Entries in Life

’cause sometimes I see people coming across links months after I’ve seen them, I’ll risk posting links you’ve already seen.

• Video: The machine is Us/ing Us
• DIY Space. Supposedly they launched on Sunday, but I don’t see an update yet.
• rms is giving up management of emacs after emacs22. I think this is the last project he was still active in on a daily basis. Still this is probably a good thing as it will allow the project to grow outside of his vision for it.
• Globe4d is nice but at the North Museum they had a very, very similar globe. It lacked “direct manipulation” but that was about it. (North Museum really surprised me. It is a small museum, but they had volunteers interacting with kids individually. My children were really caught up in a story one of them told about the lunar eclipse. Too bad it was overcast during the eclipse.)
• Roughly Drafted:
  

  Apple doesn’t have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win, it only needs to take the most valuable segments of the market.

  Once that happens, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales.

  (My own bold.)

Back in Scary Smart, I told you about the scholarship program that paid my way through school. It was filled with kids just like me: Very smart, but not very motivated, students. (There were, as a fellow scholarship recipient points out, very smart and motivated students, too. I was just impressed with that the average level of motivation wasn’t very high.) A couple of weeks ago, I discovered “How Not to Talk to Your Kids” that helped me crystallize my ideas for why smart people end up as such slackers. This experiment provides a lot of insight:

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.” Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Kids (and many adults) want to be praised, so they tend to pick the outcome that they think will end in more praise with the least risk and work. When you go through school being praised for your intelligence, you soon learn that you don’t have to put out much effort to get that praise. Of course, there is the rogue teacher who won’t praise your obvious brilliance in answering a question and who expects you to actually work, but they tend to be the minority and, besides, a quick burst of energy will distract them. So you end up with a really intelligent person who isn’t very motivated to succeed. Mediocrity is better than failure. If you try for success, you might not get it. So you coast. My conclusion: I don’t dare tell my kids they’re smart. If they work hard, I’ll recognise that. Amaze me. Just being smart is so passé. This despite the conventional wisdom which is evidently “Always re-enforce how intelligent your child is! Make sure they have confidence!” What a load of crap! As yet another example of how conventional wisdom is wrong, you should know that expensive running shoes (and, indeed, shoes in general) are ruining your feet and injuring your body:

In 1989, Dr. B. Marti published a paper which still makes the throats of footwear executives go dry. He studied 5,038 runners who participated in a 16km race and had them fill out an extensive questionnaire about their running in the year preceding the race. Here’s what he found: The incidence of injuries in runners using shoes costing more than $95 was more that twice as great as in runners using shoes costing less than $40. (Note that this result includes correction for other influencing factors such as training mileage and history of previous injury.) In other words, the fancier (high-tech, advanced) the shoe, the more dangerous it is!

Our feet are supposed to feel the ground so that our body can respond appropriately. Barefoot runners are careful runners and, as a result, less likely to injure themselves. I recall a study that showed children in martial arts classes that used padding were actually injured more than than children in classes that didn’t use padding. (If you can find a reference, let me know!) We’re so frightened of pain or injury that we take steps to protect ourselves from injury without considering that the protection may harm us more than the pain. I suspect we’re doing the same thing with our love-affair with medication. By numbing ourselves to all pain, we inhibit our potential. Pain and suffering are a part of life. Enjoy it!

Months ago, I wrote about my plans to use a planner and a budget. I ended with “I’ll let you know how it goes” and, of course, I never did. First the budgeting. My cousin () asked me about my use of sub-accounts (“Are sub-accounts in gnucash intended for such use?”) and I’ve found that they likely aren’t. Or, maybe, I’m just can’t budget. Some budget items (“Car Maintenance”) are supposed to accumulate money over time so that you have money saved when you need it. That would be fine if I actually stuck to the budget. Instead, I would find myself going over the budget and “borrowing” money from these long-term accounts. Which is fine. Except that I wanted to keep the good feeling I got when I felt I was saving for that rainy, car maintenance day. So I didn’t actually move the money from the car maintenance account to whichever account I was spending from. So, I’m no good at following my own rules. I ended up with the accounts all out of whack. Still, I have done a pretty good job of categorizing where the money is going. So, I took the last quarter of 2006, figured out where the spending went and found (TADA!) our budget was pretty accurate. and I had predicted fairly accurately where we were going to be spending money. In that sense, the sub-accounts would work. You could put money in these virtual accounts and spend from them … as long as you stick to the money you agreed to. Come to think of it, I probably would have managed to save some extra money had I done that. Boo, me! Problem was, my father offered to come work on our house and we readily agreed. Of course that meant spending money that hadn’t been budgeted (thus, the sloshing of money not-so-carefully from one fund to another). But the kitchen and bath look great! At least, they will once we paint them. Oh, and because I was a little depressed about falling off of the budget bandwagon, I didn’t reconcile the accounts as soon as I should have. That resulted in a few overdraft charges. (the SHAME!) Anyway, I’ve now eliminated the sub-accounts and will rely on spot-checking the actual spending against our budget once a month or so. How am I doing on Planning? A little worse than the budgeting. I now have tools that I use on a semi-regular basis to track how I use my time, but I haven’t gotten to the point where I can successfully set goals for the week and get those accomplished. I’m getting closer, but I’m no where close. What I have I learned from all this? That I’m no good about following a plan, but I can tell you what I’ve done really well. Now, the question is: can I use my knowlege of the past to adjust my behavior in the future?

I look at other people’s weblogs and see scintillating conversation run amok. This means one of two things: either no one is interested in what I’m saying (likely) or my words are so profound that they require no response. To salve my envy, the spammers have decided that my weblog (and a few other weblogs hosted on this site) are targets for spam. Luckily, Brad Fitzpatrik and the crew at LiveJournal had to deal with this long before I did, so they added some pretty nifty solutions. Hopefully, I won’t have to deal with that too much, anymore.

I’m not a very deep thinker. Nor am I very worried about immigration. Immigrants make good, hard-working wife material. So, when I heard about our current administration’s immigration policy (“willing worker/willing employer”), I didn’t think it was such a bad idea. It was a little paradigm shift for me when I read Not Our Kind of People in the National Review. Ah! I thought, Now, I get it! (I told you I’m not a deep thinker.) See, protectionist arguments against immigration (“They’re taking our jobs!”) aren’t going to get far with me. “Yeah, so what? That’s the heartless free market for you!” But, an argument against the elitist sentiment (“We’re too good to clean hotel rooms!”) that the the administration relies on to sell its immigration policy makes my blood boil. In America, no one is too good to clean hotel rooms, just as, in theory, everyone, even the president, has to obey the law. As Mark Krikorian writes, “It is precisely [the children of the educated elite] who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they’re young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government.” , as an immigrant daughter of a hard-working immigrant family has a much more intuitive grasp of this than I do. My parents did a lot help me understand how important hard work is; by refusing to bail me out, they made sure I understood that nothing was beneath me and, if I had mow yards or bus tables to pay my way, I would. Still, as I said, has a more intuitive grasp of this than I do. So she surprised me when she announced that she was getting an afternoon paper route for our three oldest kids (aged 6-9). A few people made comments about how young our kids were. Even my parents did, till I reminded them that I was delivering a few papers for my older half-brothers by myself at that age. And the kids love it. They earn their own money and, since they can use it to buy things, they have a better grasp of what that money means, how far it will go, what it can do. They have a better understanding of what they are capable of and the beginning of a solid work ethic. The more I think about the rationale that our administration has used to sell its immigration policy (“They’ll only get the jobs that are beneath us Americans”), the more disgusted I am. This is something I’ve forgotten too much: Hard work is inherently ennobling. PostScript: In looking for something to link to on that last sentence I stumbled upon Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. It looks as if Marcuse properly anticipated the conflict between our obsession with leisure and happiness on one side and the free market, capitalist society on the other. (I think he was on the wrong side, for what it’s worth.)

has posted a fairly vivid description of the Hell many people unconciously wish for Hitler. I readily admit that (like ) I’m more drawn to C. S. Lewis idea of hell in The Last Battle than to the fire and brimestone version of Jonathon Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, but whatever Hell is like is beside the point. Instead of dwelling on Hell or Heaven (and trying to decide who is in or out), we are called to devote our energies elsewhere.

My mother called me up the other day: “Hey! Have you seen these new Mac vs. PC commercials?” she asked. “You should show your kids!” They are funny, but, they’ve gone on for too long. The PC guys are even (finally) coming up with some nice come-backs. Besides, I’ve been a Free Software user and contributor, advocate of programming freedom for too long to get sucked into the platform wars that Microsoft, Apple, and others foment. You like Windows? Great! OS X? Wonderful! So what Beryl only now beginning to do things that OS X has done for decades? I’m a geek and I value my freedom more than the latest GeeWhizGottaHaveIt feature that Steve Jobs has decided is cool. I’m also patient. I have to be. The Gnome desktop doesn’t do everything a PC or Mac does right now, but in a couple of years (at the most) that oh-so-unique feature on your proprietary platform of choice will be commodified to the point of ubiquity. Ubuntu has already begun to make a credible effort at this, attempting to steal market share from the established leader. Yeah, your BMW is nice, but my used minivan gets me where I need to go, and I didn’t have to spend a mint on it.

For the first time in, oh, forever, I watched the complete superbowl. To tell the truth, knows more about football than me. This year was different because my father is in town and he planned on watching the game. Alexis pointedly said we should keep him company. So, my father, , the kids and I all crowded around our suitably small TV to watch the game. If I had to watch one Super Bowl game all the way through in my whole life, this year’s game would be an entertaining one to choose. The ads (the only part of the Super Bowl I bothered to watch before) were mildly entertaining, but not as good as the drama on the field. I tend to be as apathetic as my friend Jeff about sports, but, Jeff, you really missed some drama. Since I’m not an afficinado of American football, I can’t tell you much about the game except that from the start when the Bears made a touchdown off of the kickoff to the last quarter when the Colts intercepted a pass and ran it 56 yards for a a touchdown to secure their win, I was entertained the whole time. Hrm… Maybe there is something to watching sports, after all.