of estadiounidense.  You guessed it,  and I quote, “American.”   I love it.

The Bear

When I was very small,  with no understanding of things,  I listened to it every night in fear.   The thump, thump, thump of its footsteps,  coming nearer and nearer.  In the dark,  my head buried in my pillow, I knew it was coming ever closer, and when it arrived it would kill me in some horrible fashion.

Night after night,  I could hear the bear.  Its steady pace coming ever closer.   I  tried to imagine how many footsteps away it was.  My earliest memories were thinking it must be a hundwed steps away.   As I grew older,  my estimate grew faster than a government budget.  The last firm estimate I remember making was a million gazillion.  Eventually,  I learned what the bear was,  and I thought I had lost my fear of it.

Then at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day,  the footsteps stopped.   I knew the bear had arrived and all my childhood fears flooded back in an instant.   I have never been so afraid in my life.

They took me to the hospital,  and after thirty-six hours,  the bear started walking again.  I was very relieved to hear his steady trudge.  Yet I know he is much closer now,  and I do not think I will ever lose my fear of him again.

SIGGRAPH 2007

Following my sainted grandmother’s advice,  that a family going to a scientific conference together helps strengthen family ties,  the four of us climbed on an airplane and flew to San Diego for the 2007 Annual Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH 07).

Regrettably,  Pieter, my oldest son,  couldn’t make it because of final exams and college responsibilities.   This is the first family trip he’s missed and we missed him,  but he and I had attended SIGGRAPH before,  and he had been on several trips to California as a child. 

After the conference,  Jessie, Mike, Pat, and I drove up the coast to San Francisco, stopping along the way to see Muscle Beach,  Hollywood, Cal Tech, the Santa Monica Pier,  the Big Sur, and Monterey.   Pictures of the conference and the trip to the Bay area are here.   Pictures from San Francisco and the Muir Woods are here.

I admit to ulterior motives.   One reason to show the kids California is to make sure they never move there.   Just driving through traffic in LA and Silicon Valley should be enough to convince almost anyone.   Also the trip allowed them to see the consequences of an out-of-control Nanny state.

This trip may not have worked out as I had planned.  First, coastal California is a wonderful place to get away from the summer heat.  While the rest of the country was undergoing a heat wave,  we were cool and comfy in California.   Second,  showing Jess Cal Tech was a major mistake.   She,  like so many children,  always wanted to attend Hogwarts.  And frankly,  watching the fruits and nuts in California is some of the best people watching in the world.

I’m tempted to get into a rant here about all the obvious bad things we saw in California,  but why spoil a family moment with my conservative politics.  Suffice it to say that after dropping the family off at the airport to fly home to start school,  I drove from San Francisco to Sacramento.   As I drove down the crowded  highway,  the first sight that greeted my eyes were the state government buildings  coming into view across a large swamp.   At first,  I thought that was an adequate metaphor, but then I saw the sign:

CAUTION CAMPERS, VANS, AND TRUCKS
GUSTY WINDS NEXT SEVEN MILES

Amen to that.

At Least Mary and Joseph Found a Stable

In case the normal Christmas stress has you down,  just think, it could be a lot worse.

As in the United State's fifth busiest airport:

"Denver International Airport is scheduled to reopen at noon today after a 45-hour closure - the longest in the airport's history - resulted in approximately 2,000 canceled flights"

Or in Heathrow Airport, London

"Heathrow bosses faced fury from stranded passengers as thousands were left outside in freezing conditions.

Up to 70,000 people were caught up in a fresh set of cancellations as the fog-bound airport axed almost two-thirds of its flights.

Many opted not to travel to the airport, but about 40,000 passengers were believed to be stuck there, facing conditions one described as a "living hell".

There were huge queues of tired, frustrated and increasingly angry travellers - many with children - at Heathrow and Gatwick, many forced into emergency tents.

At Heathrow the tents were quickly packed full and the queue outside stretched for several hundred yards. BAA staff gave out woolly hats and gloves."

So when you're grumbling about wrapping Christmas presents, or about the in-laws coming over,  say a prayer for the Christmas Traveler.

Miracle on 34th Street

One of the cable channels is playing the classic movie Miracle on 34th Street during prime time for several consecutive nights this week.  How wonderful,  I thought, to give such exposure to one of the great Christmas classics,  especially in these times of truly disgusting movies such as Borat.   Something for the whole family to watch.

So I watched it.   The movie was as good as I remember.  But the commercials...  One was for Erectile Dysfunction and another for controlling transmission of Herpes during sex.

Does anyone but me see anything wrong with this?  What were they thinking?  Perhaps that no child raised on today's cable television and Hollywood movies would ever sit through Miracle on 34th Street,  so the only ones watching it would be the fifty somethings trying to remember when the world was much more innocent and full of hope?