Dateline: Pollen Town
I was working on a really massive reflection about free will and determinism, but then I found this moment of Zen. Lord, I hope The Daily Show hasn't trademarked that phrase.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Is This the Future of Video News?
Dateline: Attention Deficit Spending
I've been bogged down in other, "serious" projects and then I realized that serious is not the way to go. Blame the video below if you need to. This one needs to go viral, even if it spells the end of serious journalism. Is The Nation the next domino to fall?
It's actually fairly clever, especially when one considers how lame these XtraNormal videos can be. Sometimes lameness can be used to advantage, plus they are fairly easy to make, assuming you have a script in your head.
Do I smell a trend?
I've been bogged down in other, "serious" projects and then I realized that serious is not the way to go. Blame the video below if you need to. This one needs to go viral, even if it spells the end of serious journalism. Is The Nation the next domino to fall?
It's actually fairly clever, especially when one considers how lame these XtraNormal videos can be. Sometimes lameness can be used to advantage, plus they are fairly easy to make, assuming you have a script in your head.
Do I smell a trend?
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Math Liberation
Dateline: Wolframia
Math Liberation: What does that mean?
Conrad Wolfram, co-founder of Wolfram|Alpha, a really useful and fun math tool, makes a quick analysis of how, and perhaps why we're teaching math all wrong, at least within formal schools. Bad mathematicians and fuzzy thinking have largely taken math pedagogy hostage, but won't even declare what they want as ransom. Pedagogy. It's not pederasty, it's not pedophilia, but for most people, it might as well be. We've become that phobic about math.
Pedagogy just means our theories about how we think learning happens, and how we design schools to impose those largely untested prejudices on the process and on our children, shuffling deck chairs every few years, but never getting to the point of finding the liferafts, or fixing the holes in the ship's hull.
We need to be encouraging and creating settings where kids can learn to feel the math and love the math, not fear it. To make students masters of numerical methods, number theory, puzzles, logic and all the parts of math that we excel at, that were the reason some of us build computers in the first place, rather than convince most of the population that they are slaves of computation, with some vague notion that by demonstrating their subjection beneath math, they will respect and revere it, rather than see it as the monstrous enemy that they should push over a cliff at the next opportunity.
We've made our tools into our prison guards. I found the video on Eugenia's blog, by the way.
How much is our failure locked into the bias to serving the market? Computers are pushed on us to a degree that is almost absurd, and yet we tend to be corralled into some strange alternate reality, where the computer's actual usefulness to us if often masked and distorted.
This has been long delayed. I was trying to marry some of my thinking about the impending Dark Ages here, and the potential that might still exist for a revitalized Second (or Third?) radical Enlightenment. That's what I'd been reading for awhile now, but I'm getting increasingly distracted as I try to reinvent some way to support myself, while also watching Rome burn. (And I swear, it wasn't my match... this has been running on inertia since before I was born, I think.
Related readings below, but first let me ask, why did I hide the most valuable link in this article in the slugline at the start?
Math Liberation: What does that mean?
Conrad Wolfram, co-founder of Wolfram|Alpha, a really useful and fun math tool, makes a quick analysis of how, and perhaps why we're teaching math all wrong, at least within formal schools. Bad mathematicians and fuzzy thinking have largely taken math pedagogy hostage, but won't even declare what they want as ransom. Pedagogy. It's not pederasty, it's not pedophilia, but for most people, it might as well be. We've become that phobic about math.
Pedagogy just means our theories about how we think learning happens, and how we design schools to impose those largely untested prejudices on the process and on our children, shuffling deck chairs every few years, but never getting to the point of finding the liferafts, or fixing the holes in the ship's hull.
We need to be encouraging and creating settings where kids can learn to feel the math and love the math, not fear it. To make students masters of numerical methods, number theory, puzzles, logic and all the parts of math that we excel at, that were the reason some of us build computers in the first place, rather than convince most of the population that they are slaves of computation, with some vague notion that by demonstrating their subjection beneath math, they will respect and revere it, rather than see it as the monstrous enemy that they should push over a cliff at the next opportunity.
We've made our tools into our prison guards. I found the video on Eugenia's blog, by the way.
How much is our failure locked into the bias to serving the market? Computers are pushed on us to a degree that is almost absurd, and yet we tend to be corralled into some strange alternate reality, where the computer's actual usefulness to us if often masked and distorted.
This has been long delayed. I was trying to marry some of my thinking about the impending Dark Ages here, and the potential that might still exist for a revitalized Second (or Third?) radical Enlightenment. That's what I'd been reading for awhile now, but I'm getting increasingly distracted as I try to reinvent some way to support myself, while also watching Rome burn. (And I swear, it wasn't my match... this has been running on inertia since before I was born, I think.
Related readings below, but first let me ask, why did I hide the most valuable link in this article in the slugline at the start?
A Serious Problem
Things have been busy here lately and one of many things that has fallen by the wayside is keeping this blog up to date. While you'd probably expect me to be posting some long essay about politics or terrible events somewhere, and their bio-neurochemical significance, or something else fairly profound, instead I'm writing this, and then hoping to remember where I left the DVD for the Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse That Roared.
Time to get away from this desk. See the Flickr group for a few more details on this student performance.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
It Takes More Than Hope
Dateline: People & Power
Looking behind the "leaderless" revolution. Mind you, I am not endorsing this perspective as the whole story, just more of it.
Looking behind the "leaderless" revolution. Mind you, I am not endorsing this perspective as the whole story, just more of it.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
An Open Letter to Navy Times
Dateline: Planet Grow-a-Pair
Relieving Capt. Honors of his, by all credible accounts, excellent command aboard the USS Enterprise is a travesty, and perhaps a sign of the rot within the upper echelons of military leadership, to cower before what seems to me to be a very clearly political stunt, perhaps intended to damage the Commander-in-Chief, but surely a decision that is unwise and unnecessary, punishing an outstanding officer for acts that in my estimation were directly related to his excellent performance as the XO of the USS Enterprise.
It is clear even from the biased selection of material from the videos being broadcast online and in the news media that the videos were intended (and succeeded) in sustaining morale in trying times under highly stressful conditions. Frankly, assuming the rumors of his being relieved of command are confirmed in the next few hours, this is nothing less than a shame and a blot on the capacity for judgment of all those who've allowed this to go forward and who have not contested the sloppy journalism and lack of sense displayed in telling (or "spinning") this story, preferring instead to go gutless, perhaps in an attempt to embarrass the current Administration's long overdue scuttling of the misguided and disastrous DADT policy.
Capt. Honors, the Navy and the American people deserve better.
Every day I'm reading stories of a suicide epidemic building in our nation's military. [Let's call it a Freudian slip that I first typed "media" and in fact sent this text hastily to Navy Times including that gaffe. Mea culpa.] It's frankly an embarrassment that someone whose videos may well have saved some sailors' lives by giving them a laugh when they may have otherwise sunk into fatal despair under a lesser XO, is now being treated to such a shameful kangaroo court, aided, perhaps, by the kind of politically savvy, but utterly useless officers who tend to dominate certain parts of the military, offiicers unfit to shine Captain Honors' boots. You may not know you are one, but I guarantee those who've been under your command can recognize you.
If there is any justice left in this world, the public shaming of whoever was behind this hatchet job will come some day, and if senior officers were complicit, at the moment I'm thinking they ought to be charged with acts of sabotage, related to undercutting and subverting unit morale aboard the Enterprise, just as it was preparing to embark on its probably final tour of duty under Capt. Honors' able command, now to be, at best, under the command of someone competent but burdened with coping with the almost certain drop in morale that will be the inevitable consequence of this travesty, assuming it plays out in the usual way.
Acts like this impair the readiness of sailors and soldiers everywhere and whoever engineered this bit of political theater deserves a special place in Hell.
As a veteran I've remained silent for too long on this -- though I did resign from the Veteran's organizations that supported DADT when it was put in place and served as the basis for endless, pointless political games over sexual politics and personal traits irrelevant to military (or any other) service.
I served with too many gay and lesbian service members whose competence, patriotism and sense of honor and duty were all that mattered as they did their missions with valor and professionalism. Making a political game out of any service member's sexual identity or, for that matter, any other personal quality irrelevant to their service and competence at the mission at hand is just a complete and utter waste of resources, serving only as a tool for the gutless political manipulators in the upper ranks that are and always will be a burden to unit cohesion and a corrosive factor in unit morale.
None of the GLBT soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines I knew during my own service would have found Capt. Honors' videos anything but amusing. The content itself is being misinterpreted, and willfully viewed without context or common sense. Grow a pair already.
With all due respect,
Sgt. Brett Underberg-Davis
US Army (1980-86)
Illegitimi non carborundum
Context people, context
And here's the supposedly "offensive" video:
Relieving Capt. Honors of his, by all credible accounts, excellent command aboard the USS Enterprise is a travesty, and perhaps a sign of the rot within the upper echelons of military leadership, to cower before what seems to me to be a very clearly political stunt, perhaps intended to damage the Commander-in-Chief, but surely a decision that is unwise and unnecessary, punishing an outstanding officer for acts that in my estimation were directly related to his excellent performance as the XO of the USS Enterprise.
It is clear even from the biased selection of material from the videos being broadcast online and in the news media that the videos were intended (and succeeded) in sustaining morale in trying times under highly stressful conditions. Frankly, assuming the rumors of his being relieved of command are confirmed in the next few hours, this is nothing less than a shame and a blot on the capacity for judgment of all those who've allowed this to go forward and who have not contested the sloppy journalism and lack of sense displayed in telling (or "spinning") this story, preferring instead to go gutless, perhaps in an attempt to embarrass the current Administration's long overdue scuttling of the misguided and disastrous DADT policy.
Capt. Honors, the Navy and the American people deserve better.
Every day I'm reading stories of a suicide epidemic building in our nation's military. [Let's call it a Freudian slip that I first typed "media" and in fact sent this text hastily to Navy Times including that gaffe. Mea culpa.] It's frankly an embarrassment that someone whose videos may well have saved some sailors' lives by giving them a laugh when they may have otherwise sunk into fatal despair under a lesser XO, is now being treated to such a shameful kangaroo court, aided, perhaps, by the kind of politically savvy, but utterly useless officers who tend to dominate certain parts of the military, offiicers unfit to shine Captain Honors' boots. You may not know you are one, but I guarantee those who've been under your command can recognize you.
If there is any justice left in this world, the public shaming of whoever was behind this hatchet job will come some day, and if senior officers were complicit, at the moment I'm thinking they ought to be charged with acts of sabotage, related to undercutting and subverting unit morale aboard the Enterprise, just as it was preparing to embark on its probably final tour of duty under Capt. Honors' able command, now to be, at best, under the command of someone competent but burdened with coping with the almost certain drop in morale that will be the inevitable consequence of this travesty, assuming it plays out in the usual way.
Acts like this impair the readiness of sailors and soldiers everywhere and whoever engineered this bit of political theater deserves a special place in Hell.
As a veteran I've remained silent for too long on this -- though I did resign from the Veteran's organizations that supported DADT when it was put in place and served as the basis for endless, pointless political games over sexual politics and personal traits irrelevant to military (or any other) service.
I served with too many gay and lesbian service members whose competence, patriotism and sense of honor and duty were all that mattered as they did their missions with valor and professionalism. Making a political game out of any service member's sexual identity or, for that matter, any other personal quality irrelevant to their service and competence at the mission at hand is just a complete and utter waste of resources, serving only as a tool for the gutless political manipulators in the upper ranks that are and always will be a burden to unit cohesion and a corrosive factor in unit morale.
None of the GLBT soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines I knew during my own service would have found Capt. Honors' videos anything but amusing. The content itself is being misinterpreted, and willfully viewed without context or common sense. Grow a pair already.
With all due respect,
Sgt. Brett Underberg-Davis
US Army (1980-86)
Illegitimi non carborundum
Context people, context
And here's the supposedly "offensive" video:
Monday, January 3, 2011
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