Eat All the Children that Would not Be Good

Every night I put my 2 year old daughter, Brynna, to sleep with the same lullaby that I used with my three sons - The Grateful Dead's "Brokedown Palace" original followed by a cover of the gospel "We Bid You Goodnight"

With my sons I had to use a bootleg cassette to play it since that was before the internet was in any home.  With my daughter it's purely acapella since the guitars keep her awake.  My sons used to just fall asleep in my arms and Brynna did too but she is the most musical of the four, by far, and once she learned the words, she just sang along instead.

Here's a video that I think my first son heard while still in the womb:
https://youtu.be/H1Ncl0Av3UY

Here are the lyrics, I wonder if any of them will figure out that I sang to them about a beast that eats children.  All the good nursery rhymes scare children into being good.  Nice tradition.  ;)

For my bird that still sings...

Fare you well my honey
Fare you well my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Have flown except you alone

Going to leave this broke-down palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll, roll, roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll

In a bed, in a bed
By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

River gonna take me
Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back back home
It's a far gone lullaby
Sung many years ago
Mama, mama, many worlds I've come
Since I first left home

Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet…

Source: LyricFind

Lay down my dear brothers, lay down and take your rest
Won't you lay your head upon your Savior's breast
I love you, but Jesus love you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight

Lay down my dear brothers, lay down and take your rest
Won't you lay your head upon your Savior's breast
I love you, but Jesus love you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight

Tell 'A' for the ark, that wonderful boat
Tell 'B' for the beast at the ending of the wood
Oh, well, they eat all the children when they wouldn't be good
I remember right well, I remember right well
Walking in Jerusalem just like John, good night

Lay down my dear brothers, lay down and take your rest
Won't you lay your head upon your Savior's breast
I love you, but Jesus love you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight

Source: Musixmatch

Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields just 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 74,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 141 years of suckers, too high, so the rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute. Voting age range is about (78-18) 60 years, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.
Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields just 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 60,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 114.155 years of suckers, too high, so the rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute. Voting age range is about (78-18) 60 years, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.

Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 60,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 114.155 years of suckers, but the voting age range is only about (78-18) 60 years or so. The rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.

Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

If You're Smart, You Became that Way

Most people say I'm a smart guy.  Most people think I was born that way and all smart people are born that way.  That is never the case, even when people pretend that is true.  You are born stupid and only become smart through working at it.

I remember tough neuropsychology tests in college.  I was a top student in my class.  Like all tests in similar courses (that is, non-math courses), I read the material before class, listened and took notes at every class.  A few days before a test I would review the readings and notes and make a set of questions that I thought would appear on the test along with my answers on a stack of index cards or at least some notebook pages.  I did not stop studying the cards until I knew them all, often walking around from class to class with a stack of index cards in my hand.  (I suspect the best part of my learning was done by my fingers while making the cards.  The act of writing, the feel of the cards and their placement in the deck.)

I hated that redheaded female classmate.  She would just breeze into to the test and say, "Ah!  I had no time to study at all for this!  My mother was sick, I've been sick, I've been working so hard and fell asleep at 7 last night and couldn't study."  She always had a long sob story to get some attention.  She was very self-centered.  When the grades came back, hers were about the same as mine - maybe better half the time.  She pretended like she was naturally so smart that she could do as well as me - the guy who always had the index cards in his hands.

I was so jealous.  Here's a girl who can read the book once and pass the test.  There were guys like this in my physics class too.  And some nerds in my computer science class seemed to whip out code in an afternoon that took me a week to write.

But all of these stories of natural genius college kids are untrue.  They are just trying to build up their own ego while they put yours down.  These kids are so smart that they know what's written in a book they never read?  Do they live on Mt. Olympus?

The next semester I worked in the same lab as the redhead.  Then, as now, I code at all hours so I would often come into the lab at 10PM or 11PM.  Guess what I found?  The redhead studying her ass off for the test the next day.  Papers and scribbled everywhere.  The first time I saw this she instantly knew she her secret was uncovered and her cheeks became as red as her hair.

The nerdy programmers?  Later I found out that their rich parents had gotten them a $3,500 computer and programming courses starting 4 years before college.  They shouldn't have even taken the course they should have taken harder courses to challenge themselves and grow, but slacked and took an ego-boost review class instead and shoved it in every rookie coder's face.

Like most smart people, I thought I was stupid and I needed to take every step and use every minute to catch up to everyone and pretend like I'm a smart person. This is the Imposter Syndrome that achieving individuals share.  To me, it was born from a paranoia, a fear of failure, and a willingness to succeed.  I don't think of this as bad, hard to live with sometimes, but it is the grindstone that sharpens the sword of your mind and helps you succeed.

The difference between natural and acquired learning was made clear to me when I applied for graduate school and took the standard GRE test, similar to the SAT.  I scored around 600 out of 800 on my verbal SAT n high school, without study, but scored 780 on my verbal GRE - which is much harder - by using an enormous stack of cards.  Was I naturally 45% smarter because of my tremendous natural brain growth from 18-22?  Of course not.   I always had the potential to be smart but I needed to work at it to reach my potential.

Women like to turn this universal syndrome into sexism - and as soon as they do, then sexism exists in their minds and it is very effective.  They don't even need a man in town to be sexist to them.  Sexism can exist in a vaccuum of 1.  It's the same with racism.  Sexism and racism exist, but much more within us than outside of us.  Provincialism, language-ism, religion-ism, whatever, they mostly hold you back only if you let them.

Recognizing out Violence, the Forward to Nonviolent Communication by Arun Ghandi

Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, wrote a Forward to "Nonviolent Communication" that is so great, my good friend Karen Wagner recommended Marshall B Rosenberg's book to me 5 years ago and I still haven't gotten past the Forward (and I really need to!). I think it says a lot of things about the world at large and our politics now and our personal and social lives, and that has been true every time I've read it.

I'm changing, will you? If we all change, we'll all change faster for the better.

Forward to Nonviolent Communication Marshall B Rosenberg's By Arun Gandhi

As a person of color, growing up in apartheid South Africa in the 1940 was not something anyone relished. Especially if you were brutally reminded of your skin color every moment of every day. To be beaten up at the age of ten by white youths because they consider you to be too black and then by black youths because they consider you too white is a humiliating experience that would drive anyone to vengeful violence.

I was so outraged that my parents decided to take me to India and leave me for some time with Grandfather, the legendary M.K. Gandhi, so that I could learn from him how to deal with the anger, the frustration, the discrimination, and the humiliation that violence color prejudice can invoke in you. In the eighteen months I learned more than anticipated. My only regret now is that I was just thirteen years old and a mediocre student at that. If only I had been older, a but wiser, and a bit more thoughtful, I could have learned so much more. But, one must be happy with what one has received and not be greedy, a fundamental lesson in nonviolent living. How can I forget this?

One of the many things I learned from Grandfather is to understand the depth and breadth of nonviolence and to acknowledge that one is violent and that one needs to bring about a qualitative change in one's attitude. We often don't acknowledge our violence because we are ignorant about it; we assume we are not violent because our vision of violence is one of fighting, killing, beating, and wars - the types of things that average individuals don't do.

To bring this home to me, grandfather made me draw a family tree of violence using the same principles as are used for a genealogical tree. His argument was that I would have a better appreciation of nonviolence if I understood and acknowledged the violence that exists in the world. He assisted me every evening to analyze the day’s happenings—everything that I experienced, read about, saw or did to others—and put them down on the tree either under “physical” (if it was violence where physical force was used) or under “passive” (if it was the type of violence where the hurt was more emotional).

Within a few months I covered one wall in my room with acts of “passive" violence that grandfather described as being more insidious than “physical" violence. He then explained that passive violence ultimately generated anger in the victim who, as an individual or as a member of a collective, responded violently. In other words it is passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence. It is because we don’t understand or appreciate this concept that all our efforts to work for peace have either not fructified, or the peace that we achieved was only temporary. How can we extinguish a fire if we don’t first cut off the fuel that ignites the inferno?

Unless, as he would say, “we become the change we wish to see in the world,” no change will ever take place. We are all, unfortunately, waiting for the other person to change first.

Reduplication

The golf course in Mandaluyong, Manila is called the Whack-Whack Golf Course. 

I think this is an example of a feature of many Asian languages called Full Reduplication.  All the Filipino languages have it (kàon-káon "eat-eat"; hìbî-híbî "cry-cry"; tinlò-tinlò "clean-clean" are examples in Hiliganon (often, though mistakenly called "Illongo"). A motorcycle cab with a sidecar is called a "tuk-tuk" in many Asian countries.  You can hear Japanese and Thais say "same-same" when speaking English, I assume this comes from their root of the word "same", and is typical of how reduplication is used - for emphasis. Wikipedia is a wiki, and all wiki's get their name from the Hawaiian "wiki-wiki", which means quick, really quick!

I don't think Mandarin has reduplication, except for kinship (叔叔 shūshu - uncle who is younger than after and 伯伯 bóbo for an uncle who is older) but I could easily be wrong. The Italian for "take it easy" is "piano-piano" (softly, softly). 

There are other kinds of reduplication such as partial reduplication ("tick-tock" ) and rhyming reduplication ("dazzle-dazzle", hanky-panky"), baby reduplication (mama, papa, baba), and onomatopoeia reduplication ("bow-wow"). Except for "bye-bye", which could be characterized as baby reduplication, I can't think of an English full reduplication. I'm not sure if "knock-knock" counts since it's from knock-knock jokes which themselves come from the passwords needed when gaining access to a hidden speakeasy bar during alcohol prohibition in the 1930s. 

"Whack Whack" sounds funny to Americans, like it should be a mini-golf course, mostly because it sounds like baby talk. Similarly "same-same" sounds funny to Filipinos. It seems all legit when put into language context. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication

2015 U.S. Mobile Phone Plans (hint: Rok Mobile)

My friends have been recommending MVNO's to me.  These mobile phone service providers use the same networks as the national carriers and offer many interesting inexpensive plans, some even free.  There are so many that it's clear that most people have a far better alternative with an MVNO like Ting than directly with the mobile phone network owners (Verizon, ATT, Sprint, TMobile).  I used WhistleOut for much of my initial research, but I've visited and investigated most of the plans on nearly all the MVNOs (I think) and all the major carriers sites so I thought I'd report back on what I've found.

I've been a Sprint subscriber since the 1990's since they've always been the best value.  They may still be the best value for many, but I'm finally ditching them.  I'm a techie and a data hog, though I don't watch a lot of video, which is where the vast majority of data usage lies, but when I need my data, I need it.  Sprint never throttled my data, even after using the hotspot regularly.  They didn't have a hotspot charge until a few years ago ($10 extra), but when the new owners took over they started to throttle at 3GB and the hotspot charge went to $30. At that point, it wasn't the best value for me anymore.  I've had an iPhone 5S on Sprint.

I've been all over the Boston area this year and have been using OpenSignal app and my They turned on their new network 4G LTE network in Boston about a year ago only (after the WiMAX flameout), and only now as they still build it out during the year, am I starting to see a difference.  I bought an iPhone 6S and tried AT&T for a month and it's 4G LTE seemed to be available everywhere and far speedier than Sprint's, so I wouldn't mind a network change (though when I'm near one of Sprint's new towers, Sprint is faster). I have had a Verizon mobile hotspot and they seem to 15% more widely available than Sprint's and usually faster as well, though not as fast as AT&T's.

Overall network coverage is converging and price is becoming the differentiator, and MVNOs have greatly increased the competition, thanks to Obama's FCC.  Since they are using the same networks, and are very cheap, why not switch?

I'd like to save a lot on the outrageous sums I've paid to Sprint over the years.  I want to avoid having to count my bytes and I also prefer a known bill rather than worry about if I should call someone or whether I was roaming when I watched that video for fear of a charge worth about a full month's bill. I text some, but don't talk a lot, but talk is cheap, literally, so the plans that fit me best are the unlimited plans and that's where I focused my research.  At the same time, I have a second number I'd like to keep as cheaply as possible as I can, so I kept my eye on that too.  Unlimited data plans are easy to come by, what you pay for nowadays is the 4G speed over the 3G (or slower) speeds.  Most providers will give you a limited amount at 4G speeds, which I'd say are about 4 times faster experientially, and then the rest of your data at 3G is pretty cheap to come by.

Findings

Honerable Mentions

Ting may be the service best plan for users that don't want a lot of data, especially for people who can use wifi most of the time, but their mobile data gets expensive.  A plan with just 100 minutes of talk (about all I need), 1000 texts with 1 phone is just $14.  Add in 2GB of data - I minimally am like the rest of us and use 1-2GB a month (until I tether), then the bill jumps to $43, which doesn't beat Sprints $50 unlimited plan.  Anyway my iPhone 5S won't be Ting-ready until they turn their new GSM network online in February.

Runner Ups

RingPlus beats Ting hands-down, with $33 for unlimited talk, unlimited global SMS and 2.5 GB of data.  Additionally, RingPlus, like many of these new MVNO services, has unlimited calling via wifi as well, if you happen to have wifi and bad phone service (often true indoors).

RepublicWireless has an interesting $5/month wifi-only plan which can be quite economical in many circumstances.  For the unlimited lovers, unlimited talk, text and data (over cell), and unlimited data, throttled after 5GB for $40.  However, it's not really unlimited since it's stopped, not throttled, if you violate the 5GB a second time in 6 months, and there doesn't seem to be tethering support.

Boost mobile has $45 unlimited 4G, but no hotspot.  The might be the best deal if our winner wasn't running a special.

Winners

"Without Tethering" Category
Rok Mobile has nearly the best unlimited deal, with a current offer that beats everything.  First, Rox Mobile was started by the same man who started Patron tequila, enough said! (And Paul Mitchell hair products, both great companies with high quality products). Rok Mobile has unlimited talk, text (including international) and web with 5GB at 4G LTE for $49.99 - with 4 months free, that's like $33/month!  Plus it adds some nice added bonuses, especially a "free" subscription to their Rox Music service with unlimited music streaming and none of it counting against your download data.  Additionally you get and access to 20 million wifi hotspots. The downside?  No hotspot!  Still, that's a great deal no matter how you look at it, it beats almost all MVNO 2GB of 4G plans.

"With Tethering" Category
MetroPCS (TMobile Network) has the best really unlimited plan, unlimited talk, text and supposedly unlimited 4G LTE all month, no throttles, for $60, $65 to use it with a hotspot tethering.  This is $80 a month from TMobile directly.

Google Chrome and Chrome OS could Be Huge

The move to an all-Cloud life is curving upwards. Most people have wifi most of the time they crack open their computers and mobile broadband hotspots are getting nearly cheap (more in my next post). Maybe we don't have to carry powerful laptops anymore?

In order to work with the high school class I help teach, I bought a Chromebook to match what the students have. I bought the best one out there and it was just $239 (in store is cheaper), many Chromebooks can be had for around $120. The specs are light in some ways, a 14" screen (1366x768), 2GB RAM, 16GB Hard drive (not a misprint), but it is made for connectivity and mobility: 1 HDMI port, 3 USBs ports (one is 3.0), SD slot, 802.11ac wifi, bluetooth, camera, a nearly 3000 mAh battery which seems to last forever (they always do at first, don't they?), and it comes with 1TB of Google Drive storage for two years for free - ah, there's the real hard drive. I do wish Google Drive was versioned content management, like Time Machine, but I can't even see old revisions of Google-originated documents, maybe I'm missing something.

I used the machine for only a few days, but it's clear that I can do nearly all of what I need to do on it, and I like the keyboard navigation better on it than a Mac. With my Mac crashing almost as much as Win98 now, and Macs being WICKED expensive, I have to consider if I could replace it for a mere $250 (with resale values on Macs seemingly near 95%). The Chromebook is about 10% lighter than my MacBook Pro 15", so I don't mind being lighter in the hand as well as the wallet.

When I moved to the Mac from Windows I moved everything to the cloud - a lot of that was moving things to Google Drive, much of it what have been great online services - Evernote, ToDoPro, Mint, and all the mobile apps and websites I use. I've already learned that machines come and go, but your data is always your data, so keep everything near permanent backed up to external hard drives  (except my Google data, which I should do). The idea was to create OS independence, so I could move to - and away from - the Mac easily.  Could I move to Chrome OS?

After 6 years, 3 Macs (one a used starter, one run over after 5 years - they do last, one recent replacement) and 3 iPhones (4S, 5S, 6Plus), I am still not very tied to MacOS/iOS. I am somewhat tied to Aperture (sort of, you can get at the pics underneath their database easy enough) but the only real major tie to is TimeMachine - one of the main reasons I moved to Mac in the first place. Since I have a lot of data backed up on Time Machine, I'll always need a Mac around, or a Virtual Machine for a MacOS, and I will always have that around. Heck I could always have a virtual machine for OS/2!

It's not just me, most people are far less tied to OS's now that we are all using apps in the cloud. In fact, maybe people are more tied to Google's main services than the various operating system they are using on their various devices. In the meantime, Chrome has recently become the majority browser. It's been a long war, but Chrome is winning and none of the competitors can recapture share (Microsoft and Opera certainly won't, Safari can only change as far as their OS penetration, and no further, and Firefox is improving but it will be hard to keep up without the same level of funding).

Chrome is now invading other OS's desktops.  After adding a Chrome Extension, I automatically got this helpful new Google portal on my Mac dock, just like the one on my Chromebook's start menu.

Ah, so I can use all those apps that plug into Chrome on all my devices? Nice. I don't think it's hard to see Google growing their eyeshare from here.

But I'm a developer! How could I get along on a Chromebook? The time for development to move to the cloud is near, maybe not here, but near.

We almost had cloud-like development in the 1990's with ClearCase - a virtual file system, very similar to Google Drive, but with controllable versioning, like Time Machine (on steroids). It could never quite work because the files a developer edits were always local because the developer tools were always local so it was very slow as the compiler reached across the network to find the net file, 10,000 times. I can here some of my old IBM mainframe friends that they were developing in the cloud, and it's true, though the cloud was usually in the building.

In 2015, developers have many tools living in the cloud - editors, compilers, builders, test runners, test and production machines. They seem mature enough for Javascript development, though the tools for Java may be somewhat behind. (I'm trying out Cloud9, no review ready yet.)  All we need now is a little terminal. Ah, but ChromeOS has bash and if that's not good enough, maybe Ubuntu on a Chromebook would work!

Jack-a-Roe & Women Warriors

I went to the tailor shop today (as an aside run by a wonderful elder Italian gentleman, Joe Giullo, Rte. 9 Shrewsbury, near The Bean Counter).  Of course the rest of the day I was singing (and playing) "I went down to the tailor shop to dress in men's array..." from Jack-a-Roe, a traditional song that the Grateful Dead kept alive for millions.  A particularly interesting version can be heard here.

The lyrics are very dense - a wealthy merchant's daughter is courted by many, but Jack-a-Roe, a sailor, was her true love.  He left to sail in a war so she went down to the tailor's shop to dress in men's clothing and snuck aboard a boat as a man.  After the war, she found her true love wounded, got a doctor to heal his wounds, and they got married.

As I often want to do with traditional songs, I looked up the history.

Jack-A-Roe also occurs as Jackaroe or Jackaro. It is one of a number of closely related songs that also occur as Jack Monroe, Jack Munro, Jack The Sailor and The Love of Polly and Jack Monroe, possibly also as Jackie Frazer. Possibly the earliest recorded version of a similar song is titled Jack Munro and is held in the ballad collection of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. This dates from roughly around 1800.

Here's the original ballad, posted as a bill, between 1774 and 1825, as a war protest.

Jack Munro ("In Chatham town there liv'd a worthy merchant man ...") 

The theme of the woman warrior is not unique to the West, of course.  A similar ballad around 400 AD  inspired Mulan.

Robtos: Trust me, I'll get you a beer!

Robots are becoming useful now that engineers are realizing it's all about the human interaction.



Summary of the Boston Globe article from the ACM News:

Robot May Furnish Lesson in Human Trust
Boston Globe (07/05/10) Johnson, Carolyn Y.

Boston-area scientists are using a new robot to study the signals that people use to decide whether to trust one another within minutes of meeting. "There should be some signal for trustworthiness that's subtle and hard to find, but [it is] there," says Northeastern University's David DeSteno. The robot, called Nexi, has advantages over human participants because people use subtle gestures, or engage in unintentional mimicry, that can be hard to measure or control. Nexi has many human expressions, but researchers can control every aspect of its behavior, which enables them to test what nonverbal cues might seem more or less trustworthy. The research also could help roboticists find ways to design machines that will be trusted partners for humans. The experiment is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern, and Cornell University. At the end of the experiment, researchers measured how trustworthy the participants found Nexi to be using an economic task in which they decided how many tokens to exchange with Nexi and predicted how many tokens Nexi would give them.

If that creeps you out too much, maybe just try having your computer to get you a beer.

The Real "Avatar" (The Last Airbender)

I saw The Last Airbender this weekend with my 13 year old and his friends. If you don't know, the movie is based on the cartoon called Avatar : The Last Airbender. I call it the "real" Avatar because Avatar the blockbuster movie hardly reflects the meaning of the word. The word "Avatar" comes from the Sanskrit word for "descent," meaning a spirit (or "God"), descending to the material world as a human. You may think such a notion is preposterous, or you may have deep faith that some Avatar is your personal savior (like Jesus Christ or Krishna), but in either case, an Avatar, fictional or factual, is more closely related to the Last Airbender than the Marine in the virtual blue suit.

As you might expect, I enjoyed The Last Airbender more than Avatar. Avatar was three hours of over-the-top drama. The Last Airbender was far more subtle. Instead of yelling and screaming and in-your-face interaction, Aang, the main character's strongest imperative was telling an animal "Be nice."

Noah Ringer, who played Aang, was phenomenal. I was expecting to be disappointed, as most were by Hayden Christenson playing the adult Anakin Skywalker. Monks with power are very difficult to play, but Ringer did what great actors Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson could not pull off - maintain a constant state of grace and even temper while exercising power in difficult circumstances (Alec Guinness, the original Obi-Wan Kenobi, maintained grace, but his style was better suited for stage than film).

The theatergoers, including my triad of 13 year olds, did not like the movie. They picked on the things missing from the cartoon, like the villian's missing ponytail or the fact that Aang was pronounced more properly like a mantra than like it was in the cartoon (rhymed with "hang"). After comparing Aang to the Jedi, I was met with disbelief by the 13 year olds. "Aang is not a monk - he's a warrior!" That led to a 15 minute diatribe about the Bhagavad Gita's ("What? What do you mean we've never heard of the most widely read book ever?!") Arjuna the Archer, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Star Wars. I think I got enough into their minds that it will spark their interest when they come across it again sometime.

China's Government Advocates for Workers

According to this IBD story, "Chinese workers are usually represented by government-sponsored unions. "

Now I suspect this may not be all it's cracked up to be since "Many recent labor disturbances were organized outside these communist-backed groups." But still can you just imagine a government advocating on behalf of workers? I suppose if you remember America in the 1930's or 1940's, you might remember, but in my lifetime, government has been 98% a tool of business interests - the capitalists - not labor. I know there was once or twice a raise in the minimum wage (fat chance of that happening again now that Ted Kennedy is dead). And I am well aware that those who rely on FOX News for their worldview think labor and teachers have an undue influence on government, but just that fact that the notion that the government advocates for labor is a foreign idea to most Americans (and anathema to many) shows how tilted the power in this democracy has become. Some say America is now Fascist, who by definition "seek to organize a nation on corporatist perspectives, values, and systems such as the political system and the economy."

Sure there's corruption in China, as there is in the U.S., but at the end of the day, the Communists truly do look out for the workers. This may be idealogical, but is likely just as much a matter of self-preservation - the Chinese government is well aware that without economic growth, the people would revolt and who knows what will happen then. In any case, it will be fascinating to see how the U.S. corporate-oriented government will compete with the Chinese worker-oriented government over the next 50 years.

Pre-Internet Publications

As I was writing a blog post on switching to the Mac, I started discussing my first programming on the Mac. Since it was pre-Internet (or at least pre-browser), I didn't think I'd find any about the articles that come out of my first professional post-B.S. work, but I did come up with the references via David A. Rosenbaum's C.V.:

Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). A model for reaching control. Acta Psychologica, 82, 237-250.

Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). Knowledge model for selecting and producing reaching movements. Journal of Motor Behavior, 25, 217-227.

Bushe, M. M., Vaughan, J., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (1994). Pascal external functions for Strawberry Tree's "Analog Connection Workbench." Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computer, 26, 461-466.

This was some of the most memorable and fun work I've done. The model for reaching control was a computer model that acted like a baby at the start. This baby would randomly reach in different directions using different combinations of angles of various limbs. Each angle would be given a cost so that moving your torso was more costly than your wrist, and bending at angles that were difficult (like scratching your back) was also costly. After a few thousand trails, the model learned to reach for objects at novel locations using fluid lifelike movements. Lots of hours with Mac programming manuals always handy.

The "Pascal" paper was a different experiment. We were seeing how well someone could mimic tapping out a beep-beep rhythm with varying delaying between the beeps (.1-1.0 seconds or so) when heard aurally or seen visually on a screen. Aural won. The article was about writing Mac software to hook up with a hardware/software package called "Strawberry Tree." It involved some low level z80 processor instructions to pick up analog signals from a external board hooked up to a Mac. Can't say it was all that fun, but doing the dirty work made it publishable.

Ultimately, though I'm always dissatisfied by cognitive psychology experiments. They are too contrived. "Life is a bowl of concurrent schedules," as my behaviorist professor Dr. John Donahoe, liked to say. Looking back, I can honestly say that he was the most influential professor I had. I think I had the best work-study gig on campus as I wrote a neural network simulation for Dr. Donahoe. A harbinger was the nights that I was up until 2AM writing the visuals. Dr. Donahoe didn't think the visuals were that important, he really just wanted the numbers, but I wanted to see the network learning. I still remember how his face lit up when the dark lines lit up yellow as connections were made. An early positive reinforcement that has been reinforced many times since in my UI and visualization work.

Williams Syndrome

Williams Syndrome, is a genetic condition that causes a lack of social fear - people with Williams Syndrome are really friendly even with people they don't know. Fascinatingly, they also have no or nearly no racial bias, from a recent Discover Magazine article:

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias...

It's very interesting to think about the fact that we are born with a predilection to racial bias. It makes more sense when I think about what I read in Guns, Germs and Steel that said when two tribal people who don't know each other meet each other in Papua New Guinea, they will first start naming off people who are related to each other to see if the other person knows them. If they find a match, they are OK, if they don't find a match, they fight. I guess those conversations could last a very long time.

Serendipitously, I've never heard of Williams Syndrome until this morning. Then Dylan and I visited UMass for an Open House. I talked to Dylan about the story on the drive to UMass (hmmm, is this the kind of conversation that inspired Dylan to want to teach science?). Then not one, but two different speakers mentioned Williams Syndrome in passing during their speeches. Weird. One was talking about the opportunities at UMass and mentioned how he worked with local kids with Williams Syndrome. I forget the context the other speaker mentioned it in. Our tour guide came close to the concept as she was doing her thesis on social contact.

Why Alex Trabek is So Smart

Alex Trabek, the longtime host of Jeopardy! seems like a very smart guy. He knows the answers to so many questions, "Oh, I'm sorry, it was Victor Hugo." (He does get a bit swarmy when the answer is about something French).

Category: Education Level
The answer is : 6
The question: How many DAYS did Alex Trabek spend in college?

Now, of course, not going to college doesn't make you not smart, but could it be that we think Alex Trabek is smarter than he is?

I don't have the reference, but one thing I remember from my psychology (neuroscience) degree was that there were some studies done in the 80's that were in a game show format. Participants either asked trivia questions or gave answers, and they switch roles for different audiences. Audiences were asked to rate how smart they thought the participants were - both the questions givers and the answer givers. The audience thought the people asking the questions were smarter than the ones answering the questions, no matter who was asking. The numbers were quite extraordinary.

We have a strong tendency to think the person asking the questions is smart - which is why the crooks at Enron could convince other that they were the "Smartest Person in Room."

This came up when a friend and collegue, who is wicked smaht - he went to a Ivy League school, he's a genius,and he's very technically proficient - was asked some questions about algorithms in a techie interview and didn't quite have the answers (neither would I, I only minored in math/computers). Most experienced folks know that you can't figure out someone's ability by a few technical questions in an interview. That strategy only assesses the intersection of knowledge of the interviewer and the interviewee, both of which can be vast and non-intersecting. This tactic makes the questioner feel real good about themselves since they knew something the other person doesn't. It deflates the person being interviewed, who is already nervous.

I approach it differently. I look for what I know about what the person claims they know. I then drill down into what they did to see if they had a thought process to intelligently make the decisions they made given the constraints they were under. This gives the person confidence since they are talking about something they know, not something you pulled out of the air. It allows you to have a humane interaction, and assess the person under a situation that would be more normal. Hopefully, you also talk enough tech to realize how knowledgeable the person and if what their resume says holds water.

Newspapers may be dying, and that's sometimes a good thing.

I had my first paper route when I was about 10 years old. Third grade, if I remember right. It was a Sunday-only delivery in Leicester, MA. I think I started out with around 50 houses, and grew to around 100 when someone gave up an adjacent route. The papers were so thick, I'd could only stuff about 10 in my bag at once. Yes, this is when American kids actually WALKED - I've since seen parents drive their kids on their routes.

The hills where I grew up are ubiquitous and steep. I've heard the average grade was steeper than the hills in San Francisco, though I think that's not quite true (but close). I'm pretty sure Apricot Street (where this is all happening here, as Arlo Guthrie would say) in Leicester and Worcester is as steep as the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco (a 27% grade), and at least four times longer. I had to stuff my bag, deliver to the first ten houses, walk back down for more, then walk back up to deliver another 10, etc. Later I took up a daily route in Worcester, starting out at 40 houses and growing to over 100 again, which was not so great for my customers, since it was an evening publication and many nice folks received their papers well after dinner.

It was work, but I had no idea how valuable it was, beyond the $20 a week. It certainly kept me in shape, I met a lot of nice people, and my eyes were open to many different types of folks. I can remember the single mother who couldn't afford to pay me and was months behind. She had to ask a 13 year old to spot her the paper so she could look for jobs in it. There was a religious person who needed to tip me with moral stories. There was the 93 year old who kept her home very cold, not out of choice. She loved when I came collecting (yes, cash, credit cards were invented, but not widely used), since I gave her some company, and I enjoyed hers. She knit me a hat and mittens one winter. The letters my wife wrote me the summer when we were 14 are still wrapped in the ribbon that went 'round that gift. Then there was the 50ish man who tricked me into his bedroom and started showing me playboys before I excused myself, suddenly thinking my shorts were a bit to small for my growing body.

But the greatest gift of the newspaper routes were the newspapers themselves - and the writers who made them alive and interesting everyday. Of course I read the sports section first, parsed each baseball boxscore while in season, and waited on the rare "hot stove" article in the winter. (Unfortunately, this was the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, so I didn't discover Peter Gammons until college). These were long routes however, so I wound up reading everything - the front page and every page those articles lead to. I was a teenager and I knew about what was going on in the world more than most adults (and didn't realize it, which may have been better for my ego). Occasionally the business section caught my eye with something interesting, and though I never really was interested in anything a particular business was doing, eventually I realized I loved macroeconomics and watched everything the Federal Reserve did, followed how the markets and interest rates moved and watched the waves of the economy before and during a recession (which paid major returns to me in 2008, when I timed things as well as I could and did not panic). I've continued having wide interests. I also read so much that good writing was drilled into my mind. I'm sure it's weakened, but it's still there.

Don't expect me to say that those were the good ol' days and kids now just don't know how to write or read garbage. Things change. I didn't know how to network with my friends constantly. You can surf for an hour and come across more interesting topics than any paper has in a month. My parents didn't know how to word process.

[Total tangent, but Susan and I were talking about it recently. Language is amazingly dynamic and comes to suit the time as it changes. Think about the word "fair" - how long did it take to get to four letters? According to this:

Origin:
bef. 900; ME; OE fæger; c. OS, OHG fagar, ON fagr, Goth fagrs

If it's a good word in common use, it will get simpler and simpler. Read The Mother Tongue if it interests you . Yes, I know it's controversial among experts, but it's Bill Bryson!]

Newspapers themselves though, and journalism in general, do have ethics to uphold, and they aren't. Newspapers have always been, and always should be, there to balance democracy, to shed light on corruption and injustice, to lend a thoughtful eye and hand to the considerations of the day and time. They have failed, and it's unclear if there is any protection left for the people from the backroom deals that now seem to have their hand at the throat of our democracy. Why? Journalism, such a noble pursuit, is no longer an art, a calling, a public trust, at least outside of some brave poor souls who work for websites and publications that are always on the brink of going under. Newspapers now are about the buck, or a buck for a thousand clicks. It's about working the channel while it lasts. Which is why the Boston Globe's price has gone up almost an order of magnitude, they blame production costs, and then deliver the ads (and only the ads) before Thanksgiving, for free.

The death knell? The Boston Herald, which deserved a quick death 20 years ago, has a new slogan in their ads: "Someone's got to say it." "Someone has to say it" just wasn't colloquial enough?

Techie Blog...

I now have a separate blog for tech stuff at michaelbushe.wordpress.com, so hopefully I'll write more techie and non-techie stuff. I already was able to get a couple of old posts out of the closet.

Humanity's Purpose: A Warning For the Next "Intelligent" Life Form

Truly, it's inevitable, isn't it? The best we can hope for is to leave enough trash around so that, in another 5 million years, some future Bonobo relative realizes that they were not the first forms of life intelligent life, and they could mess it up too.

"No one is useless, anyone can at least be used as a bad example."

New Favorite Movies

I have a new movie to add to my list of favorites: 8 1/2 Now if I could only learn Italian enough to understand it. :-) It's brilliant anyway. In order to understand it, you have to understand Jung, because it's nearly a Jungian drama dealing with a man's relationships to the females in his life as the main character deals with the confusions he creates by following useless and narcissistic tendencies. The climax is as poignant as movies get. A true masterpiece.

So what are my other favorite movies?
American Beauty
Dr. Strangelove
Field of Dreams
Hanna and Her Sisters
Life is Beautiful
Schindler's List
Star Wars, Episode IV and Episode I

Though they certainly span the decades (nothing in this century yet though), there are some common threads - both obvious and more deep. Obviously there are two Italian films, two about concentration camps, five use black and white, and they are generally serious, witty, and often dark. More deeply, they are studies in contrast - always for me the most attractive form of art. The generally share themes of self-actualization in the face of adversity, determination, and penance.

The most common thread is most clearly spelled out in Star Wars - the struggle of good and evil, the battle for the human soul, in short Joseph Campbell's (and Jung's) Hero's Journey, on which Star Wars is based. I'm always surprised by how few people appreciate this most popular movie as a rendering of mythical themes. Distracted by the special effects, I guess.

Speaking of Campbell, I retold again this week my favorite Campbell quote (I'm pretty sure I first heard it in The Power of Myth):

If you follow you bliss, doors will open for you that would not have open otherwise, and that would not have opened for anyone else.

The Yoga I practice I learned from Ananda Marga, which literally means "The Path of Bliss," and this is just the bliss that Campbell is talking about, as he was a Yogi at heart. People can, of course, learn their true nature from many paths. Isn't it funny that when they do, and they act on it, they start knocking down doors that they hadn't even seen before? I can guarantee that if you do honestly practice quietude and meditation you will uncover that steady hum that lies within us all.