I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week in an AP Computer Science Principles class for the upcoming school year . . . Schools are adding more CS classes and, almost without exception, retraining in-service teachers to teach them, rather than hiring people with knowledge and experience in the field. I met with the teacher today to do some upfront planning. At one point, he was calculating how many printouts we’d need for 6 groups of 4 students each . . . “Let’s see,” he said, “6 times 4 is 20 . . .” If you think that’s funny, guess what class he normally teaches: accounting. “Are you going to write that?” someone asks me. “Does he know you have a website?” “I don’t know what he knows or doesn’t know. Except he doesn’t know what 6 times 4 is.” Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
EppsNet Book Reviews; The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
I can’t come up with a better synopsis than this article from the Boston Review: Each of these men suffers from memory and from the compulsion to obliterate it; from a mourning and melancholia so deep that it is almost unnamable; from the knowledge that he has survived while those he loved have not; from problems distinguishing dream and reality; from a profound sense of displacement. Highly recommended! Rating: Read more →
Passing for Normal
The onset of the state of mind consisted in a loyalty to objects. She apologized to one egg for having boiled it, to another for not having selected it to boil. Since it was impossible to know with much precision whether an egg prefers to be boiled or not to, she was always in a state of indecision, followed, as soon as she had taken any action, by extreme remorse. Since this is not far from the predicament of most people of any sensitivity or conscience, she passed for normal. — Renata Adler, Speedboat Read more →
Only So Big a House You Can Have?
Obama: “Right now I'm actually surprised by how much money I got. And let me tell you something, I don't have half as much as most of these folks… There's only so much you can eat. There's only so big a house you can have. There's only so many nice trips you can take." pic.twitter.com/LALI5TCA0i — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 17, 2018 In other news, the former president and his wife bought an 8,200-square-foot house with 9 bedrooms and 8-1/2 bathrooms in Washington, D.C. for $8.1 million. In fairness, he did say there’s only so big a house YOU can have. He didn’t say there’s only so big a house HE can have. Read more →
Animal House Tax Policy
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland sued the federal government over the Republican-led tax overhaul Tuesday, alleging the new law championed by President Donald Trump unfairly singles out high-tax blue states. — wsaz.com I thought this was noteworthy in that I can’t remember ever in my life hearing a Democrat say anything about people in high tax brackets other than they are not paying their “fair share.” If a Democrat has ever before said that people in high tax brackets are being singled out unfairly, I can’t remember it. The new federal tax law passed last year caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000, meaning that residents of high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland — and California, where I currently live — will see big increases in their federal tax bill. It reminds me of a scene from… Read more →
See You in Hell, Champions of Diversity
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] I love diversity and inclusion and equity. Why do I love diversity and inclusion and equity? Because they make everyone hate each other even more than they already do. On one side, you have the people thinking “Look, life’s not a fucking fairy tale for anybody. I’ve been eating a shit sandwich every day of my adult life to stay alive in this profession and these narcissistic pricks want to coattail their way in on a ‘diversity’ exemption.” And on the other side: “The numbers prove that these privileged cocksuckers aren’t giving us a fair shake. Fuck ’em. Their time is over.” In fact, “love” is too weak a word for what I feel. I luuurve it! I loave it! I luff it, two F’s, yes I have to invent! Hell is open borders. Heaven has… Read more →
Be Thankful That You’re Miserable
I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable. — Alvy Singer Read more →
Competitive Programming: CodeSignal – footballGroupStatictics (A World Cup SQL Challenge)
Description You are creating a website that will help you and your friends keep track of the results of soccer games from all around the world. You store all results of one group in a table, results. You want to sort the teams in a complex way – first by points, then by total goal differences, and then by total goals. If all of these parameters are equal, sort the teams alphabetically. The results table contains the following columns: first_team – the name of the first team; second_team – the name of the second team; first_team_score – the number of goals scored by the first team; second_team_score – the number of goals scored by the second team. Here the primary key is the pair (first_team, second_team). Return the list of team names sorted in the way described above. Note: see three points for a win to understand how points are… Read more →
A Tolerant and Diverse Society
Competitive Programming: CodeSignal – canScore (A World Cup Challenge)
Description Your friend is a soccer fan and you were watching some World Cup matches with him. You liked this game, but the rules are very complicated for you, so you decided just to try to guess whether the given attack will end with a goal or not. In the beginning, the ball is in the attacking team’s goalkeeper’s hands. On the attacking team, there’s a very talented goalscorer, who is waiting for his chance at the other end of the field. His teammates want to give him the ball so he can score. They can move the ball by passing it one to another along a straight line, but the defender can steal the pass if he is closer than d to the ball at any point throughout the pass. Now you want to know if the attacking team can score or not. Formally, you are given the coordinates… Read more →
End of the World Poll
Musical question: What is a good song to play when the nukes start falling? We’ll Meet Again What a Wonderful World Eve of Destruction We’ll All Go Together When We Go Always Look on the Bright Side of Life Clair de Lune Something short Read more →
Doesn’t Tell Me What I Need to Know
A co-worker is telling another co-worker that you have to make sure day care providers are insured and bonded. Actually, being insured and bonded is no guarantee that I want you taking care of my child . . . “Mr. So-and-so, your son wouldn’t stop crying so we taped his mouth shut. The bad news is: he died. The good news is we’re insured and bonded!” Read more →
Competitive Programming: POJ 3281- Dining
Description Cows are such finicky eaters. Each cow has a preference for certain foods and drinks, and she will consume no others. Farmer John has cooked fabulous meals for his cows, but he forgot to check his menu against their preferences. Although he might not be able to stuff everybody, he wants to give a complete meal of both food and drink to as many cows as possible. Farmer John has cooked F (1 <= F <= 100) types of foods and prepared D (1 <= D <= 100) types of drinks. Each of his N (1 <= N <= 100) cows has decided whether she is willing to eat a particular food or drink a particular drink. Farmer John must assign a food type and a drink type to each cow to maximize the number of cows who get both. Each dish or drink can only be consumed by… Read more →
A Prescription for Peace of Mind
If I don’t believe that I’m the prime cause of my life being the way it is, I’m doomed to a joyless existence in the victim position. Any prescription for peace of mind has got to include owning your own shit. Read more →
Competitive Programming: POJ 2455 – Secret Milking Machine
Description Farmer John is constructing a new milking machine and wishes to keep it secret as long as possible. He has hidden in it deep within his farm and needs to be able to get to the machine without being detected. He must make a total of T (1 <= T <= 200) trips to the machine during its construction. He has a secret tunnel that he uses only for the return trips. The farm comprises N (2 <= N <= 200) landmarks (numbered 1..N) connected by P (1 <= P <= 40,000) bidirectional trails (numbered 1..P) and with a positive length that does not exceed 1,000,000. Multiple trails might join a pair of landmarks. To minimize his chances of detection, FJ knows he cannot use any trail on the farm more than once and that he should try to use the shortest trails. Help FJ get from the barn… Read more →
Exactly the Same?
Decisions Are Not “Right” or “Wrong”
Decisions are bets on the future, and they aren’t “right” or “wrong” based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and allocated our resources accordingly. . . . It would be absurd for me, after making a big bet on the best possible starting hand (a pair of aces) and losing, to spend a lot of time thinking I was wrong to make the decision to play the hand in the first place. . . . When we think probabilistically, we are less likely to use adverse results alone as proof that we made a decision error, because we recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but luck and/or incomplete information (and a sample size of one) intervened. Maybe we made the best decision from a… Read more →
Competitive Programming: POJ 2195 – Going Home
Description On a grid map there are n little men and n houses. In each unit time, every little man can move one unit step, either horizontally, or vertically, to an adjacent point. For each little man, you need to pay a $1 travel fee for every step he moves, until he enters a house. The task is complicated with the restriction that each house can accommodate only one little man. Your task is to compute the minimum amount of money you need to pay in order to send these n little men into those n different houses. The input is a map of the scenario, a ‘.’ means an empty space, an ‘H’ represents a house on that point, and am ‘m’ indicates there is a little man on that point. You can think of each point on the grid map as a quite large square, so it can… Read more →
You Think I’m Inept?
“You think I’m inept? You think I’m inadequate? If I’m inadequate, where are you going to get people who are adequate . . . if I’m . . . do you understand what I’m saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?” — Philip Roth, American Pastoral Read more →
Sorrow Without Limits
The whole order of things fills me with a sense of anguish, from the gnat to the mysteries of incarnation; all is entirely unintelligible to me, and particularly my own person. Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows of it, except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity. — Sören Kierkegaard Read more →