The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: personal

Stuff about me (Bernard HP Gilroy), instead of or in addition to stuff about education.

  • The Perils of Positive Thinking

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

    I think the major point — that a unquestioning devotion to “positive thinking” is both dangerous and immoral — is a good one. We definitely allow suffering because we think everyone has a shot, so if they’re suffering, it must be their fault. It’s pretty easy to see how comforting this is, to people on top.

    There are poor people who are poor because they are lazy or bad.  There are rich people who are rich because they have worked hard and applied intelligence.  What we don’t like to recognize, however, is that there are also poor people who are poor despite living right and working hard, and there are rich people who are rich despite being lazy or stupid.

    Luck plays a huge role in our lives.  The part of our lives that result from forces outside our control — luck, history, social mores, etc. — probably dwarfs the fragment of our lives we can directly influence.  And that terrifies people.  It means that maybe, just maybe, their success isn’t really deserved.  Maybe the fact that they have a giant house and three cars and five iPhones doesn’t mean that they’re better people than someone who struggles to find food every day.  And if that’s the case, then maybe they should help out those who are struggling.

    But no one wants to hear that, so they prefer to imbibe The Secret and believe that they are the root cause of all they have.

    We are a sad, little species.

  • Why I have no respect for design behaviors at Microsoft

    I’ve received my new laptop and am working on getting it outfitted and up to speed.  (This process, by the way, is distressingly like moving to a new home and is equally as frustrating and potentially as traumatizing.)  After logging in for the first time, the system helpfully suggests that you create a system backup.  This is a wise and useful thing to do, so that you can restore to original conditions, and I was impressed that Microsoft offered it.

    Except…

    It takes fiendishly long to generate the system image — after about two hours of waiting, I gave up last night and went to bed.  During the night, the other “helpful” feature of Windows 7 kicked in, which was automatic downloading and installation of updates.  As anyone who works with Microsoft knows, you can’t even think about an update without Windows needing to reboot, which it did … automatically.  This interrupted the system backup, of course; and since the system has changed, the backup can’t even just pick up from where it left off.

    Net result?  I must begin the backup again and wait another two hours for it to run.   I will have had my laptop for over a day without being able to run a single program on it.  What is the overwhelming temptation, of course?  To skip the backup “for now” and just dive in.  So these two choices for Microsoft have the combined effect of discouraging proper computer hygiene — and for many users, probably taint the whole idea of backups in general.

    Way to go, Microsoft!

    (By the way, I have of course also now turned off the automatic install option, as it’s insane to let anyone just drop stuff into your operating system without at least some chance at review.  Once again I am reminded of a mantra I’ve had since at least Windows 95:  Whatever default behavior Microsoft settles on, it’s the wrong one.  We could call their philosophy “default-to-fail”.)

  • Days of miracle and wonder, indeed

    For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song).  In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030.  Although they are expected to construct a likely technological path from today’s state-of-the-art to that future product, they aren’t expected to actually build their device because, after all, it’s supposed to be 20 years away.

    In one of the early years, a team chose as its device a free-standing holographic display a la the chess scene on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.  They presumed it would involve some sort of fast-spinning mirror.

    Today, I came across this — a SIGGRAPH paper and video demonstrating a free-standing three-dimensional display utilizing a fast-spinning mirror.  It’s about 20 years early.

    I guess I have to revise my project rubric.  😛

  • I might just be succumbing to the lure of reliving my misspent youth…

    … but this looks awesome.

  • Seconded…

    This piece from the Atlantic captures my feeling pretty close to exactly, re: the recent Rand Paul flap on the Civil Rights Act and his alleged “courage”.  In particular, the conclusion:

    Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that he would have had the “courage to march with Martin Luther King.” This is a common strain of courage. It chiefly shines through in men born 50 years too late. Presently among the crowd, they are distinguished at that decisive moment when queried about wars they won’t have to fight, in times they will never live. These men populate our history books. They are all on the wrong side.

    Devastating.

  • Too true…

    This captures my experience grading entirely…

    PhD comics:

    2010_0521_grading rubric

  • Brilliant remix of the Dark Knight Trailer…

    … using footage from — amazingly! — the Toy Story franchise!

    via Ezra Klein

  • Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.

  • Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook.  It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense.  These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over on privacy, so I treat it like a big virtual billboard+skywriting.

  • Deep pondering

    Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)?  Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being the “party of fiscal responsibility” (in that the RNC apparently can’t say how such an egregious expenditure slipped past their checks)?

    One for the ages, I suppose.  But I suspect the media will drop the story after today (to the limited extent they carried it at all), because it’s the RNC and not the DNC…