The Kids Are Alright: CS Enrollment Way Down at US Universities

As I said a couple of weeks ago (or months ago, maybe), while talking about how wonderful Python is, I wouldn't really recommend Java to American programmers, particularly young ones, since Java programming jobs are so easily outsourced.

In the article 'The 'Anti-Java' Professor and The Jobless Programmers" (lamest Disney movie EVAR), Robert Dewar talks about the concurrent trends of increasingly focusing on Java in the college CS curriculum, and the decreasing enrollment in CS programs. Colleges appear to be responding to the trend by dumbing down their courses as fast as they can (dive! dive!) with some notable exceptions like the ever-reliable M.I.T. and Carnegie-Mellon.

Says Dewar:

“Furthermore, Java is mainly used in Web applications that are mostly fairly trivial,” Dewar says, with his characteristic candor. “If all we do is train students to be able to do simple Web programming in Java, they won't get jobs, since those are the jobs that can be easily outsourced. What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems.”

“By the way Java has almost no presence in such systems. At least as of a few months ago, there was not a single line of safety-critical Java flying in commercial or military aircraft. I recently talked to a customer who had a medium-sized application in Java, which was to be adapted to be part of a safety-critical avionics system. They immediately decided that this meant it would have to be recoded in a suitable language, probably either C or Ada.”

This is, as far as I can tell, all true. Even if, like late 90's early 00's me, you score one of these cushy Java jobs, the tedium of essentially pulling stuff out of a database, putting it on a web page, pulling back the user's responses, putting them in the database really wears thin after a year or two. Also sez Dewar:

In response (to declining enrollment), colleges have compromised – heavily – to attract students. “So two things: reducing requirements and getting rid of annoying math courses and things like that. And also trying to make courses ‘fun.’ I believe that computer science should be fun, but the fun should come out of solving problems – not making pretty pictures. That’s the danger, I think.”

I would say this is not particularly worrisome - kids avoiding CS programs of the candy-ass variety who don't particularly have much interest in the topic to begin with are exercising good judgment. Dewar does say there will always be jobs for the hard-core types that take this stuff seriously. The problem is more the candy-assedness of the programs and the whole business of pretending graduates who can work with Java web framework of the month X aren't going to be competing with somebody who'll do it for $3/hour.

Particularly brilliant and inventive youngsters probably mastered Java in their pre-teen years, like the dude at Borders the other day whose voice hadn't changed yet who was deciding which book to buy with his Dad. Kids like that should maybe skip CS altogether and check out one of the hard sciences. That's some real shit! You don't see Physics professors with the little tassels on their loafers shaking all the time because they're so nervous about 'ooh, what will the CEO of JoeBlowCo think of my lecture today?'

See, very very occasionally I actually do have handy advice for the youngsters.

Crowd-Sourced Comedy: The American Family Association Boycotts McDonald's for being too nice to gays, or something.

McDonald's recently drew the wrath of the American Family Association after making an announcement that they'd joing the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. From the 'Boycott McDonald's' website:

According to McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner, McDonald's will aggressively promote the homosexual agenda. In remarks on McDonald's Web site concerning the company becoming a member of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), Skinner wrote: "Being a socially responsible organization is a fundamental part of who we are. We have an obligation to use our size and resources to make a difference in the world … and we do."

The comment page is a treasure trove of unintentional laffs.

Some fall under the category of accidental double entendres:

"because McDonald's had taken a stand to support the activist gay agenda that is destroying the core of family values in the U.S. we will take a stand to support McDonald's competitors such as In-n-Out and Chick fil-A."

"I and my family will be buyers at burger king.. You need to change your gay position.."

Several commenters claim to eat at McDonald's with alarming frequency:

"I WAS a twice a week "eater" at McDonald's. That has changed now. I will NOT eat there again and will not take my grandchildren there. Since you have such a hate for christians and those not supporting the homosexual agenda, I'm sure you wouldn't want to take my money any more."

"My family has supported your business for well over 25 years. We have been loyal customers eating at your establishments 4 times/week. It pains me to say, but, I now will take my business and hard-earned money elsewhere. As much as we have enjoyed the food over the years, we will not continue to do so because of your close-minded leadership. We are amazed that your leadership is taking this stand. Such ashame. You will be losing nothing just to be neutral on same sex marriages. Now you WILL lose.... customers. The loss of revenue is completely YOUR choice.

"It was bad enough having to keep my Spanish to English dictionary handy every time I pulled up to your drive-thru window (to the tune of about $1,000 per year). But this is the final straw (and I guess the final Big Mac) for me. Your blatant disregard for the strongly held moral values most Americans hold dear has cost you my business. Yes, Wendy's, I will have a Frosty with that."

"My husband & I are ministers and we are so ashamed that McDonalds would rather support the Homosexual Agenda than the American families that have enjoyed eating at Mc Donalds down through the years. We have up until recently ate at McDonalds three to four times a week. WE will we no longer eat at Mcdonalds. Revs Joe & Arlene Rohrbacker"

Amidst repeated insincere pleas that this isn't about hate or homophobia are sprinkled some comments by the Fred Phelps Faction:

I'm very sorry to here that McDonalds supports the gay agenda. It was a great American restaurant, good for the whole family. I can't believe that they would rather support the 2% that makes up the faggots and not the 98% of the normal people"

"I am thrugh with eating at McDonalds. Will not eat with your Mac Queers"
"It is sad that McDonald's is not FOR the nuclear family. Please put Ronald Mc Donald in the closet."

"McDonald I am a regular customer in your store but I will not be eating in your store any more because of your open support of gay. I am a christianand God says they are an Abolition and God will deal with them. joyce"

"McDonald's targets 2 year old children to blackmail their parents into bringing them to McDonald's, & has helped to undermine & destroy the family by turning meal time into "play time." Now "IT" wants to foist a "gay" time on all Americans. This is beyond "hatred." This is arrogance & contempt for even basic human dignity. No McBuggers for me."

This guy's really pissed. First McDonald's acknowledged the existence of black people, and now this:

"McDonald's first turned me off as a Father when they decided to turn their advertisements from the family to an "urban image". Now they have really disenfranchised me with this. Your promotion of "Gay activism", and the assistance of those who want to cram their idea of what is right down my throat is the best reason I can think of to no longer patronize your "facilities".

McDonald's better watch out, these people apparently have already destroyed Starbucks and Ford:

"I will tell all my friends about this. McDonalds isnt the only game in town. We did the same thing with Starbucks and look what happened to them. They are closing them by the hundreds."

No more big macs or fries. My kids grew up with mcdonalds but since you support the gay agenda we will no longer visit mcdonalds. Ask FORD if it was really worth it?"

"Since you have decide to support homosexually totally and their Sodom and Gomorrah life style. This has given me an extremely good reason to stop the purchase of any of your food items from McDonalds as of today. I also have a very active Blog site and I will post data about your support of the homosexual gay agenda."

I am sure the American Family Association will be boycotting my very inactive Blog site soon, but I will survive. And I'm willing to bet the next time I take my daughter to 'Old McDonald's' on a Sunday, I'll feel way underdressed and there'll be no place to sit because the after-church crowd will be out in force as usual. Little will they know they are eating with a heathen and his heathen spawn!

The Northern Hemisphere is totally kicking the Southern Hemisphere's Ass in the Programming Language Department

Check it.

Australian techies remain neither abashed nor humbled.

Leaving out Ruby (Japan) was a pretty big oversight, though, I have to say.

LinkedIn Shows Us How Right Chris Rock's Mom Was

When I was a kid, my mother would never give money to a white bum. She'd take one look at him and say, "No reason for that." -Chris Rock

When I was 29, I was a bundle of nerves, having just made the worst move of my career up to that point (and since). Motivated as much by personality conflicts and enmity toward a certain individual as for any other reason, I left an otherwise OK position with a super big (but still involved in interesting and new technology, like the then-flashy Java) company for a position doing C++ for a small company with an application originally developed in COBOL for mainframes (gigantic red light warning sign I didn't see).

It didn't take too long to figure out the buffoonery and bumblefuckery was out of control at this place. Shitty as all-get-out code slapped together by long-gone contractors, co-workers who couldn't spell C++ in some cases, and in other cases were competent but so bitter and painful to be around it was like being in some program length anti-depressant commercial - the place was a real disaster.

A colleague's buddy gave some helpful third-party perspective: we were a bunch of losers on the bullet train to career oblivion. We had to get out of there or we were fucked, if we weren't already fucked. We needed to learn to drive trucks or bartending or something (both are perfectly fine, respectable occupations. The point is, the software thing was OVER).

As it turns out, we had nothing to worry about! I ended up finding a job somewhere else, and things have been fine ever since. And now thanks to LinkedIn, I know everybody else landed on their feet too, unhindered by incompetence or general cluelessness. The company itself went down the toilet for all I know. I bailed out long before the last circle of the drain.

To protect the identities of these individuals so they can continue milking the corporate gravy train, and because I love the now-over MethMinute39, I've changed their names to names of the Wang Warriors. I changed the name of the company where we all worked to Smegmatix.

Spicy

Who he was:
A QA guy with no formal education. He sometimes tried to show people his novel he'd written. He was buddies with Hammer U, the Al Capone/shark hybrid QA manager, and thanks to this connection Spicy was given a job as lead developer. He was not particularly good at it, and after following Hammer U to another job, he washed out in a few months.

Where is he now:
Development Lead at REDACTED

Did he list Smegmatix in his profile:
No

Shokai the Dentist

Who he was:
Sad sack programmer who was pretty sure the company was going down the tubes in a hurry. He was right, but was hard to be around since he never had anything good to say about anything or anyone. Prone to long meandering gripes about why do people get to be on welfare when my life is so horrible.

Where is he now:
Systems Analyst at REDACTED

Did he list Smegmatix in his LinkedIn profile?
No

Li'l Shizz

Who he was:
Contractor famous for 'cranking out code fast'. It showed, as his code was full of some of the sloppiest half-assed moves imaginable, with no discernable logic or structure evident. I mean doing things like having variables named Store1, Store2, Store3 instead of using arrays or lists - lame-itude of that magnitude. I never met him, but I really hated his guts. I only found out who he was by asking around. He didn't put his name in the comments for some reason.

Where he is now:
SW Developer at REDACTED

Did he list Smegmatix in his profile?
No

Soil O' Boyle

Who he was:
Another contractor. Wrote a true abomination of a 'Calculation Engine', which was a sort of interpreter for a proprietary language for the app. It was an example of how you'd write such a thing if, instead of spending maybe at the very least an afternoon researching how other such engines had been put together, you just sat down and started writing code to see what happened. He was the source of much of Shokai the Dentist's misery, because Shokai inherited his crapware. Often Shokai would be unable to fix a problem a customer was screaming very loudly about, and so Soil would be brought back in for a couple of days at $200/hr, and he'd fail to fix the problem, too.

Where Is he now:
Information Systems Manager at (Government Entity)

Does he list Smegmatix in his profile?
No

Li'l Man Tate

Who he was:
Manager of the developers. Kind of looked like a turtle, and kind of acted like one, too, hiding in his office all the time. We wrote weekly status reports for him. After a couple of weeks it was clear he never read them, so I'd write about the cartoon characters I'd collaborated with. Mr. Peabody was worth his weight in gold and a real team player.

Where is he now:
Business Analyst at REDACTED

Does he list Smegmatix in his profile?
No

FAQ:

Q: When did you work there?
A: Approximately 10 years ago. So these white dudes have a whole decade of coasting here.

Q: Are you white?
A: Yes, I add support to Mrs. Rock's hypothesis.

Q: Did you, SDC, list Smegmatix in your profile?
A: No.

Q: What's your Wang Warrior name?
A: General Tso

Blogging About Twitter Is Like Swimming About Bathing

It took me a long time, but I've finally got into Freebase. No, not that freebase, actually I mean Freebase, 'an open, shared database of the world's knowledge.' It's shares similarities with wikipedia and Google Base. What's cool about it (to me) is the query language. Would you like to give your daughter some examples of powerful women? Show her a list of Female CEOs of Public Companies in order of Market Cap. If it weren't one of the sample queries you can just click on, here's the query in Metaweb query language that would extract that info:

{
"query" : [
{
  "employment_history" : [
    {
      "company" : {
        "/business/company/market_capitalization" : [
          {
            "amount" : null
          }
        ],
        "/business/company/ticker_symbol" : [
          {
            "ticker_symbol" : null
          }
        ],
        "id" : null,
        "name" : null
      },
      "title" : "Chief Executive Officer"
    }
  ],
  "hide:/common/topic/image" : [
    {}
  ],
  "hide:gender" : "female",
  "id" : null,
  "name" : null,
  "sort" : "-employment_history.company./business/company/market_capitalization.amount",
  "type" : "/people/person"
}
]

}

I'm not being facetious here, I think it's great that they're making an effort to semi-structure the web and make searching for info less of a crap-shoot. It's part of that whole semantic web thingy.

Anyhow, this might inspire your daughter, and she'll need that inspiration to deal with being taken away from you after she goes to school and tells people Daddy uses freebase.

I'm not being entirely facetious there, either. Naming the thing after the drug associated with Richard Pryor setting himself on fire and that scary scene in 'Boogie Nights' might make it difficult for Metaweb to reach Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, as Guy Grand would call them. Anyhow, I respect what they're doing and this is one of those things where I'd be happy to be wrong.

Oh yeah. I forgot to include the proof.

Re: a couple entries ago, the one where I engaged in EWD worship, I mentioned a nifty proof in his essay but left it out.

It's a cool proof because: 1) it requires no knowledge of math 2) it requires no knowledge of chess 3) it makes his point about looking at a set as a whole rather than bit by bit.

To recap, say you remove the 2 squares on opposite corners of a chess board. Prove you can't cover the remaining board w/ 2x1 dominoes.

The proof: those squares will be the same color (see chessboard). So you'll have 30 white and 32 black sq. Or 32 black and 30 white. It's not important which, the important thing is there are an unequal # of black and white squares.

Every 2x1 domino will cover a black and white square. So if there's a covering, there will be exactly the same number of black and white squares covered. Only there isn't the same number of black and white squares, so you can't. QED.

Battle of the Bands: Backyardigans vs. Vampire Weekend

As a parent of a now 4 1/2 year old, I occasionally write about matters of interest to parents.

This week we discuss the very important matter of music for kids. Many then-new parents were driven insane by the musical stylings of Barney the purple dinosaur in the 1990s. Making music that appeals to the very young without driving parents to suicide or merely to the ill-advised actions culminating in the great American Housing Bubble and SubPrime mortgage collapse may seem like rocket science, but music is supposedly a universal thing, so why should that be so? My daughter thinks Steely Dan is OK - if, like me, she hears 'drink Scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel', like I did many times in 70s when I was a kid and it doesn't bother her, where's the harm? Neither one of us really wants to listen to the Veggie Tales.

Like (I'm guessing) a lot of parents I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief on discovering the music of The Backyardigans (musical director Evan Lurie - brother of fellow Lounge Lizard and star of 'Fishing with John' John Lurie). While the high-pitched voices take a bit of getting used to at first, they navigate from genre to genre with ease, not embarassing themselves like your friend in college whose band did a reggae song to show how down he was with black people, but is now an executive at a Fortune 500 firm who got embarrassed on 60 Minutes a couple years ago because he made those jokes about black jelly beans getting stuck to the bottom of the bowl.

Unsurprisingly my favorite track is the samba-esque 'Castaways', although I also really like 'Into The Thick Of It', which I'm not sure what genre it's supposed to be. It features a lot of strings, but not in a little Einsteins 'open wide, kids, we're gonna cram some classical music down your throat now' way. My daughter likes (surprise, surprise) Lady Tasha's 20's-ish 'Queens Are Never Wrong' and (somewhat surprising, but not really) - the mid-80's pre-gangsta hip hop of 'Cowboys Cowgirls' with some sweet singing in the mix by (I think) Tasha. Also a worthy effort is the very James Brown influenced 'Yeti Stomp' by Pablo, who shows beanie-wearing computer-generated penguins are much more adept at doing the James Brown thing than drunk white guys who want to be funky. 'Hear my Yeti yell/smell my yeti smell' is good for some laughs, too.

Vampire Weekend also throw some strings into the mix, in fact, some of their more moronic fans have been heard comparing them to 'the Strokes with Strings' a statement so stupid it nearly gives me a stroke with or without strings. Vampire Weekend are not morons - in a recent article about bands and their SAT averages, VW had one of the top scores. VW also make an effort to mix it up musically, with the aforementioned strings, and influences ranging from reggaeton (we are told, but I don't know reggaeton well enough to spot it) to South African 'township jive' (or possibly, Paul Simon's 'Graceland', which nobody could miss hearing for a couple years in the late 80s).

Vampire Weekend has some youthful, kid friendly vocals, and the lyrics - well, 'who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma' isn't going to win them a gig scoring the next VeggieTales movie, but it's not showing an appallingly casual attitude about drunk driving ('drink driving' for my Irish readers) either. But they don't really stretch out and take the musical risks the Backyardigans do, and their popularity among very slow-witted hipsters (oh yeah - another reviewer called their album 'the 2008 version of 'Graceland'') is troubling. The Backyardigans seem to straddle the gap between parental and kid musical sensibilities much more skillfully, so in conclusion as helpful advice to other parents out there we will take the bold stand of recommending the Backyardigans over Vampire Weekend to those seeking music for the youngsters.

Statistics tells us what this blog is about

Hidden in the Google App Engine App Gallery among the me-too twitter-based apps and variants on 'save something so I can read it later' (I use Firefox plug-in Readeroo) is the glamorously named app 'Statistically Improbable Phrases'. Give it a URL, play with some sliders, and you're rewarded for your minutes of effort with a nifty tagcloud:



It seems a pretty accurate representation of what this blog's about. Notice there's love in there, but not love's opposite. I'm so positive and upbeat. Nice work Anand, whoever you are.

Radical Novelty - Edsger Dijkstra and what might have been

Edsger Dijkstra is known for his many contributions to computer science, including but not limited to the algorithm named after him, structured programming, and the shunting yard algorithm. He's also famous for his ninny-eviscerating essays like 'Go To Statement Considered Harmful' (1968) and 1975's even more wonderfully titled 'How Do We Tell The Truths That Hurt?' (there are likely many country and western songs that share this title), which contains such deathless truths as these:

• Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
• It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
• Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

Sadly, apparently nobody listened to him at all. Neither did anyone apparently listen to what he had to say in the equally brilliant 'On the cruelty of really teaching computer science', a 29-page manifesto whose words resonate so strongly with me 20 years later that I'm simultaneously thrilled and nauseated. Thrilled that somebody so brilliant would express ideas and attitudes similar to what's been boiling beneath my own impassive surface for years, nauseated by my tendency to go with the flow and firmly entrench myself as part of the problem. So what does he say? Well, for starters, he discusses the idea of a 'radical novelty', something that turns the world upside down and destroys the established order. In this case he's talking about computers. Dijkstra says when confronted with radical novelties we try to come up with analogies and metaphors to describe them in terms of our experience, but that in the case of a sharp discontinuity (a radical novelty) this approach is useless. The comparison he draws is to learning about quantum mechanics, a mind-fuck of an experience where thinking about Bobby and Suzy on a see-saw isn't going to do you a damn bit of good anymore. He then goes on to recount the suppression of and resistance to radical novelties throughout history: math's Michael Jordan, C.F. Gauss, is labeled a coward for keeping his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry to himself, fearing he'd get the Galileo treatment. He also recalls the story of King Ferdinand's visit to the conservative University of Cervena, where the King is assured by the Rector:

"Far be from us, Sire, the dangerous novelty of thinking."

Software Engineering comes under fire shortly after this. Though I've used the term (go with the flow), I've known real Engineers and what they do, and have considered it a bit of a joke myself (like calling a janitor a 'Sanitation Engineer'). Steve Ballmer and Microsoft side-step the controversy, preferring 'Developers'. Dijkstra's take:

Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."

(It's funny because it's true.) Dijkstra then tells the truths that hurt about Artificial Intelligence:

Finally, to correct the possible impression that the inability to face radical novelty is confined to the industrial world, let me offer you an explanation of the --at least American-- popularity of Artificial Intelligence. One would expect people to feel threatened by the "giant brains or machines that think". In fact, the frightening computer becomes less frightening if it is used only to simulate a familiar noncomputer. I am sure that this explanation will remain controversial for quite some time, for Artificial Intelligence as mimicking the human mind prefers to view itself as at the front line, whereas my explanation relegates it to the rearguard. (The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I'd rather use them to mimic something better.)

So by this point Dijkstra has laid out that we have something completely new and incredibly powerful at hand, but by refusing to recognize it as such, we're blowing it, big time. Further, our efforts to get our heads around it by relying on analogies and metaphors are misguided at best, damaging at worst. As I look at my 'Desktop' and see icons representing 'Folders', I can see what he's talking about (but maybe I'm just too much of a die-hard command line UNIX guy). Since the essay promises something about teaching computer science being cruel, we are by this time wondering when Dijkstra will get around to that, and finally he does. He blasts traditional academia for buckling under the business elite, who dismiss traditional academics and intellectuals as largely irrelevant and powerless. He again rejects 'this guy talks to that guy' anthropomorphism of computers and presents a cool proof of the theorem that if you remove the two corner squares of a chessboard, it's impossible to cover what remains with dominoes that each cover two squares. Most would be tempted to use the fast and powerful computer to stupidly run thru all the permutations, Dijkstra shows that by thinking in terms of a set's definition (mathematical type thinking) instead of in terms of individual elements (brute force) - you can derive the answer much more quickly, just using your little brain. More importantly, the idea is if you think that way and try to approach the radical novelty that is the computer using ideas and thought processes from formal mathematics, you will see much better results than if you try to program a computer by connecting cartoonish machine icons to each other inside your IDE. What's funny to me (and I guess I'm alone here, I've really run on long I know, but this essay has been running through my mind all week now) is Dijkstra's proposed 'appropriate way to teach computer science' essentially involves teaching formal mathematics and providing a programming language that 'has not been implemented on campus so that students are protected from the temptation to test their programs'. Radical indeed, but familiar in concept to the math geeks out there. Sadly, today the focus and method is as far from Dijkstra's vision as it could possibly be. The focus is on teaching languages used in industry, with non-industry languages like Scheme used in some programs regarded as hoops to jump through and hazing to suffer through. Throughout the industry there's a profound dearth of imagination, a slog-through-it mentality, misplaced pride in taking what little one has bothered to learn to absurd extremes rather than to step back and think of a better, maybe even simpler, way. It's too bad, really, because in the words of the man himself:

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that is what education is about. Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.

So there you have it. Edsger W. Dijkstra is my lunatic fringe preacher, and I'm going to keep going to his church, consequences be damned!

OK Kid, Get Off The Couch and Learn iMovie Already

Clay Shirky spoke recently about something I have pondered - the tragic waste of mental energy that's sunk into TV watching. Rather than suggest Nuremburg-type Trials for TV producers, as I did, Mr. Shirky has a much brighter and optimistic outlook, predicting a future where the people who once sat on the couch watching TV get out into the world (or onto the internet, more or less the same thing) and start producing something. We will finally take advantage of what Clay calls a 'cognitive surplus'. Coincidentally, Clay has a book out, 'Here Comes Everybody'.

Clay concludes with a story about a 4-yr-old watching Dora The Explora who, in the middle of the show, gets up and starts 'looking for the mouse'. Sez Clay:

"Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."

I like Clay's ideas, and I hope he's right (love his hair, hope he wins), but as somebody who caught more than enough of a 'My Little Pony' DVD recently, I'm not sure the 4-yr-olds have totally broken free of the cathode-ray chains. Perhaps I am shirking (ow!) my responsibilities as a parent letting her watch that show, but maybe I'm trapped, paralyzed even, trying to keep up with the feeds on my RSS reader (Google Reader), or emails from work, or whatever (you can't blame the blog, though - I only write here when she's asleep or somewhere else).

Further, though I've enjoyed my iPod and am on board with the goodness podcasting brings, I had a disturbing thought recently. If you're on the phone, talking to somebody, listening to music or podcasts or whatever from the minute you get out of bed until you lose consciousness, how would you even know if there were voices in your head? When would they get a word in?

The situation is still undeniably better than it was 50 years ago. For one thing, 50 years ago I did not even exist. There was no MF Doom, or even Ghostface Killah, and yogurt was still disgusting and fit for consumption only by Greenlanders living in the 1300s. Today the potential is there to do many a worthwhile or interesting or at least participatory or engaging thing (as Shirky points out, the biggest loser sitting in his basement in his underwear pretending to be an elf is still exercising better judgement about what to do with his free time than the middle manager sitting on a really nice couch watching 'The Biggest Loser'.) Even writing this entry which nobody is gonna read or firing off <140 character 'tweets' that scroll up a couple of follower's twitterific windows is better than sitting in a chair smoking a pipe or whatever it was Mr. Cleaver did between dinner and hopping into his twin bed next to June's twin bed. It's just that sometimes I feel overwhelmed by choice. Maybe televised trials of sweating big-media executives would ease the pain a bit and provide a nice distraction for all us poor schlubs after all.

I was in Vermont this past week

(written whilst internetless)

We ran into that 'Rambo' guy, he had one tooth and a bushy beard and a very sad story from 'nam - he had been told to stay in the tent that night and not go anywhere, but he disobeyed and went in search of a 'piece of tail'. When he came back - you know what's coming - everyone was gone, they had been attacked and killed (I feel bad for the gut reaction of wanting to go on Snopes to check out his story, but there you have it).

Today he was more interested in reminiscing about the spring day in 1968 when there was a big snow fall, so he ditched school to go snowmobiling. Spring of 1968 - the Prague Spring, the student uprisings in Paris, Vietnam, the White Album, and snowmobiling.

This was followed by a visit to the Vermont Country Store, a delightful place full of penny candy for eight hundred and ninety-five pennies a pound, practical and not so practical clothes, all sorts of gag type gifts (joy buzzer, butterfly that flies out of a book when opened, etc)
, and now a vibrator/kegel exerciser section. That and some great cheese, too. Across the street there's another store, where I bought some 'coffee soda' from a micro-soda-brewery in Vermont. It was kind of odd, I'm not sure I'd do it again. The woman behid the counter gave it a similar review.

I haven't had internet access all day, and haven't given a fuck about it. I guess I'll have to wait to see what sort of cleverness people are coming up with on Twitter and there's a hope in hell I'll read some books instead of RSS feeds. Fuck you Vint Cerf, fuck you Larry Page, fuck you Sergey Brin, and facebook guy, you rate an F and I'm not spending any more energy on you. I'd just as soon not go back. You hear me? I said I'm not going back. To the internet I mean. I wouldn't last a month here in rural Vermont. I have callous-free hands and thirty-seven years of avoiding physical type labor. Too late to kid myself about going 'off the grid'. I'd last a few hours, tops. People think Vermont is all lattes and liberals since that commercial with the old bitter constipated Republicans griping about Howard Dean, but it's not like that at all.

Recommending Free Stuff since we have that Recession going

I am recommending free stuff not only because of the Recession, but also because too much of human interaction (esp. on the internet) is about 'oh hey, I bought this'. 'You bought that? Cool'. 'I'm gonna buy this other thing.' As I type this on my MacBook Pro, I realize I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

The flip side (the Jedi side, the punk rock before 1991 side, the Jesus before Fallwell got into him side) of the Internet is that largely it is about free shit. Not just free music, but free (as in beer and in speech) software, like Linux and all the Gnu stuff and Firefox and this NodeBox thing I've been playing w/ lately, which is Mac-only (ha!). It embeds Python in a self-contained app you can use to experiment w/ generating 2D graphics and perhaps even simple games. Fun for the would be hyperformalists out there. Start with 2d, then make the leap to 3.

Freebie #2 comes to us from Brazil, and it's the Loronix blog. It took a beating at the hands of pranksters/hackers/the RIAA recently, but zecalouro's rebuilding it. It's a good place to hear music outside of the well-known Caetano Veloso/Gilberto Gil/Joao Gilberto/etc circle, as he makes available music that you could otherwise only hear if you know a Brazilian person with a record player and a good record collection.

Item #3 is the Podcast The Sound Of Young America at maximumfun.org. The name is a bit misleading as it's not a Youth Radio type deal where the oldest person involved in the production is still in high school (not that there's anything wrong with that - Youth Radio on WFHB is great), rather it's America's Radio Sweetheart Jesse Thorn interviewing a good mix of people I've heard of (Patton Oswalt, Upright Citizen's Brigade, Steven Wright, Colin Hay aka the singer from Men at Work, 2 guys from The Wire, etc) and people I had never heard of (The hosts of '7 second delay', Dan Deacon, etc) previously, but am glad that I now have. It is consistently good and hopefully Jesse achieves radio domination much like Ira Glass before him.

Items #4 and #5 are Frederator and its retro counterpart, re-Frederator.

Frederator hosts the series 'Meth Minute39' by animator Dan Meth, which has provided the world with such gems as 'Mike Tyson's Brunch-Out!', 'The Wang Warriors', and the classic mixture of real watermelon footage and unbelievably catchy music that is 'Watermelon Nights'. The weekly podcast compiles collections of cartoons by various artists, and is a mixed bag, but worth subscribing to for animation fans. If you are an eggplant, you wouldn't dig it, man.

Re-Frederator also puts out a podcast, this one focusing on very old cartoons, as in cartoons from the 30's and 40's. My daughter and I have bonded over the antics of Ub Iwerks' 'Flip The Frog' and have found that Little Lulu's 'Bargain Counter Attack' still works for 4-year-old girls in 2008, who have been brought up watching the likes of Dora, Bob The Builder, and the Backyardigans (who IMHO are far superior to Dora and Bob).

Re-Frederator doesn't whitewash (ha.) the past, and has featured old cartoons with stereotypes and attitudes from the 30s and 40s, including 'Plane Dumb' and 'Little Black Sambo'. These are interesting to watch now, although with people like Imus and Michael 'He's a N*****! He's a N******!' Richards running around, we probably can't look down on how it was in grandpa or great grandpa's day as much as we'd like. On the other hand, it is true they didn't have the Internet back then, and that really had to suck.

The End!

Be back hopefully in less than several weeks!

Curse you, Harper's Subscription Department, for making me think T.C. Boyle had died

While I like Harper's Magazine for their short readings at the beginning (there really should be whole magazines made up of these. They are like the internet, only if it only consisted of really interesting or bizarre stuff, inverting the real internet's 1/100000 interesting to tedious ratio), the Harper's Index, and the great essays and articles by many of my favorite writers, I do not like their subscription department, not at all. Especially after receiving a letter from them today with this message on the back in large print: "Goodbye: Kurt Vonneget, (somebody really old), (somebody really old), T.C. Boyle, (other stuff).

My first thought was, oh shit, T.C. Boyle died. I liked his books (Friend of the Earth, Tortilla Curtain, and Talk Talk recently). They put him in some weepy dead writer anthology. Then I opened the envelope and realized they were just trying to get me to renew. Shame on you for using these scare tactics, subscription people! What if T.C. Boyle's Mom gets this letter? Did you think about that? Try harder next time.

Effusive Python Fan Love Pt 1 - Some Early Impressions

Just as Morgan Spurlock conducted an experiment where he put his health at risk by eating nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days, in 2005 I started an experiment where I put my career and sanity at risk by taking a job focusing on the use of Microsoft products. As part of that misadventure, I did some scripting with VBScript, a horribly malformed abortion that was at one point the scripting language of choice for ASP, the Microsoft Web Framework before ASP.NET MVC (way to go Microsoft, innovating by putting that MVC thing Xerox PARC came up with in 1978 in a product in 2008), before ASP.NET 3, ASP.NET 2, and ASP.NET aka 'the last web framework you'll ever need to learn'.

VBScript is such an abomination even Microsoft is now posting articles advising the faithful as to how to convert from it to Powershell, but a better option is to choose a proper scripting language, like Python.

Calling Python a 'scripting language' seems wrong, with the negative connotations of dabbling and sloppy (or malicious) code tied to 'scripting'. It's one of the approved languages within Google, who also hired the creator, Guido van Rossum (he works on it 1/2 time). Iceland's CCP games use a variant called Stackless Python well-suited to concurrent programming for their massively-multiplayer online game, Eve Online. It's also used in Civilization IV. So it's not something limited to sysadmin 10-minute throwaway scripts in any way, shape or form.

I learned Python a couple of times (and then went off and did something else, forgetting what I learned) before returning to it recently as part of the big Microsoft backlash (although Microsoft have hired the IronPython guy to work for them, and are wanting to have Python available as a development option for Silverlight Development via their DLR (dynamic language runtime). Until recently, Perl was the go-to scripting language, because writing code in Perl was like talking to the computer and asking it to do something. It was that effortless. It was, yes, fun! I decided to give Python a go in the ongoing interest of staving off senility and general brain rot.

This meshed well with my recent purchase of a MacBook, because Python 2.5.1 is already there. This site appears to be a good resource for Mac Python people, and the author recommends building from the source and going from there, something I may do in the future, but everything seems fine for my needs now.

Editing-wise, I played around with a few different editors before opting to go with Komodo Edit, from ActiveState and free. I have had fewer woes with improper indentation with Komodo Edit than with some other editors I've tried, and it has the nifty auto-completion. Eclipse has a plug-in called pydev, but Java skeeves me out more often than not.

As to fun out-of-the-box things I've noticed with Python, number one for instant gratification is the interactive interpreter. If you're unsure what a snippet of code will do, you just type python and are popped into an interpreter, which you can feed lines of code interactively and see what happens. It is part of the speedy development aspect of Python. Not only is the compile cycle gone, you get instant turn-around for little snippets or ideas.

Another nifty thing is easy_install. A killer feature of Perl is CPAN, a central repository for modules people have created, containing code they've written to solve problems lots of other people will likely need to solve, removing the need for wheel re-invention. While it's not quite at the level of CPAN, the Python Package Index is handy, and easy_install is great, because if for example you read an article about BeautifulSoup, the Python module to parse possibly poorly structured HTML (in other words, 99% of HTML occurring in the wild), you would type:

>easy_install BeautifulSoup

...and away you go.

So far I can report programming with Python IS fun, so apparently I don't hate programming after all, just programming involving the use of Microsoft products or overly cumbersome Java frameworks with xml configuration files from hell. Java pretty much evolved from 'cool new thing' to 'your father's Oldmobile' right before my eyes, and nowadaze so much Java development is outsourced/offshored/rightshored/whateverthefucktheycallitnow anyway I don't recommend it much for Americans, especially young Americans. At any rate I'd rather use a language as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and Python fits that role nicely.

Predatory Lenders Preying On The Fundies

One of my recent obsessions is information visualization. Working in IT, yes, I'm intimately familiar with the 'an ocean of water, but not a drop to drink' phenomenon - millions of dollars of big iron type servers (or the Fisher-Price Dell variants) capturing gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes of data which can not then be pulled out in any meaningful way (except for the bytes making up employees' music and movie collections). 'Write-only' systems like SAP come to mind (tho we don't use SAP). Apparently nobody cares, long as they get their emails.

Anyhow, I stumbled on this: The Surprising Correlation Between Payday Lenders and Conservative Christians. As with all data, even data rendered in a visualized, ready-for-human-consumption format, this really raises questions and starts the discussion more than it really provides a pat answer.

Does this mean:

• Christians are taking out tons of loans because they believe the Rapture is imminent (in case of Rapture, this loan will go into default)?
• The more extreme, blood-and-fire-and-brimstone forms of Christianity appeal to the poverty-stricken and disenfranchised, the way fundamentalist Islam appeals to the poor in undeveloped countries?
• Fundamentalists, their minds clouded by pseudo-scientific flim-flam and hokum from Answers in Genesis, are prone to make bad financial decisions?
• The secular corporations, working hand-in-hand with the liberal media, are oppressing Fundies and denying them the cushy, high-paying jobs?

The author of the article has his own interpretation:

here's what I suspect may be part of the story: in the 1980s and continuing perhaps even stronger in the 1990s, I think it's fair to say that the Christian right and conservative Christians came to align themselves with conservative Wall Street big-business interests, and that's been effective for pushing a variety of issues that are important to social-values conservatives, such as the abortion debate, some sorts of family questions and perhaps gun rights—those types of things. But consumer protection law and the limits on usurious moneylending have been an inconvenient sticking point in that political alliance, and I think therefore has been put to the side. As that alliance has continued to dominate politics in these areas, the laws that protected people from usurious moneylenders in those states have fallen into atrophy.

Having recently read Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas, a book exploring the suicidal voting patterns of Kansans, it does seem plausible. Sometimes voting against your own interests means voting for people who want to send your job somewhere else, other times it means voting for something the Bible condemns (usury). Islamic banking regulations prohibit usury, so this is a hypocrisy they seem to have steered clear of better than their fundamentalist Christian counterparts.

I'll talk more about my wonderful MacBook and how it blows away the pitiful Windows alternatives, including that sorry excuse for a computer company, Dell, some other time. As the rave-era bumper sticker cautioned, I need to 'wait 6 months'. Right now after buying my Mac, I am like somebody who's just starting on Ecstasy and am loving the whole world (except Microsoft). So I need to let things level out a bit, so I can be more objective.

With My Purchase of a MacBook I Achieve Compliance with all the White Liberal Stereotypes

I have bitched and moaned here of late about the misfortunes and indignities I have suffered as a PC user and general user of Microsoft products. Raised in the somewhat cryptic and academic UNIX world, I have been looking down at Microsoft the company, their products, and their users for years (but, as a practical type, I've used the products anyway rather than be that insufferable asshole at the office who insists on doing everything his way). A couple of years ago, with XP and a new job involving the use of Microsoft products (SQL Server) and technologies (.NET, Visual Studio, Sharepoint), I decided to give them a chance.

A few years into the experience, I can say that the suspicions I had about the general shakiness of their products and the pain involved with their use were pretty well-founded. Vista was the last nail in the coffin, the straw breaking the camel's back, etc. and so on. Except for Toolio Iglesias at work who's incapable of finding fault with anything Microsoft does, NOBODY I know has good things to say about Vista, aside from vague statements about it being 'pretty'.

My non-Vista experiences confirm the general suckitude. I currently have a Dell laptop as my work machine, and using it is slightly better than a sharp stick in the eye. It is slow. It takes what seems like hours to boot up, and does that thing where it fakes me out and shows the screen after a minute to 'fool' me into thinking it booted quickly. It crashes frequently. It decides not to work when I'm minutes away from giving a presentation in spite of hours spent pre-presentation going through test-runs and trying to anticipate all the ways it will fail. It is big and ugly, like a Trabant. I could go on, but everybody has their gripes on this topic.

Anyhow I tend to be slow to go from deciding to do something to taking action, but I did finally order my MacBook. It was a thing of beauty, and tho it is still awkward at times because I'm not used to the 'Mac Way', I'm happy. It boots quickly, it works fine, it runs the software I need it to run. It's even built upon a Unix foundation, so if I want to go all old school with the command line, I pop up a terminal.

Python is there, Perl is there, Ruby is there. Microsoft has reinvented the scripting wheel with some laughable product called 'PowerShell', which used to be called 'Monad' (of course, Microsoft is always changing the names of things). If I had done a lot of scripting with VBScript (I've done enough to never want to do it again) and I was too fucking stupid to realize Windows versions of Perl and Python have been around for years, I guess I'd be all jazzed about PowerShell. As is, it's just another article to skip when I get one of those free publications from Microsoft. Of course, AppleScript is kind of pointless, too, but it's been around for years, and you don't want to piss off people who've been with you since way back.

Apache is there, SQLite is there for your lightweight database needs. All this, and it's pretty.

I am well on my way to becoming a snotty Mac User. I realized the larger significance of this development today when I stumbled on the blog 'Stuff White People Like'. There it is, #40: Apple Products:

White people also need iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, AirPort Express stations, and anything else that Apple will produce. Because you need to express your uniqueness by purchasing everything that a publicly traded company produces.

Apple products also come with stickers. Some people put them on their computer, some people put them on windows, but to take it to the pinnacle of whiteness, you need to put the Apple sticker in the rear window of your Prius, Jetta, BMW, Subaru 4WD Station Wagon or Audi. You then need to drive to a local coffee shop (Starbucks will do in a pinch) and set up your apple for the world to see. Thankfully, the Apple logo on the back will light up! So even in a dark place, people can see how unique and creative you (and the five other people doing the exact same thing) truly are!

My Prius is on the list (#60)

Some white people decide to pull the ultimate move. Prius, Apple Sticker on the back, iPod rocking, and Democratic Candidate bumper sticker. Unstoppable!

As is Recycling (#66), Japan (#58), Living by the Water (#51), Irony (#50), Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops (#48), Asian Fusion Food (#45), Public Radio (#44), Sushi (#42), Indie Music (#41), Marathons (#27), Coffee(#1) the list goes on and on. All stuff I like. I feel like a walking stereotype now. I still love my Mac, though.

They were better back when they sucked: my friend the teacher learns to teach

The subject of this story was born to be a teacher. He possesses all the essential character traits of a good teacher - he's extroverted, he's intelligent, he's confident but not arrogant, he's great with kids. By all accounts, today he is a wonderful middle-school science teacher, but it's oddly comforting to remember that his start was not so smooth.

I witnessed (and video-taped) his first ever attempt at teaching. It was actually a rehearsal for a physics lab for elementary education teachers he was to run solo, without a professor in attendance. It was notable because the word 'OK' was used every 3rd word or so. The tape has since been destroyed.

My friend also aspired to inspire the youth outside of the classroom. He taught Sunday School. He taught swimming lessons in the summer, in his big brother's backyard pool. He was a camp counselor. He was, without any question, going to succeed at growing up to be what he wanted to be when he grew up (I would not, but was blissfully ignorant of it).

The two of us lived in a house owned by a Physics professor, along with several other students, all male, all science or math majors, all tall, most blond. All of this was purely coincidental. We could have just as easily been tiny female dance majors. This was a pure fluke, the kind of thing that happens randomly in nature.

Our next door neighbor was a woman in her 70's, and we became friendly with her, or, more accurately, my friend, who loves people in general, became friendly with her, and I became friends with her as a result of tagging along with our mutual friend. She told us stories about her daughter, a wild child who had run away to play the flute with Alice Cooper's touring band. My friend accepted the idea that Alice Cooper would have taken a flautist on tour with him. I was skeptical, but steered clear of confrontation. Wild child got mixed up with some guy and the two of them started a fake religion together out west. Eventually the guy's drug use got out of hand, so she ended up running back to and marrying some sorry schlub who'd been infatuated with her since his teenage years and was now working for an insurance company in the L.A. area. In this case as in every other case I've witnessed, when a nerdy dude gets to marry his infatuation object 20 years after first developing an obsession, it is not a happy ending. It ends up being an unstable situation with a grotesque, unresolvable power asymmetry, as laughable and ugly a compromise as any physics nut who wanted to understand the mysteries of the universe but instead ended up designing bombs that would kill people without damaging property. Nobody's fooling anybody.

One summer wild child visited us, and brought the then 10-year-old spawn of her relationship with the cross between Jim Morrisson and Jim Jones. She represented southern California with all the necessary stereotypical attributes in place: blond hair, vapid California accent, the 'bringing culture to the rubes' condescension, the 'radio station that comes in and out' brain.

My friend saw in wild child's spawn yet another opportunity to practice his chosen craft. A little quick background is necessary: one of my friend's hobbies was buying junk from yard sales and re-selling it to antique stores for profit. This was in the pre-eBay days of the early '90s. We called him 'the Junk Man', but he made a fair amount of extra money at it.

Also around this time, H. Ross Perot's campaign to destroy George Bush I's re-election hopes was getting underway. My friend was enamored of Perot and the mythology around this self-made billionaire. A key story: as a child, Perot sold a pocket knife for several times what he paid for it, and this was how he discovered a love for making deals.

My friend thought it would be fun to give the California kid a knife and take him to an antique store, where he could see if he could get a good price for it. Before the trip, he asked the owner of the shop to play along, and let the kid 'talk him up' to $7.

This went over better than my friend could have ever hoped. The kid loved suckering the store owner out of $7 so much that as soon as he got back to Grandma's, he essentially turned the house upside down looking for things he could sell. He didn't find any Antique's Roadshow-worthy Civil War swords or the legendary 'Depression Glass', but he did stumble on some particularly embarassing poetry written by his mother, presumably on the Alice Cooper tour bus. The opening line of one poem: 'Babies are high all the time'. Having experienced living with a baby since then, I'm not sure I agree.

This was a classic lesson in unforeseen effects for both my friend and all witnesses. The California Kid never became a Perot-esque billionaire, but the skills he learned that summer were ones that would come in handy later in his career as a crackhead, when he'd ransack relatives' belongings for goods that could be exchanged for money.

The Main WTF moment from the Super Bowl for Me

The New York Giants' Super Bowl upset over the (until then, ha ha ha) undefeated New England Patriots had a lot of people saying WTF?!, but for me the WTF moment came after the game, when some dude (Terry Bradshaw?) presented winning QB and MVP Eli Manning with the keys to a HYBRID Escalade. Awesome, a HYBRID Escalade. It caused some cognitive dissonance for me and apparently for Manning, who unlike me, deals with such situations gracefully, said 'Thanks', and moved on.

Later I wondered: why stop at the HYBRID Escalade? Consider the possibilities:

"Congratulations Eli Manning! You've won the Super Bowl! Here are the keys to a HYBRID Escalade!"

Eli Manning: Thanks! I couldn't have done it without my teammates, you know...

"But there's more! Inside that Escalade, it's A YEAR SUPPLY OF KOOL MENTHOLS! KOOL MENTHOLS - the cigarettes with that minty fresh taste!"

Eli Manning: Uh, thanks, you know...

"And on every carton, there's a coupon good for one FREE HOUR at your local GOLD'S GYM!"

Eli Manning: That's great. You know, our fans have really been there....

"Your SuperBowl Fantasy isn't over! Drive your new HYBRID Escalade to your very own METH LAB!"

Eli Manning: What?!?

"It's SOLAR POWERED!"

Eli Manning: You know, we've been working for this all year, this is OUR moment, I question whether this...

"And if that doesn't satisfy your thirst for entrepreneurial adventures, wait till you see THE FACTORY IN INDONESIA WHERE ALL THE WORKERS ARE ORPHANS BELOW THE AGE OF 12"

Eli Manning: What is this? Guys, who's idea was....

"They make CRUELTY-FREE ARTIFICIAL LEATHER SHOES!"

Eli Manning: Security?!

Don't make my job harder - children's books with dubious messages

It's a generally accepted truism that 'reading to your child is a good thing'. It's up there with brushing your teeth, not taking candy from strangers (although even this can be dangerous), and not leaving your kid in the car on a hot day while you do the grocery shopping (or the animation work for Toy Story II (true story!)). The non-parent is likely tempted to draw the conclusion that this parenting thing, millions - actually billions - of people of sub-normal intelligence manage to do it somehow, it isn't rocket science.

The devil is in the details, as they say, and a parent who grabs books at random from the children's section in the library or book store may not be doing their kid any favors. Two books that recently featured as part of the nightly story hour illustrate this quite well.

Miss Honey's Busy Day is part of the 'Busy Day' series by Richard Scarry, who also brought us 'What Do People Do All Day?', something I still often wonder as an adult in the corporate world. While What Do People Do All Day promotes a healthy attitude toward the idea of work and the idea that different people do different jobs and they're all important and necessary, which kind of redeems the sexist attitudes and stereotypes to be found in the book (Mama earned the dress because she keeps the house clean!) it's much harder to recommend Miss Honey's Busy Day.

On the surface the book seems like a day-in-the-life story of one of those everyday heroes (and if, as an adult, you think that word has been drained dry of any meaning, wait till you catch an episode of the children's show 'Higglytown Heroes', where even the local Subway Sandwich Artist is celebrated as a hero), an elementary school teacher.

What's troubling about the book is Miss Honey's co-dependent relationship with Bruno, a slow-witted man-child live-in boyfriend who eats ice cream for EVERY MEAL. Miss Honey chides Bruno at breakfast about this, but he eats ice cream anyway. She calls him at lunchtime and again lectures him after finding out he's had ice cream for lunch. He promises he'll do better tomorrow, but we've seen the After-School specials and heard the Jane's Addiction songs, and we know when addicts talk about doing something tomorrow, it's total bullshit. Miss Honey surely knows this, too, yet she stays with Bruno. Later, she joins the children in the lunchroom and gives them a hypocritical lecture about the importance of choosing foods from different food groups. At the end of the story, Bruno surprises Miss Honey with a rose and dinner at...get this...the Ice Cream Parlor! Har har. Funny like a crack-head couple on The Wire, by which I mean, not funny at all. This book is guaranteed to be followed up with the parent spending easily twice to three times the time it took to read the book having a discussion to un-do the damage the book did. Of course, having honest discussions with your child about important matters is part of being a good parent.

The other book is the well-meaning (which, presumably, can be said of all children's books, except maybe the ones written by celebrities) Honey Bunny Funny Bunny. In this book, the Honey Bunny of the title endures all manner of teasing at the hands of her older brother, P.J., until P.J. goes too far and Mom and Dad finally come down on him. When P.J. stops teasing Honey Bunny, she becomes more and more despondent because, and this is the conclusion she draws, P.J. doesn't love her any more. There is a happy ending, though, as P.J. proves he does love Honey Bunny after all when he plays a big prank on her at the end. It's a happy ending as long as you don't think about the kind of abusive relationships Honey Bunny might end up being drawn into in the future. As a big brother, I was guilty of all manner of teasing in my youth, but can also clearly remember expressing affection in other ways, like hugging my sister or taking an interest in what she was doing, so perhaps I'm as bothered by the unfair and heavy-handed depiction of big brothers as by the questionable message for young girls.

So, in the end, the take away message here is that not all children's books are created equal, and just maybe your snobby friend who never lets their kid watch TV is unknowingly subjecting their youngster(s) to the kind of psychic damage an episode of Dragon Tales could never do.

Lu Pi's Rule

Lu Pi's rule is named after Lu Pi, who worked at the infamously corrupt Enron but cashed out before everything went to hell. At the time the film The Smartest Guys in The Room was made, he was not dead like Cliff Baxter (or, now, Ken Lay) or in jail like Jeff Skilling. He was the second-largest landowner in Colorado. Lu Pi has not cured cancer or come up with a Grand Unified Theory for Physics, or even figured out a way to make software suck less, but it's safe to say he's smarter than the titular Smartest Guys In The Room.

So Lu Pi's rule is: If you're the smartest guy in the room, in all likelihood it's because the smarter people have already left.