EppsNet

Soda Sticker Shock in Seattle

by Paul Epps on 11 Jan 2018

Seattle is trying to discourage its citizens from drinking sugary beverages by imposing a 1.75-cent per ounce tax on all sugary drinks sold in the Emerald City.

A $15.99 case of Gatorade at the Seattle Costco now has an added tax of more than $10. A case of Coke is now $7.35 more expensive than the Diet Coke or Coke Zero.

Sticker shock!

What will people drink instead of sugary beverages?

Coffee. Seattle drinks a lot of coffee. Is coffee good for you? What if you put sugar in it?
Beer. At these prices, it’s cheaper than soda.
Diet soda. Are artificial sweeteners better for you than sugar?
Fruit juice. Not taxed but contains a lot of sugar.

Should there be a tax on all-you-can-eat buffets? How about a tax credit for eating a vegetable?

Or maybe — just maybe — the tax code was not designed for and shouldn’t be used to impose nutritional penalties on the citizenry.

Economic question: How high does the sin tax on soda have to be before it becomes profitable to smuggle black market sodas into Seattle?

That’s not a frivolous question. Remember Eric Garner?

He died while being arrested for selling illegal “loosie” cigarettes as part of a black market created by stratospheric New York sin taxes on cigarettes.

Here’s another great health-conscious idea: I’ve heard a lot about the ill effects of sleep deprivation . . . Seattle should have a mandatory bedtime for all residents, with a fine of 1.75 cents per minute for violators.

Bedtime

Teaching Computer Science: Asking for Help

by The Programmer on 9 Jan 2018

I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with computer science classes.

This morning, in AP Computer Science Principles, the teacher went through an explanation of the hexadecimal number system, then gave an in-class assignment for students to convert their cell phone number to hexadecimal. Not in two parts, 3 digits and 4 digits, but as a 7-digit number.

It seemed pretty obvious from the interaction and the body language and the looks on their faces that a lot of students didn’t get it, but in a class of 25 students, only one student asked for help. Until the teacher finished with that student and asked “Does anyone else need help?” and eight more students immediately raised their hand.

I asked the teacher, “Can I address the class for a minute?”

“First off, doing a 7-digit hex conversion is not easy. I know professional programmers who can’t do it. So I’d expect someone trying to do it for the first time to need some help.

“In fact, if you know any professional programmers, ask them to do a hex conversion on their phone number. Let me know what happens. I guarantee you won’t have to ask too many people before you stump someone.

“None of the material in this class is easy. Snap programming? You might look at it and think ‘There’s a cat and a fish and a duck . . . I’m not understanding it but it looks like a program for 5-year-olds. It’s embarrassing as a high school student to have to ask for help with it. Maybe I’m not very smart.’

“No, Snap is a university-level curriculum from Berkeley. Academically rigorous. I worked through the assignments myself and I found them pretty challenging. I’d expect many of you to find them challenging as well. So you should be asking for help.

“If you need help, waiting for someone to ask if you need help is not going to be a winning strategy. In school, in life or in anything. Because if no one asks, then you need help and you don’t get it.

“There’s probably a natural reluctance to ask questions because what if I’m the only person who doesn’t know the answer? Then I ask a question and look foolish.

“It’s going to be unusual in any class that you’re the only person who doesn’t understand something. If you find that happens to you a lot, you may have a problem. But normally it’s going to be pretty unusual.

“I can tell you in this class, there’s definitely more than one person who finds the material pretty challenging. As I said, I find it pretty challenging myself. It’s not so challenging that I need help with it, but it’s definitely challenging enough that I’d expect most people who are not programmers to need help with it.

“I’m also hearing some people today saying to themselves or to the person next to them, ‘Why do we need to know this?'” That’s actually a very good question. Binary of course is the fundamental language of computers, but why would you need to know hexadecimal? Anyone?”

No hands go up.

“OK, we’ll talk about that in a minute. If it’s not clear to you, in this class or any class, why you’re being asked to learn something, put your hand up and insist on understanding the relevance.

“One final anecdote:

“I worked with an AP class a couple of years ago at another school. About this same timeframe, late first semester, I was in class on a Monday and before the class started, one of the students asked me, ‘How was your weekend?’

“I said, ‘It was okay. How was yours?’

“‘It was great! I played like 47 straight hours of [some video game I can’t remember the name of].’

“And he was one of the worst students in the class, maybe the worst.

“I know he and his parents had met with the principal and the teacher to figure out why he was doing so poorly in computer science. It had to be the school’s fault, right?

“So I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. You played 47 hours of video games, you have no idea what’s going on in this class, and it’s the teacher’s fault?!

“No, it’s your fault. You put nothing into it so you get nothing out of it, you don’t ask for help, and that’s why you’re failing.

“Moral of the story: Don’t be that guy.”

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Grounds for Dissolution

by Paul Epps on 8 Jan 2018

Divorce has traditionally been a fault-based proceeding, but California and most other states are now no-fault jurisdictions, and a divorce in legal terms is now called a Dissolution of Marriage.

And yet we never hear anyone say “I’m going to dissolve you.”

The primary ground for dissolution in California is “irreconcilable differences.” In a Regular Dissolution you are also allowed to use “incurable insanity.” Your spouse may seem crazy to you, but the insanity case is too complicated for you to present without an attorney, so if you want to keep things simple, go ahead and use “irreconcilable differences.”

EppsNet Book Reviews: Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

by Paul Epps on 7 Jan 2018

Death on the Installment Plan is a fictionalized coming-of-age story based on Céline’s youth in pre-World War I France.

Absent are heroism, transcendence, love and the possibility of love. Instead, there is a lot of human action that comes to nothing. Death is not ennobling.

That said, hopelessness has never been described with more wit, energy and imagination or more droll, breathtaking language.

Here’s a sample of the black comedy, as the narrator remembers a local physician (all ellipses in the original):

“The most exquisite deaths, remember that, Ferdinand, are those that attack us in our most sensitive tissues . . .” He had a precious, elaborate, subtle way of talking, like the men of Charcot’s day. His prospecting of the Rolandic, the third ventricle, and the gray nucleus didn’t do him much good . . . in the end he died of a heart attack, under circumstances that were anything but cozy. An attack of angina pectoris that lasted twenty minutes. He held out for a hundred and twenty seconds with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar . . . But for eighteen minutes he screamed like a stuck pig . . . his diaphragm was being ripped out, his living guts . . . a thousand open razors had been plunged into his aorta . . . He tried to vomit them out at us . . . I’m not exaggerating. He crawled out into the living room . . . He damn near hammered his chest in . . . He bellowed into the carpet . . . in spite of the morphine . . . You could hear him all over the house and out in the street . . . He ended up under the piano. When the cardiac arterioles burst one by one, it’s quite a harp . . . it’s too bad nobody ever comes back from angina pectoris. There’d be wisdom and genius to spare.

Rating:

Is A.I. a Threat to Humankind?

by Paul Epps on 5 Jan 2018

Not with a bang but a whimper, as T.S. Eliot used to say. In some countries, the people are kept in a state of submission by violence and/or threats of violence, but here in America, the same effect is achieved via mindless entertainments and gadgetry.

Fake News Awards

by Paul Epps on 3 Jan 2018

I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I’m looking forward to this! I find news media on both the left and right too smug and simplistic and agenda-driven.

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. — George Eliot, Middlemarch

Love Both

by Paul Epps on 2 Jan 2018

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject.

— Thomas Aquinas (@AquinasQuotes) January 3, 2018

2017: The Year in Books

by Paul Epps on 2 Jan 2018

These are the books I read in 2017, roughly in the order listed. Not as many as I would have liked but I spent the first half of the year having a mental and physical breakdown. I’m back on track now.

The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion.

Books of the Year: Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (fiction) and From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe (non-fiction).

Aside

A man can only be cosmopolitan up to a certain point . . .

Teaching Computer Science: It’s Not Easy to Teach a Subject in Which You Have No Training

by The Programmer on 29 Dec 2017

Mr. Rex Manihera, a teacher at the Glendowie South Primary School at Auckland

A recent issue of Science has an article on the pipeline for computer science teachers . . .

The first sentence says, “It’s not easy to teach a subject in which you have no training.”

That could be the whole article, really. That’s about all you need to know about the current state of computer science instruction: It’s not easy to teach a subject in which you have no training.

Cameron Wilson, chief operating officer and president of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, is quoted as saying, “It’s really hard to convince a computer science professional to give up a job that pays up to three times more to pursue teaching. And I don’t think we should.”

Wilson’s opinion that computer science classes should not be taught by someone who actually knows something about computer science is probably influenced by the fact that Code.org is one of the leading providers of training programs and online curricular resources for in-service teachers tasked with teaching computer science.

How would this “train a neophyte” scheme work in other academic areas?

Assuming you could provide a one- or two-week training workshop to prospective teachers, would you:

Hire someone who has never played an instrument to teach a music class?
Hire someone who has never picked up a drawing pencil to teach an art class?
Hire someone who doesn’t speak Spanish to teach a Spanish class?

These all seem like absurd ideas with a very low ceiling on what you could hope to accomplish pedagogically. Why does anyone think it makes sense for computer science? Someone needs to explain that to me.

Putting non-practitioners in the CS classroom also requires, in addition to the teacher training, a second key component: the prefabricated curriculum.

Teachers are not able to design and teach a year-long class on a subject in which they have themselves only a week or two of experience, so Code.org and others offer packaged courses delivered to students online.

I’ve had an opportunity to see this in action. I volunteer two mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with the first period computer science class. It’s a mixed class, with most of the students taking AP Computer Science Principles, and a handful of kids taking an introductory programming class in Python.

The AP students are using UTeach, supplemented by the Berkeley BJC curriculum. The Python students are using CodeHS.

The teacher, a converted math teacher, does little to no independent instruction during the class period.

The material is too hard in my opinion for most people who are not programmers to read and understand and to figure out the assignments without a lot of help. Keep in mind that the teacher is also not a programmer.

The first two programming classes I took in college had a ~75 percent drop rate. Programming is hard but it can also be fun and beautiful. I don’t think a teacher who is not a programmer is able to convey that. Minus the beauty and fun, there’s nothing left but the difficulty.

I don’t see most students having what it takes to push themselves through difficult material delivered to them via a computer screen with no human interaction.

They give up and they blame themselves. I’m not smart enough for this. I don’t have what it takes.

It’s discouraging to see this because even kids who are not going to be programmers can learn useful ways of thinking about and solving problems from a computer science class . . .

How to break down complex problems into manageable parts
How to recognize patterns among and within problems
How to recognize important information vs. irrelevant detail
How to develop step-by-step solutions to a problem, or rules to follow to solve a problem

It’s a way of thinking that can’t be taught by someone who doesn’t genuinely think that way.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Vignette

by Paul Epps on 28 Dec 2017

Sara, 48, suffers from breast cancer, diagnosed three times in five years.

She has to stop teaching at school but engages actively in volunteer work.

Her environment praises her for her courage.

She helps other cancer patients in a respectful way to deal with their illness. This for her is also very rewarding.

Still, from time to time, mostly when Sara does not expect it, an ocean of tears comes up . . .

My Worries Are Few

by Paul Epps on 27 Dec 2017

I have the ability to face up to the disturbing facts of life, except pain, sickness, death, poverty, rejection, loneliness, guilt, shame, confusion, doubt, imperfection, meaninglessness, futility and evil.

Also fear of being laughed at and cruelty to animals.

Something I Learned About Time Zones

by Paul Epps on 27 Dec 2017

Something I learned about time zones on a visit to New Orleans: Louisiana is on Central Time, as are Mississippi, Alabama — and part of the Florida panhandle!

Time zones

Jefferson Davis’s House

by Paul Epps on 26 Dec 2017

On a recent trip to New Orleans, we spent a night at the Beau Rivage Resort in Biloxi, MS.

Biloxi is also the site of Beauvoir, the former home of Jefferson Davis, now a museum and historical site.

Beauvoir is similar to a statue in that it’s a memorial to an eminent representative of the Confederacy, but surprisingly, even the most fanatical ideologue has not, to my knowledge, suggested that it be torn down . . .

Beauvoir