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 →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
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 →
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 →
Incan Gold
A couple of coworkers are playing a board game called Incan Gold. “What’s the objective of the game?” I ask. “To decimate an indigenous civilization and plunder its riches?” Evidently Incan Gold requires a lot of concentration because neither player answers my question. “Why is ‘Redskins’ a bad name for a football team but ‘Incan Gold’ is an acceptable name for a board game?” I ask. No response. “Is there a board game called ‘Aztec Genocide’?” No response. “How about ‘Mayan Massacre’?” Read more →
Nobody Reads Books Anymore
This New Coffee Place is Not Going to Make It
Trying out a new coffee place by our house . . . I order an iced coffee and pay $4.50 for the only size they have, about the size of a Starbucks grande, which at Starbucks is less than three bucks. I take the coffee over to the condiment station, taste it and decide to add some sugar. The proprietor surprises me by walking up and saying “Taste it first before you add sugar.” “I did taste it,” I assure him. “Does it need sugar?” “That probably depends on who’s drinking it. If I’m drinking it, it’s going to need a little sugar.” I think I’ll stick with Starbucks. The coffee is cheaper and the staff lets me do whatever I want with it, no questions asked. Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Diversity Takes a Hit
They told us during teacher training in the summer not to scare off the students. But programming is difficult. There’s a lot of complexity and detail to master. The first couple of programming classes I took, we started off with around 50 people on the first day, and had around 12 left for the final exam. Entry-level programming classes have very high dropout rates. One of our students dropped the class this week, a girl. So much for promoting diversity in computer science . . . Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Applause
We did an interactive exercise to write a simple program that prints numbers and the squares of the numbers — a for loop, basically. We went around the room with each student providing one element of the loop and me writing them on the whiteboard: for, open paren, int, i, equals, 1, semicolon, etc. I thought it went very well. The timing was good and it was obvious that most of the class understood what was going on. When we got to a girl who’s usually ahead of everyone and knows all the answers, what we needed from her was “curly bracket” but what she actually said was “semicolon” and there was a collective groan from the rest of the class. When the last student said “close curly bracket,” there was spontaneous applause, immediately, before I even wrote it on the board. It wasn’t like a concert at the high… Read more →
People I Thought Were Dead
Johnny Mathis – singer I got an email this afternoon notifying me that priority tickets are now available for a Johnny Mathis concert Nov. 8 at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. If you’d asked me this morning if Johnny Mathis is still alive, I would have said “I don’t think so.” Read more →
Teaching Computer Science: Asking for Help
I’m not sure students are asking for help enough despite my repeated admonitions to do so. On the first day of class, I said, “Ask for help early and often. If you ask for help when you’re in trouble, you waited too long. Ask for help when things are going well. That’s a good heuristic in this class and in other areas of life as well.” Later I said, “Learn to distinguish between persistence and floundering. Persistence is good. Floundering is bad. Don’t flounder.” Yesterday I said, “You may think, ‘Well, if I was a better programmer, I wouldn’t have to ask for help.’ That’s incorrect. As you get to be a better programmer, you’re given harder problems to work on. I’ve been programming for 30 years — almost — and I ask for help every day.” Honestly I feel like a mental case repeating the same thing over and… Read more →
A Glimpse of Antiquity
Yes, those are World Books and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. No, this is not an archaeological dig. It’s a furniture store we visited over the weekend. When I was growing up, our family, like many American families at that time, had a set of World Book encyclopedias, so I knew they existed but I haven’t actually seen one in decades. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books are a relic from a time when many Americans still liked to think of themselves as the kind of people who read books but didn’t want to actually read a whole, entire book. Reader’s Digest stripped out all the boring passages about clouds and such that people don’t read and compressed four or five books into the size of one. Today, of course, no one reads books at all, with or without the cloud passages, so Reader’s Digest Condensed Books have joined World Book encyclopedias in… Read more →
Would Jesus Tow My Car?
The lot that I usually park in at the high school was full this morning so I parked across the street at what looked like a large church. I checked in at the school office to make sure that was okay . . . “I couldn’t find a space in the lot out front so I parked across the street,” I said to the woman at the desk. “Is that okay?” “Did you park on the street or at the church?” she asked. “I parked at the church . . . I asked myself, ‘What would Jesus do? Would he tow my car just because it doesn’t belong there?’ No, because he’s all about forgiveness and love.” “Jesus doesn’t love you when you park in that lot. You need to move your car.” Read more →