Brain cancer patients are worse than vegetarians — meddling busybodies telling everyone else how to live their lives. Ever since Brittany Maynard announced her intention to end her own life, brain cancer patients have been coming out of the woodwork to tell her that she has no right to do that (see here, here, here and here). Some people don’t want to die the kind of lingering death that exhausts the emotional and financial resources of their loved ones. In fact, I think most people don’t, but I think most people with a terminal illness imagine themselves dying a kind of radiant death like people with terminal illnesses in movies. By the time reality sets in, the dying person is past knowing or caring. Read more →
October 2014
Women Need to Get Into New Professions Where They Can Be Shot
A man in Texas shot two people breaking into his home, which probably wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy except that the two people were both women. Armed robbery is like technology and engineering in that it’s a profession in which women are seriously underrepresented so I endorse this as a step forward for diversity and inclusiveness. Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Diversity for Girls Only
I called the class’s attention to the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, which honors young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. Awardees are selected for their computing and IT aptitude, leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education. The website features a photo of a black girl, an Asian girl, a white girl, and in case you’re not in any of those groups, there’s an ethnically ambiguous girl on the left you can probably identify with. Diversity and inclusiveness for all. All are welcome. You still have to be a girl of course, they’re not that inclusive . . . Read more →
It’s Election Season in Irvine
It’s election season . . . campaign signs dot the Irvine landscape. As I drove to lunch with co-workers, one of them pointed out a sign for Ira Glasky, who’s running for school board or city council or something. “He’s probably trying to cash in on the name recognition of Ira Glass,” he said. “Who’s Ira Glass?” I asked, and he told me but I’ve since forgotten. A person on the radio, I think. If I were a campaign manager, I wouldn’t be advising my clients to coattail on the popularity of people no one’s heard of. “Maybe he’s trying to play into the popularity of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930s crime novel The Glass Key,” I suggested. Another Irvine candidate, Lynn Schott, is in a local women’s networking group that my wife belongs to. I offered her a free campaign slogan — “Lynn-sanity!” — but she’s not using it. Read more →
A Recipe for Confidence
If you know very little, and have a coherent story that explains the little that you know, you can be a very confident person . . . Read more →
UC Berkeley Roller Hockey
Cal hasn’t fielded a roller hockey team since 2011 but the boys (and one girl), including our kid, got a team together this season, rejoined the Western Collegiate Roller Hockey League, and they’re playing their first tournament this weekend, with games against UC Santa Cruz, USC, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. No scholarships and you pay for your own unis and travel expenses. GO BEARS! Read more →
Baldness vs. Malaria
Why is there so much more research done on baldness than on malaria? Because rich people go bald, and they don’t die of malaria. — Bill Gates Read more →
Martial Artist, Self-Taught
“I’m taking a self-defense workshop for women this weekend.” “My wife knows martial arts.” “What kind of martial arts does she know?” “I’m not sure. She’s self-taught. She’s Asian, she thinks she’s good at everything Asians are supposed to be good at: martial arts, badminton . . . some people might say she doesn’t know martial arts at all, she’s just violent and crazy.” Read more →
HIS and HER
I work at an educational non-profit. Whenever I type the abbreviation HSI (High School Intervention), Microsoft Word automatically “corrects” it to HIS. When I worked at a healthcare organization and typed EHR (Electronic Healthcare Record), Word helpfully “corrected” it to HER. There’s a nice symmetry to that: HIS and HER. Read more →
Flaubert’s Prediction
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. — Gustave Flaubert (1850) Read more →
Blondes
There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Room and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The… Read more →
50 Years of Solving Crossword Puzzles Finally Paid Off
I’ve solved a lot of crossword puzzles in my life with no benefit accruing to me other than personal enjoyment — until now! Steven Landsburg, economist and author, published a crossword puzzle contest last month with free books going to the top three solvers. The puzzle was a cryptic crossword, which is typically more difficult than a “regular” crossword. This particular crossword was extremely difficult. No one was able to solve it correctly. The winning entrant had three errors, second place had four errors, and two entrants, including me, tied for third with five errors. If you think that five errors in one crossword puzzle is not very good and doesn’t deserve a prize, you should take a look at the puzzle. Read more →
I Don’t Much Care for Coincidences
I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy — to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. — Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot Read more →
Common Core Testing
A colleague posted this on the office discussion board: OK. So a good friend of mine teaches Math in our Middle School and we’re constantly talking about the various standardized tests that we subject our kids too (he currently has my 7th grade daughter for Intermediate Algebra). The students are taking ForeSight tests this week. Sort of a practice for the PSSA tests later in the year. This morning he texted me a math problem from the 7th grade ForeSight test and asked if I could solve it. So I solved it using simple amortization, but none of the possible answers match (or are close to) my solution. So I went online to solve it and got the same solution that I got by hand. Anyone care to take a crack at this problem – a typical example of a 7th grade standardized test math question? PS. My teacher friend… Read more →
L’Affaire Winston
Florida State said Friday its athletic department compliance staff is reviewing the reported authenticated signatures by Jameis Winston, but has yet to find evidence that the star quarterback accepted payment for the autographs. ESPN reported Thursday that more than 2,000 authenticated signatures by Winston have been found on the James Spence Authentication website. — ESPN.com A couple of very surprising things about this: Jameis Winston can write his name. That may be a clue. Before I bought any signed Jameis Winston memorabilia, I’d insist on independent verification of his ability to write his name, lest someone be foisting some counterfeit goods on me. Caveat emptor. Florida State’s football coach — a grown man named Jimbo — believes (or claims to believe) that Winston signed 2,000 items without being paid for doing it. He signed 2,000 items for free. I wouldn’t sign 2,000 items for free, would you? How long would… Read more →
You’re Now the Local Computer Expert
Tropical Spiders That Burrow Into Your Torso: Another Reason I Prefer to Just Stay Home
Happy 170th Birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche!
o those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures. Read more →
The Lowlight of My Weekend
I had lunch over the weekend with Robert Hass — Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, UC Berkeley professor and former Poet Laureate of the United States. When I say I had lunch with him, I mean he was one of five people seated at our table. I asked to take a photo with him, which he graciously consented to. I don’t have any photos of myself with Pulitzer Prize winners and still don’t because the photo didn’t come out at all. I completely botched it somehow. So that was probably the lowlight of my weekend, except for Cal getting blown out by Washington on the gridiron 31-7, while four Husky fans sat directly behind us screaming the whole game. Football at Cal unfortunately is like academics at Washington: not terribly distinguished. Read more →
One of Those Things That You Never Forget
We were walking north from Doe Library toward Hearst Ave, where we parked the car. Four girls were throwing Frisbees around on the lawn. I raised my hand in the universally understood “throw it to me” gesture and soon found myself in possession of one of the Frisbees. I flipped it behind my back toward one of the girls, and as the disc sailed majestically over Memorial Glade I reflected that there are some things in life you never forget, and one of those things is how to whip a Frisbee throw behind your back. Read more →