Adults: Potential Perverts; or No Cost Is Too High If It Saves Even One Child

Here’s a link to a story about Louisiana requiring that all electronic teacher-student communications be documented. This reminds me of an earlier story out of Britain where parents were kept outside of a playground, away from their own children, because some of them might be pedophiles. Some teachers have inappropriate relations with students. In fact, much of the time that Teachers Make The News is when they are caught in inappropriate relations. Therefore it must be going on all the time. And some parents do abuse their children. And most adults who abuse children are parents at some point in their lives. So parents are suspect and must be monitored.

Should we ban new mothers from unsupervised contact with their newborns? Infanticide(killing a child who is under 1 year old) is committed at a higher rate by mothers than fathers. So, following the logic displayed above…

“Parents Raise Child To Become Productive Adult” never makes it to the headlines. “Teacher Helps Students Master Curriculum” – same deal. News falls into a few broad categories:

1 ) Big things that will affect us even if commonplace (government programs, taxes, legislated social change, etc)
2) Unusual things that are counter to a good social order (mothers leaving children in hot cars, priests doing things they shouldn’t, etc)
3) Updates on things of common interest (weather, sports, entertainment)
4) Disasters
5) Helpful Hints (computer updates, car maintenance, cooking tips)
6) Today’s Feel Good Moment (Easter Egg hunts, puppies bringing smiles to shut-ins)

I think we usually do a good job of keeping categories 1 and 3-6 in their proper mental places. But we are prone to overgeneralizing, and that can cause us to place category 2 items into category 1. Daniel Gilbert spends a little time on this in Stumbling On Happiness – my short review here.

A bit too much of that and we end up treating everyone as a potential criminal. Of course, I’ve only cited two examples myself, and only one of those was from America.

Reincarnation

I think Erik Satie came back as a cat.

My wife has attended many classes in Tibetan Bhuddism recently. Our local lama has met his reincarnated former lama as a now-teenager. I maintain my scepticism about reincarnation, mostly because it makes more spiritual sense – and shows the universe to be a more transcendently just place – than I believe it is.

But piano-playing cats? What’s the saying? We marvel not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.

Or perhaps Satie came back as Moby. Proof?

Some real Satie, which is quite beautiful. I’m not sure why I’m picking on him.

Mel Brooks on the stimulus

This analysis on Reason.com

The most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector. For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs. The difference we will soon find out is going to other government jobs.

You need more evidence? 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to feral agencies.

So even if we assume that the government could create jobs by spending our money, we can see that what this money is being spent on is big government. Or bigger government I should say.

So when you think that, on top of everything, the government can’t create jobs (here and here), this data is transparently depressing.

got me to thinking about this scene in Blazing Saddles.

We’ve got to save our phoney-baloney jobs.

I think “feral agencies” should be “federal agencies,” but “once tame, now gone wild” might be more accurate.

Achewood + Drinky Crow

Drinky Crow’s Tony Millionaire draws today’s Achewood.

Only for those who are already fans, I suspect.

Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel, Turing

Here is an interesting and annoying BBC documentary on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel, and Alan Turing. The explanations are well-done and not the usual ones one sees for this stuff. The gratuitous Jesus-bashing and worries about “will we pledge blind allegiance to yet another certainty?,” and the “this is the equation that killed him” silliness detract from an otherwise well done series of intellectually linked biographies. Weak minds who want to appear to be thoughtful often mock the completely reasonable search for foundational truths, because these guys and what they accomplished would not be interesting and valuable enough if it couldn’t be used to put down someone else.

There are some wonderful German accents. Worth watching, particularly if your teeth need to be ground a bit.

Will Our Gigantic Health Care Bill Pay for This Great Idea?

From Mickey Kaus:

Shouldn’t doctors give patients waiting to see them little hand-held beepers or vibrating devices like some crowded restaurants give you when you’re waiting for a table? That way you could wander around nearby instead of staying in the unventilated waiting room filled with coughing, sneezing people. … 1:32 A.M.

I was a galaxy cluster before you were a star…

The Chandra x-ray observatory has found a galaxy cluster 10.2 billion light year old, at the limit of when galaxy clusters were thought to form. The cluster is in Cetus. Have a look.

If You Like Astronomy…

It’s a couple of years old, but I just ran across the Galaxy Zoo project. It asks volunteers to look through images of galaxies and classify them. Having galaxies classified (elliptical, spiral, etc) by multiple people gives a more reliable data set for astronomers to look at. If someone wants to study definite elliptical galaxies, that person can choose the set of galaxies that 100% of classifiers call elliptical. And so on. If you think that sounds interesting, then visit the site and see what their successes have been, and go through the simple training if you’d like to become a volunteer galaxy classifier.

Back It Up, Buttercup

This article about the T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick debacle from Edgelings.com comes as a reminder that you need to back up your data. As does this article on a similar topic. Trusting some third party, even a big respectable company like Microsoft, to always take care of the only copy of your important stuff is a risky proposition, especially considering how cheap hard drives and USB flash drives have become.

My wife was telling me about a friend whose x-boyfriend hacked into her web-based email account and erased all of her emails and business contacts. The friend knows her X did this because he was retarded enough to have sent her a text message bragging about it. But, she only had the emails and contacts in one place, so whatever legal action she may take against him is unlikely to result in her getting the emails and contacts restored.

I’ve been thinking about the unexamined assumptions we have with regards to electronic-based information and networks. I’m brewing up a larger post on that, but for now I want to remind everyone that everything breaks eventually. So, find a way to get your emails and contacts and family albums and music collections and calendars and so on in more than one place. And be sure that you own (and not rent) at least one of the places that your stuff is duplicated.

BS^4

There’s an old saying among scientists that “you have bullsh**, bullsh** squared, then cosmology.” Now we know what bullsh** to the fourth power is: Theories about why the Large Hadron Collider is having some startup issues.

Both of the authors of this absurd paper, Holger Bech Nielsen and Maseo Ninomiya have actual employers: the Neils Bohr Institute and the Yukawa Institute For Theoretical Physics.

From my point of view, a project as large and complex as the Large Hadron Collider is certain to have issues upon startup. Nothing that I’ve read about their troubles indicate problems beyond material quality and assembly issues. Due to the complexity of the instrument and the extremely low temperatures it must use, there are long times associated with cycling the sections needed for repair up to room temperature and then down to operating temperature. But these two think that the instrument is being sabotaged from the future.

For another article, this time in the NY Times, click here.

Are these guys the Heene family of physics, or is this an elaborate hoax to make mainstream science reporting look bad, like Alan Sokal’s famous prank in 1996 of Social Text? I’m leaning toward the Heene family likeness. String Theorists make me itchy.