The idea of last words is funny to me, because the whole notion of “last words” suggests they matter. Which they don’t, of course, but this hope we carry that there will be some wisdom or some insight at the last moment, other than “Oh, fuck it, fuck this fucking shit” is so sadly human, I just love it.
Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves. — Walter Anderson
The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.”
Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t.
| Ethnicity | 2011 Fall |
|---|---|
| African American/Black | 130 |
| Mexican American/Chicano | 325 |
| Other Hispanic/Latino | 150 |
| Native American/Alaskan Native | 33 |
| Pacific Islander | 11 |
| Chinese | 936 |
| Filipino | 108 |
| Japanese | 68 |
| Korean | 250 |
| Other Asian | 45 |
| South Asian | 324 |
| Vietnamese | 142 |
Image via Wikipedia
I soon was taught that [Linus] Pauling’s accomplishment was a product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning. Equations occasionally crept into his argument, but in most cases words would have sufficed. The key to Linus’ success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry. The
-helix had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children.
We could thus see no reason why we should not solve DNA in the same way. All we had to do was to construct a set of molecular models and begin to play — with luck, the structure would be a helix. Any other type of configuration would be much more complicated. Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness. Pauling never got anywhere by seeking out messes.
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
Asian kids are putting a different race on their college applications to boost their chances of getting into the top schools.
Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.
That’s a rather modest strategy. Identifying yourself as white does give you a little bit of a boost but to really improve the odds, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and check the Black or Hispanic box. Or Eskimo. Eskimos are kind of Asian-looking.
Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.
Here in California, state colleges and universities are prohibited by Proposition 209 from considering race in the admissions process. As a result, the student body at UC Berkeley is more than 40 percent Asian, up from about 20 percent before Prop 209 was passed in 1996. (The California population is 13 percent Asian.)
Other top schools that don’t consider race in admissions also have a high percentage of Asian students. Cal Tech is about one-third Asian. (As a private school, Cal Tech is not subject to Prop 209, but chooses not to consider race.)
Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.
Draw your own conclusions. We are being overrun by the yellow horde!
Indonesian students crossing a collapsed bridge to get to school
The conventional wisdom in America is that you have to be rich to get a good primary education.
The real problem is that American kids will not cross a collapsed suspension bridge to get to their school on the other side of the river, like Indonesian kids will . . .
I keep hearing that there aren’t enough women in technology, like this is a problem. The most obvious explanation is that women don’t want to work in technology. If they want to work in other fields, fine. If they want to raise their kids, even better.
I did some tutoring for a girl taking AP Computer Science. She’s a junior in high school and wants to be a veterinarian. Afterwards, she told her dad, “If I decide not to be a veterinarian, maybe I’ll be a programmer.”
Don’t let it be said that I’m not doing my part to address the shortage of women in technology, even though I think it’s baloney . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Five little monkeys jumping on the bed.
One fell off and bumped his head.
Mama called the Doctor and the Doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Twitter: 2009-11-27.
I’m abandoning the notion of moral certainty and replacing it with statistical significance . . .
After this debacle of a basketball game, my son, a college freshman, says to me, “I should have gone to USC. I could probably walk on to basketball and make the team.”
“Are you kidding? You could probably walk on and start,” I said.
We had a vendor rep stop by the office this morning . . .
The first thing he told me was, “I got a workout in this morning before I came over. Great way to start the day!”
Really? How does that information solve any of the problems we’re having with your software? How does it alter my planned activities for the day? You are not a serious person.
The unmistakable mark of the moron is he (or she) tells you about his workout schedule, especially if he has just worked out or is just about to work out.
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much [economic] mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”
Jerry Buss
I’ll argue with it . . . the fact that people are not doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a hard thing to do. Maybe people aren’t trying to do it. Maybe people don’t want to do it.
From Daniel Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow:
A large-scale study of the impact of higher education . . . revealed striking evidence of the lifelong effects of the goals that young people set for themselves. The relevant data were drawn from questionnaires collected in 1995-1997 from approximately 12,000 people who had started their higher education in elite schools in 1976. When they were 17 or 18, the participants had filled out a questionnaire in which they rated the goal of “being very well-off financially” on a 4-point scale ranging from “not important” to “essential.” . . .
Goals make a large difference. Nineteen years after they stated their financial aspirations, many of the people who wanted a high income had achieved it. Among the 597 physicians and other medical professionals in the sample, for example, each additional point on the money-importance scale was associated with an increment of over $14,000 of job income in 1995 dollars!
In other words, one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others. People have different ambitions. Some people will gladly sacrifice things like family and leisure time for money and some people won’t.
Here’s an example of what it takes to be rich in America: Laker owner Jerry Buss spent so little time with his family when his kids were growing up that when he and his wife separated, they didn’t tell the kids, and it was five years before any of them noticed the difference.
True story.
Not everyone is willing to show a Jerry Buss level of ruthless disregard for their family in their pursuit of financial success.
I’ve spent a lot of time with my family. Jerry Buss owns a basketball team and I don’t. Good for him! I’ve lived my life a certain way and I could have lived it a different way if I’d wanted to.
A lot of Americans are self-absorbed morons whose principal activities are eating and watching television. The fact that these people are not shooting up the economic ladder doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a hard thing to do if you really want to do it.
