Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/rita-buscari-25/
Excerpt from Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” (1967)
There were about forty of us went down there to protest James Dukes’ execution. We had a very orderly, and I think, dignified picket line. We marched in two’s up and down, very quiet. We rarely spoke to each other. But across the street there were about two hundred people in their cars with the doors open, the radios blarin’ out rock’n’roll music, with beer cans and with sandwiches. They were there all evening, and very often there would be jeers at us from across the street.
I was marching with a Northwestern student, who goes down to protest every time there’s an execution. He said these people are there at every execution. Every single one. He said no matter how cold it is–this was a warm night, this was August–no matter how cold it is, there are approximately the same number of people. He believes they’re there because the lights dim in the building, which isn’t true, because the chair is rigged up to a different electrical system.
They stay there until the body is brought out in an ambulance. You got the feeling, you know, that this was the instinct that sent people to the Colosseum in Rome. And it’s here, right here and now, present in our society. Warden Johnson said people call up and ask for tickets. Well, if tickets were sold, I’m sure it would be a sellout house every single time.
It was so brutish. I was marching with pacifists and ministers, and the quiet of these people compared to the crowd across the street gave it a nightmarish quality. At the time of the execution we all turned toward the jail and ceased conversation. And this was when the rhythm of the noise on the other side gained momentum. They had all the radios on, first of all because they wanted to hear the announcement. The sounds on the other side increased as our silence increased.
When the announcement came through on the radio, there was a big reaction across the street: Oh, that’s over with. Oh, that’s great. Especially toward us. It was a victory for them, you see? A great victory against the crackpots who were demonstrating across the street. You know: This is how much your demonstration has achieved, you’re no place at all.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/10/27/or-why-i-dont-care-about-snakeoil-salesmen/
Everyone is talking about Joel Spolsky, especially with his latest article.
Many appreciate what he has to say, but then again, he is basically articulating what we all know, and plenty figure that maybe his writing is no longer fresh, and he is just cranking out articles in order to shill his warez:
“This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum. Once a week, the team gets together, in person or virtually, and reviews the previous week’s work. Then they decide which features and tasks to do over the next week. FogBugz would work great for tracking this . . .”
My position is that most stuff we read is mediocre, and Joel at least writes well, and Joel wears his ulterior motives on his sleeve, so when he starts figuring FogBugz can cure what ails CS curricula, I just figure “and now a word from our sponsors” and my brain hits the fast-forward button.
I think Tom actually has the best reaction to the issue Joel brings up, in that he adds that different people have different learning methods:
We all know there are students that are “visual learners”, “audio learners” and “kinesthetic” learners.
We all know what? Okay, yeah, and “everyone” is talking about this, right? Anyway, Tom, like me, is a learning-by-doing kind of guy who didn’t always “get” the formal CS curriculum:
When I took my undergraduate class on software engineering methodology I felt it was useless because I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was being taught. Most of my programming had been done solo or on a small team. I could not take seriously the problems that were being “fixed” by the software methodologies discussed in our lectures. “Code size estimation? Bah! Impossible, so why even try!”
In my CS days, the bits I enjoyed most were the learning-by-doing: compiling my first C program, bending my mind around recursion and functional programming to complete assignments in MIT Scheme, implementing a virtual spanning tree, and coming up on my own with the idea of a finite-state automaton to parse NWS weather forecasts. (Okay, that wasn’t a CS assignment and I didn’t know how to talk to girls.)
The parts where I fell completely flat were the theoretical classes where we considered bizarre hypothetical problems that didn’t make sense, using Greek letters that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. One day my ECE roommate asked how, as a CS major, I would go about sorting one million integers. My response was “why would you want to sort one million integers?” Later I slept through multiple lectures where the best methods of sorting integers were discussed at length. I skimmed the slides so I know that Quicksort performs well and in-place, but that Bubble Sort may work better if your data is mostly sorted, so in my mind that just means that if anybody asks how you would sort one million integers, the correct answer is to ask some questions as to why they need to sort one million integers.
Uh, yeah. Anyway, what was I nattering on about? Joel’s schtick is that CS students aren’t taught to manage large, complex, “real world” projects with lots of moving pieces. CS mostly focuses on the “interesting 10%” like how you would sort a million integers and skips over the boring 90% of hard work like implementing the interface for the customer to provide their million integers and retrieve the results. And Mark Dennehy’s reaction was “of course we focus on the interesting ten percent: the other 90% is constantly changing and best learned on the job!”
But, addressing the “how do you tackle big projects” thing, I think Joel has a point. And his point isn’t new. The point is extra-curricular activity.
Whether you’re a visual learner or whatever, the biggest secret to learning things is to find the thing that you are studying interesting. The very best computer programmers are all fucking fascinated by the challenge of getting the computers to do things within given parameters. Computer programming is fun because when you get down to it, it is a lot like computer games: a person at the interface banging away until they get their dopamine fix by either beating the level boss or getting the damn thing to compile and spit out the correct result.
Well, that is for the learning-by-doing types. Some computer programmers get their jollies by trying to fathom a new and novel method of sorting one million integers. Whatever floats their boat, I guess.
Anyway, long story short, I’m thinking the learning-by-doing types tend to get a little queasy after a few CS theory classes and end up majoring in English in order to score a bachelors degree, but they keep tinkering with the computers along the way, and end up, like Tom and me, as systems administrators, figuring out the best way to keep 1,000 computers running in order to make it possible to sort billions of objects with map-reduce algorithms in constant time.
Oh yeah, and that I agree with Joel that motivated CS students ought to find non-class projects that they are passionate about, and thereby gain chances to collaborate with others on the sort of “real world” challenges that they are likely to face in their professional careers. Back at Illinois the ACM played a big role in this. I myself did some time apprenticing at NCSA and at an ISP, and the big win these days it would seem are the oodles of Open Source projects ready to put interested volunteers to work. And that’s why Google’s “Summer of Code” just sounds like a fantastically great idea.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/10/14/intelligence/
A comment I made on an e-mail thread that was well-received:
Intelligence is the product of basic brainpower, passion, and education. The brain is like a car engine: whether you have a little two-stroke or a V-12 you still aren’t going to get anywhere without some passion fuel, and the going will be really tough without some nice, smooth educational asphalt to help guide you to where you want to go.
Also, to those endlessly debating nature-versus-nurture, the answer is usually “both” . . . you start with a certain genetic baseline, then a childhood you don’t have much control over, and you make of your life what you will. Some folks receive a terrible start in life and are going to have it hard whatever they do, but most people have something they can work with, and with the right sort of ambition, positive attitude, and tenacity, can achieve some sort of success in life.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/05/27/transit-etiquette/
I will never forget a day in high school when I was sitting on a crowded bus, headed home, and the lady in front of me, who was not old or pregnant, had what looked to me to be a pained expression on her face. I wondered if maybe her legs hurt as the vehicle lurched around, but I was a shy kid scared to offer her my seat in case really I had just totally misread the situation. After a while the crowd eased and the woman took a seat near me with obvious relief. I had failed on that day to give my seat to someone in need, and ever since I have made an effort not to repeat that mistake by paying greater attention to my fellow passengers.
I still ride transit most weekdays, and I have noticed especially that younger people tend to fail at the whole courtesy thing. Part of it may be self-involved rudeness, but part of it I think is a combination of shyness, and a fear of making contact with strangers in a public place. My generation was raised on the lessons that the world outside our homes is extremely violent and treacherous and that the most dangerous thing a child could ever ever do is to talk to a stranger. I like to think that with time most people grow out of their shells and feel more comfortable taking the initiative for social responsibility.
My own strategy is that if I see a person who might better deserve my seat, I try to make eye contact, at which point I start to get out of my chair. Then they either move forward or gesture for me to sit down. (It is better to err on the side of getting someone a seat. Also, I think people looking for a seat know to look others in the eye.) In other cases if the vehicle is crowded and eye contact can not be achieved, I’ll often just stand the heck up anyway, positioning myself in such a way that the person who could best use my seat finds it most accessible. (I would hate for a young punk to ignorantly snipe my seat.) (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/05/01/party-cat/
He is just too cute:
Party Cat Episode One
Party Cat Episode Two
Party Cat Episode Three
Party Cat Episode Four
Party Cat Episode Five
Party Cat Episode Six
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/14/systematic-developmental-retardation/
I am presently enjoying an old thick history book. A footnote in the first chapter says:
“Biologically considered, the distinguishing mark of humanity was systematic developmental retardation, making the human child infantile in comparison to the normal protohuman. Some adult human traits are also infantile when compared to those of an ape: e.g., the overdevelopment of brain size in relation to the rest of the body, underdevelopment of teeth and brow-ridges. But developmental retardation of course meant prolonged plasticity, so that learning could be lengthened. Thereby the range of cultural as against mere biological evolution widened enormously; and humanity launched itself upon a biologically as well as historically extraordinary career.”
W H McNeill
“The Rise of the West”
I was thinking that domesticated animals are similarly developmentally retarded relations of their wild kin. Dogs mature to a wolfishly adolescent level. By remaining in a younger, more affably co-dependent state, they more easily get along with humans. From what I have seen, a lot of adult humans could be described as childish, and while the usual concern is that they are less effective for their childishness, they also subordinate themselves more readily to more ambitious leaders, and this facilitates collaboration.
Or, I guess, domesticated humans and animals fall more naturally into packs, for better and for worse.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/10/dream-scramble-time-at-a-methadone-clinic/
I was at some sort of lecture for really smart people, and a precocious young woman asked a technical question of the speaker, who answered back with some Math, and the questioner apologetically asked for a moment to run the Math through her head before she could follow-up. The speaker replied that she should take her time, because after all, “this is an open forum, not scramble time at a methadone clinic.”
And I was like where the heck did that line come from?!
Later in the dream I was looking for my car in a parking garage and found it not where I thought I had parked it but a little ways away where I had actually parked it earlier in the dream. I was like “this dream has a great continuity” and then I had to pee so I was looking for a toilet in the parking garage. That is when I got up to pee, and realized that I had slept really soundly this night. I was glad the sun was managing to peek through the clouds.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/08/iowa/
Eileen linked me to this YouTube video. It rocks. It is Iowa’s Senate Majority leader Mike Gronstal making it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he will not cooperate with the Republicans to amend Iowa’s constitution to ban gay marriage. He quotes his daughter, Kate, after listening for several minutes to her older colleagues complain about the subject:
“You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care.”
Well, I, for one, care. And Mike Gronstal is clearly compassionate and thoughtful on the subject:
I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I’ve talked with other people about it and that’s what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that.
Is that so wrong? I don’t think thats so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know Ive been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.
No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.
And Vermont passed gay marriage, this time through the legislature, and overriding a governor’s veto! Sure, gay marriage can be had in only four states today, but I’m getting this hopeful feeling that the cooler heads prevailing in Iowa are the real tipping point. The Right thought California would lead the nation, and they fought hard to win Prop 8, and they won that battle. But while they were fixated on the West Coast, they have been outflanked by the reasonable Midwesterners making reasonable decisions in the middle of the country. Hoorah!
Also good, thank you Tom, is the Supreme Court Summary for Varnum v Brien, which lays out in simple language over six pages the case for why gay marriage ought to be legal. Basically, unless there’s a compelling reason to ban it, equal protection means you should allow it, and there’s no compelling argument for why a state ought to ban it, so, now, Iowa has it!
Like, duh!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/03/iowa-gay-marriage/
We used to visit Newton, IA every year or two for McConeghey family reunions. Iowa’s a nice place, though admittedly somewhat dull. But today, America has a big patch of purple right at its heart because the Iowa Supreme Court has declared the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Joe Eskenazi explains beautifully in “Will Gay Mecca Relocate From San Francisco To Des Moines?”
Disdain of San Franciscans’ disdain of all things Midwestern has become nearly as clichéd as the original sin. And, yet, there’s always a touch of schadenfreude anticipating city residents’ chagrin whenever legitimately good news emanates from the Midwest indicating its denizens have out-progressived our self-anointed capital of progressivism.
The Iowa Supreme Court this morning did what many observers feel its San Francisco-based California colleagues will not — rule that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. This morning’s decision adds Iowa to the very short list of states in which same-sex marriage is legal — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and, now, The Tall Corn State. Perhaps it’s only fitting for a state with the motto “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”
From what I have read, if conservatives want to defeat this, it will require the legislature to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. This could be done by 2011, and even then Iowa residents may not support it. Personally, I’m just really proud to see progress being made on this issue, from of all places, the “fly over country” where I grew up. (Well, I’m from Illinois, but I can still root for the hawkeyes on this one.)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/03/28/the-sun-is-an-excellent-magazine/
A couple years back I came upon this magazine somewhere that was all poetry, prose, and black-and-white photographs. And the stuff inside was good. I love reading and I used to mostly keep up with The New Yorker. These days The Sun is one of two magazines I subscribe to. It is more enjoyable and less of a burden than The New Yorker.
Another thing about The Sun that I really appreciate is that there are no ads. Just me and the writer, mediated only by the editorial staff of The Sun and some pleasing typesetting. As the editor, Sy Safransky recently explained in his annual appeal for donations from Friends Of The Sun:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with some advertising, just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with a traveling salesman knocking on your door. But you probably wouldn’t invite the salesman in if you and a friend were having an intimate conversation. In a magazine that strives for emotional candor and a reader’s quiet respect, a sales pitch is an unwelcome distraction. I want to place one simple demand on a reader’s attention: the content. Nothing else.
I sent them some cash last year. This year I figured maybe I can send a couple subscribers? If you’re looking for good stuff to read on a monthly basis, I totally recommend a subscription to The Sun. And if you happen to be kinda poor, drop me a line with your home address because when I renew I have been known to throw in some gift subscriptions and you might could get lucky.
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/02/12/carbon-tax/
It has been a pretty busy day at work. In between bouts of business I entertain myself with various baubles like mailing lists. Someone made a statement I found utterly hilarious, that in the context of current events:
“I think it would be politically possible to return to a gold standard.”
I responded that:
“I think a carbon tax would be more relevant to the concerns of the 21st Century.”
To which some else responded:
“Our currency and economy are broken, and the solution is to tax use of fossil fuels, biggest source of productivity the world has ever seen!”
And I though yeah . . . it is hard to advocate an idea like a new “tax” during a recession. Personally, I think calling it a “carbon ration” might be smarter: you get your allotment and if you make good lifestyle choices you can sell your excess at a profit. Anyway, I responded from the basis of an idea I heard at TED last week:
Over a century ago we swore up and down that without the cheap energy afforded by black slaves the national economy would collapse. So, instead of abolishing slavery we made compromise after compromise. Ultimately our nation was plunged into the catastrophe of civil war, and we abolished slavery for International PR reasons and in order to literally free up fresh soldiers for the war effort from among the newly-emancipated populations.
These days we swear up and down that without access to unlimited cheap energy, our economy would collapse and we would be unable to enjoy the “quality” of life we do now. And as each decade passes we find greater and greater evidence that we are living on borrowed time, and that we are multiplying the problem of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and that we are approaching various global tipping points which bring us closer to catastrophe.
In both cases, abolitionists and environmentalists are ridiculed and despised an know-it-all killjoys out to ruin everyone’s fun. Where the abolitionists had printing presses that would literally be burned down by their detractors, modern radicals warm themselves with flame wars on the Internet.
To go back to your glib response to a carbon tax, it is easier to make radical changes when it is clear that the status quo is broken. A big reason for the present crisis is that we were fueling growth on unsustainable credit models. Debt Debt Debt. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a form of debt against the future, and if we go bankrupt with climate that’s really really not pretty. So, we have a good opportunity to look at how we structure the free market to take natural resources like the atmosphere into account, and price them appropriately so that we can realize economic benefit with the greatest efficiency.
Maybe one way to think of the idea of carbon rationing is that it is like Social Security for the environment: we each make a sacrifice now so as to secure against a future characterized by poverty. In this case the poverty would be a world wrecked by sudden catastrophic climate changes.
6 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/02/05/digital-tv-delayed-ugh/
After a campaign centered on the idea of “change” President Barack Obama mentioned in his inauguration speech that:
“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Alas, Congress decided that giving our all to the difficult task of obtaining a digital converter box, even without a government coupon, so we can finally change over to digital television on February 17, was too great a character-building exercise for the American people. And I suppose the risk of impoverished and mentally challenged consumers losing access to a constant barrage of commercial advertising would be too great a blow to our weakened economy. Congress has therefor postponed the transition to digital television until June 12, “sending the fast-tracked legislation to President Obama, who has promised to sign it.”
Really, this legislation deserves a pocket veto. “Oh, you wanted me to exercise personal responsibility? Dang, it must have slipped my mind.”
To me, this is thoroughly symbolic. And when it comes to such a fairly trivial issue as to whether we will accept a bit of minor pain and inconvenience to get the job done versus hem and haw and make excuses and opt for business as usual, we have opted for the excuses. Frustrating! After all, we how can we face up to the challenge of Global Warming when we can’t even get the TVs switched over on time?
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/01/15/spirituality-sexuality/
As someone who has wondered at the issues involving monastic vows of sexual abstinence, I found myself dog-earing the following passage from an interview with a Buddhist couple who gave up the monastic life for marriage, as interviewed by Leslee Goodman in the January, 2009 issue of The Sun. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/01/12/scandalously-erotic/
A bit that got me laughing out loud, from a New Yorker article on breast milk:
In 1735, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus first sorted out the animal kingdom, he classed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. Even those of Linnaeus’s contemporaries who conceded the animality of man averred that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus countered. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process that the Stanford historian of science Londa Schiebinger has reconstructed, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word that he made up, Mammalia: animals with milk-producing nipples. (The Latin root, mamma, meaning breast, teat, or udder, is closely related to the onomatopoeic mama—“motherâ€â€”thought to derive from the sound that a baby makes while suckling.) As categories go, “mammal†is an improvement over “quadruped,†especially if you’re thinking about what we have in common with whales. But, for a while, at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus’s classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. “Loathsome harlotry,†one botanist called it.) More important, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, strictly speaking, are not mammals.
Personally, I think I would approve of anything that was scandalously erotic. Oh my! Also, my high school biology teacher said that I, a male mammal, could indeed lactate, if given the right hormones. I was glad to hear that I had the capability, just in case . . .
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/12/19/hi-tammie/
I was asked to “critique” a friend’s new blog. Because I’ve been writing like this since before anyone called this format a “blog” . . . here’s two paragraphs from my response:
I’m really excited about Prop 8 as well, and it is funny that you borrow that story from Gandhi that I enjoy as well. Tonight I just watched “Cry, the Beloved Country” and was moved all over again by great words in a book I have read twice, about . . . compassion and forgiveness. I did not expect to be left feeling so emotionally.
[ . . . ]
And I hope you enjoy the blogging thing. Write for yourself but remember you are being read. I still get emails from old posts I wrote, especially about the divorce stuff. Occasionally someone comes to me expressing a pain that is familiar, and I have the chance to return in a small way some of the kindnesses that have been bestowed upon me over the years. Your children, your grandchildren may some day read through or skim what you had to say. In that way you may be able to help them in their growth, years from now. And remind yourself of things forgotten.
To be sure, “the divorce stuff” is really just a bunch of excerpts from a book someone else wrote. Lately though I have had very little to say about my personal life or things that have stirred my passion. There is less creative self-expression or revealing of myself these days. I am not sure if that is as it should be, or if that needs to change. I figure that my relationship with my web site changes over time based on my needs and how I take responsibility for fulfilling those needs.
Oh yeah, and I love reading what Dennis has to write as well. Happy holidays, folks!
Update: Tammie was laid off a few weeks ago. If you know anyone looking for a smart, talented and diligent Microsoft .net and C# hacker, please check out her LinkedIn profile. (Welcome to the economic down cycle. Yahh!!)
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