Lift Up Your Hearts!

I am of the last generation to know what life was like before pocket calculators.  Even that name is revealing; who calls them that anymore?  Who remembers when “adding machines” were big, clunky things like typewriters?  (Have you seen a typewriter outside of a museum or an old movie?)

I remember my parents doing their taxes with a nifty little plastic device with a set of numbered dials like a telephone.  (Uh, who remembers dial phones?)  There was a 1’s dial, a 10’s dial, a 100’s dial, etc. and you used a stylus to turn them to the correct numbers.  You could add and subtract by turning the dials clockwise or counterclockwise.  The device was handy for checking all those tax numbers, and lots of fun for me when I could get my hands on it.

As a science major in college, I had many tedious calculations to do, and often found it worthwhile to make a trek through the cold and snowy winter night to use one of the half dozen Wang calculators made available to students by the physics department.

When I graduated from college, I received a thrilling (and expensive) gift:  A Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator!  It was especially cool because it handled scientific notation.  Take a look at the keyboard and note that it did a whole lot less than the calculators you can buy today for $10 at your friendly neighborhood Walmart.  The last time I visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, I found my wonderful graduation present on display amongst the other relics.

I firmly believe that everyone should know how to do basic arithmetic functions easily and quickly, and think it’s deplorable that we have cashiers who can’t make change without a register to do the calculations.  I’ve never forgotten Isaac Asimov’s prescient story, The Feeling of Power (1958).

I also believe that everyone should know how to make bread, but that doesn’t stop me from being thankful to be able to buy bread at the store.

Thus, without apology, I am thankful for the handy, portable, convenient, powerful, inexpensive, labor-saving pocket calculator.

I've removed the Feedjit live traffic feed from the panel on the right because of the ads that are now there.  I didn't mind the ads for Feedjit itself, but I have no control over the others they are now showing.  I have, however, retained the link (under Links/Other) so you can see the feed there if you, like me, find it interesting to see where people come here from and (sometimes) why.

MMG is one of my Facebook friends. I've known her since before she was born, so technically she's more the daughter of our friends than my own friend.  Yet thanks to Facebook, in recent years I've had more contact with her, and know more about what's going on in her life, than with her parents.

This is a particular blessing, not only because it keeps up a connection that would otherwise have been lost, but because I enjoy her perspective on life.  She and I differ and disagree in multitudinous ways, from thoughts about God to the importance of televised hockey games.  As Hercule Poirot is fond of saying, she "gives one furiously to think."  But best of all, she is adept at finding (and posting) links from all over the Web, some of which lead me down very interesting paths.  Here's a recent one:

A cool presentation of part of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson.

And here's one more by Robinson, a second TED lecture that also overlaps a bit with the above .  With all Robinson has been saying about education, this is the first time I've heard him mention homeschooling (very near the end of the lecture).  He's neither positive nor negative, but acknowledges it as a legitimate form, which is progress, anyway.  (This one is only about 18 minutes long.)

I've written about Robinson before, notably in:  Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity, and Education, and also a review of his book, The Element.  And of course I can't miss the opportunity once again to plug John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, which confirms and elaborates on what Robinson says about the industrial model of education.

Here are a few side notes I've taken from the above talks.

• There are no school systems anywhere that Robinson knows of that teaches dance every day, giving it as much importance as mathematics—which he believes to be a mistake.  Long ago I concluded that music should be given that same importance; that learning music should be no more optional than learning to read or to brush one's teeth.  But I apologize to our dancing daughter for not recognizing the similar importance of dance.  Sigh—if only the value of dance had been separated from silly little girls in frilly tutus, I might have been more understanding.
• "We still educate children by batches.  We put them through the system by age group.  Why do we do that?  Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?  It's like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture."  Amen and amen.
• Since 1970 in America, spending on education has more than doubled in terms of real money, class size has steadily declined, but literacy has remained the same.  Robinson believes this supports his thesis that the education system cannot be reformed but requires revolutionary change.  John Taylor Gatto and John Holt gave much of their lives to reforming the schools, and in the end concluded it couldn't be done, instead throwing their support and work into alternatives.  Robinson still has hope that the revolution can occur within the public educational system.
• The paradigm shift Robinson recommends is that we discard the industrial model on which our current view of education is based, and instead adopt an agricultural model.  I believe he's right, but with all the diversions he took in his longer talk, I wish he had pointed out that many would claim our schools are indeed based on an agricultural model:  that of agri-business and the CAFO.  The agricultural model we need for education is that of Polyface Farms, in which the "pigness of the pig"—the individuality of the student—is respected.
• Robinson has many important things to say about schools.  But for all that I agree with him, he is working from a view of humans—of life, the universe, and everything—so fundamentally different from my own that it's a wonder we have so much in common when it comes to education.  He comes to his conclusions based on his belief that human beings are insignificant in relation to the cosmos, that people are basically good but wrong circumstances cause us to go bad, and that we have risen from a lower state and continue to improve.  My own conclusions come from the Christian belief that human beings are of infinite value (importance being unrelated to size), that we have within us the potential to be far better than we can imagine, but that the evil streak within us is innate and cannot be eliminated by improving our circumstances.  And yet those fundamental differences lead us to many of the same conclusions!  Maybe we're right. 

No, I'm not really leaving Facebook.  It's too useful a tool for keeping in touch with people I would otherwise be prone to neglecting.  I think it best to keep my participation minimal, however.

I've never done apps, for example, because I mostly find them annoying.  Today's Wall Street Journal provides another good reason to avoid them, a massive security breach.

That revelation was enough of a push to make me rescind my previous decision to share my blog posts as notes on Facebook.  Not that the recent breach had anything to do with notes; it merely makes me less comfortable with the platform and less willing to take whatever risks there might be when I've seen no discernable benefit.  Having my posts duplicated on Facebook does make them more accessible to some people, but (1) Facebook usually posts them in clumps, so that most are hidden under a "see more posts" link; (2) there are few comments made, so if people are reading them I rarely know about it; and (3) I prefer to have all comments here, anyway, to keep the conversations in one place.

So, I apologize to the few of you who I know do read my posts on Facebook, but after this one posts I'll be stopping the feed.  Please come here instead; you are more than welcome.

Can you believe I get tired of hearing that my blog is absolutly brilliant, and the commenter can't wait to share it with his friends?

Well, I do, and so I'm trying out comment moderation.  If I'm going to have to spend log in several times a day to remove spam, I might as well spend that time approving comments.

The down side is that if you write a comment here, you won't see it right away, at least not at first.  Jon has enhanced the moderation software to allow previously-approved commenters to bypass the moderation process, though you'll have to go through it again if you write from a different IP address.

I trust it will go smoothly, but if your comment gets lost, please let me know.

Not long ago, my lovely external monitor gave out completely.  I suppose I could complain about how nothing lasts well these days, but it lasted a lot longer than the Gateway computer it originally came with, which self-destructed after 19 months of an 18-month warranty.^*

One does not need an external monitor, and I was prepared to do without for a while, but Porter, God bless him, cares for his wife's desires as well as her needs...and an external monitor is especially nice when the regular one is a small laptop screen.  So we ventured out shopping.

And blundered into a CompUSA monitor sale.

At first I was very disappointed, because my old monitor was essentially square, and every single new one was rectangular, with more width than height.  I've always found height more important, as it reduces scrolling—and square even better.  But apparently the rest of the world does not agree with me.

We decided on a ViewSonic VX2250 22" widescreen LED monitor.  (The link takes you to Amazon, but we actually bought it from CompUSA.)  And I've decided it's cool.

Really cool; that was a selling point.  My office gets hot from all the computing equipment, and it's lovely not having the monitor pour out detectible heat.  So we're saving energy at two levels:  the monitor and the air conditioner.

And, in the spirit of New Year's Resolution #4 (Like More Things), it turns out that I love the widescreen format!   Much credit goes to Porter, who pointed out that I now can have, in effect, three screens, by dividing the new monitor into two, side-by-side windows.  It's not a perfect system, because the resulting windows are a bit smaller than I like, but I can easily switch between that and full-screen mode as needed.  It's really helpful not to have to keep flipping back and forth among screens.

I understand that the main reason for the popularity of this screen shape is for watching movies.  The ability to watch movies does not even make the list of what I look for in a computer monitor, but it's true that if I'm watching something by myself, there's no point in turning on the television—this screen does very nicely, thanks.

 

It shouldn't have been so hard, though I'll admit I'm stubborn.  Firefox has been nagging me for days to update my Flash player, but I have to check the box that says I've read the EULA, and every time I tried to download the pdf, it gave me an error at best—and sometimes crashed my machine.

I tried on another computer with the same result.

I don't mind skimming EULAs, and even fudging on the part that requires me to say I actually understand them, especially when half the agreement is in French.  But I refuse to say I've read something when it's not even possible to get a copy of it.

After checking the Adobe site, forums, and Google to no avail, finally inspiration struck:  I copied the url of the recalcitrant file out of Firefox and into Internet Explorer—and it worked.   Then I could go back into Firefox and complete the update.  Even that required several attempts and a couple of Firefox restarts, though.

And that was just for one computer.  For the other I still haven't been successful, as the update refuses to download, telling me a plug-in is missing—without telling me what plug-in is missing, and when I search for the missing plug-in, nothing is found.

What a waste of time!

Having family all over the globe makes for an interesting life, but sometimes it's hard to know which end is up—or more importantly, who is up when.  Enter FoxClocks, an add-on for FireFox, which has made that task much easier for me.  There's also a version for Thunderbird, and I use both to my advantage.

My two favorite display formats are (1) showing the city, time, and day in the status bar:

and (2) a tiny icon in the status bar which pops up that information when I hover my mouse over it.

On Sunday, Firefox suddenly stopped working on my computer.  It would open all right, but no matter what URL I used it would only display a blank page.  Existing HTML files on the computer worked fine, but nothing online.  The problem was not with my connection, as Internet Explorer worked, as did other network connections.

I have no brilliant solution to the problem—though mine is now "fixed"—but am writing it up because I appreciate reading other people's experiences online when I run into a problem.  My Invisible Firefox post is also one of the most read on this blog.

I did find other folks out there with the same blank-page-only issue, but no clear solution.  Suggestions included doing a system restore, creating a new Firefox profile, reinstalling Firefox, and/or making various changes to Firefox, firewall, and registry settings.  In my limited research, I found no obvious reason for the changed behavior of Firefox, and no definitive evidence that the suggested approaches would work.  Moreover, there wasn't a one of them that I trusted myself to implement, given that all this was taking place under the exciting and sleep-deprived circumstances of the home birth of my latest grandson. Thus I was reduced to depending on IE, which I dislike, though I must admit times like this make me glad it's there as a backup.

By Wednesday I figured I was in sufficient command of both my faculties and a few moments of time to tackle the problem.  But before I could make any changes at all, Firefox suddenly started working agan.  To all appearances it is back to normal.

As my father always said, I'm suspicious of inanimate objects that appear to heal themselves.  I don't understand the fixing any more than I understand the breaking.  But there it is.

Today I almost gave up before I started.  First, there was a blog post that I felt needed a comment, and I was guiltily trying to get it written without using up the entire hour, when I learned that there was yet another wrinkle in my ongoing struggles with the insurance company over a medical procedure from last year.  (It isn't even an acrimonious battle; everyone agrees that the company should have paid.  But one small error in a procedure code has taken months to rectify.)  I thought we had finally gotten it straightened out, but this morning another charge popped up that the insurance company says it has paid but the provider says it hasn't received.  I managed to take myself out of the middle and now have them talking directly to each other on this one—but by the time I was done my computer time was well over an hour, and the day barely started.

Still, I plowed on, deciding merely to log the time while trying to keep it down.  That worked somewhat (though I did keep coming back to the machine more than I had hoped), until mid-afternoon, when I realized that the timer had been running throughout a long conversation with Porter and now read nearly four hours.  Probably three of that was legit, but not really knowing the truth I again gave up the fight.  At least I lasted longer than I did yesterday.

Ganbarimasu!

Last night I finished a project that had kept me welded to the computer for the better part of several days, and I awoke wondering if it would be possible to go through a day limiting my computer use to one hour.  The experiment started out well enough, though I had accomplished but the minimum of my normal morning computer routine when I realized I'd already used up a quarter of the time.  It was not too hard, however, to set the routine aside and turn to (mostly) non-computer-related projects.  I felt empowered, and looked forward to a day of accomplishment.  Occasionally I needed the computer briefly for something I was doing, but managed to do the job and get off, resisting the temptation to check blogs, news, or e-mail.

That lasted till maybe 9 a.m.

I had successfullly prepared, assembled, and packaged two boxes for mailing, but printing the postage for one turned out to be a bit of a problem and involved an online chat with USPS customer service.  Another half hour of computer time gone, just like that.  Then there was a problem with a recent Amazon order that could not be put off, and included another customer service exchange.  After that, the allotted hour was completely gone.

For some of the day I continued to try to minimize computer use, but then we worked on researching and purchasing a new camera (shhh—it's an early birthday present for me!) and that ate up hours of computer time—so I just plain gave up.  Which is why I'm able to write this post.  One thing I know for sure is that I can't limit myself to an hour of computer use a day and do any significant writing, let alone make any progress on many important projects.  But even an hour a day is so much time!  How different might I be if I spent that hour reading, or praying, or learning to play the piano!

One thing I know:  the important work I do, in this stage of my life, requires time on the computer.  A lot of time on the computer.  That's simply the nature of the work.  Some things are plain impossible without it; others possible, but much less efficient or effective.  I am in no danger of giving in to Luddite tendencies.

But the taste of freedom this morning was so sweet I'm continuing the experiment tomorrow.

What drives spam?  Money, obviously.  And sin.  Sin on both ends:  the sin of greed on the part of the spammer, and the sin that the spammer is hoping will entice his victim to throw money his direction.  Spam, therefore, may be a diagnostic tool, an x-ray scan revealing the broken and diseased places of our society.

If the spam that hits this blog (and is mostly filtered out before you see it) is any measure, the sickest area of our society is sex, although that observation is a bit like peering at an x-ray and announcing that the patient's leg is broken when anyone can see the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  Porn of the worst kind, body part enhancements, "performance" drugs:  "greed meets lust" is a terrible combination.

Then there's "greed meets greed," the get-rich-quick schemes, from online gambling to fraudulent investments to Nigerian banking scams.

I don't know what to make of the drug spams.  Most are obviously either lust spam or promoting illegal drugs, but some appear to be illegitimate sources of legitimate drugs.  (Unless there's a street use for Retin-A that I'm unaware of.)

Every once in a while there appears a spam that actually looks as if it might be an ad for a real company that decided to try a new marketing ploy.  Poor judgement, but at least inoffensive.

The latest wrinkle, although also inoffensive, has me both worried and frustrated:  essay spam.  Greet meets dishonesty?  Greed meets incompetence?   Have students become so lazy, so insecure, and so convinced of the uselessness of their classes that the market for essays has become lucrative enough to attract spammers?  Is anyone really so stupid as to buy an English essay written by someone who could pen the following?

Students have a chance purchase the research paper or buy custom essay papers at the essay writing service about this good post. 

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This need very long time to find more ideas just about this post but the essay writing can aid somebody to get the proper custom papers and to buy essay 

The thesis service is perfect and the company appreciate you for the hot data about this good post. Thence, after this some people really get know just about buy dissertation and buy a paper. 

I probably will come along your incredible information about this post in time of the term paper and just art essay completing. Thus, thanks a lot for work.

This kind of spam is difficult for the filters to manage, it hardly seeming reasonable to ban the word "essay."  I delete it when i see it, but that's usually not before feedreaders have picked it up.  That's frustrating—but at least the amusement factor eases the sting.

Someone else posted an enthusiastic link to Michael Hyatt's Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?  That I am not so enthusiastic is probably due to having a serious problem with the first sentence, which reads, 

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful.

After reading Hyatt's article I realized that not only do I make several of the mistakes, but I often make them on purpose.  That's when I realized the real problem:  I'm not convinced I want to increase my blog traffic.

Neither am I convinced I don't.   What writer puts that much effort into his work and doesn't want it read?  I like to hope that each post manages to inspire, inform, or encourage someone, somewhere.  It's a big world out there, so I don't think that's a vain hope.  Nonetheless, "going viral" is not my idea of a good thing.  Staying under the radar is much more my style.  Fortunately, my blog is likely to keep its low profile, as long as I continue to score well on Hyatt's list of mistakes.

Mistake #1: You don’t post enough.

Mistake #2: You post too much.

I'm guilty of both, thanks to life constraints, a varied audience, and an inner conviction that if something exists, it requires my commentary.  It's impossible to please both those who check my blog once a week, if that often, and those who check more than once a day.  So I mostly post as I have time and inspiration, though I have been known to write a post but hold back from publishing it for a day or two, just to spread things out.

Mistake #3: Your post is too long.

Guilty, though not as much as I thought.  I frequently exceed his recommended limit of 500 words, but include enough short posts to keep the average in line.  Considering only my last 10 posts, I averaged 450 words, with the maximum being nearly 1200 and the minimum a mere 18.  I could learn something from his suggestion to make longer posts "scannable" by including such devices as subheadings and lists.

Mistake #4: You don’t invite engagement.

I want engagement, comments, and discussions, but then again I don't like controversy and acrimony, which permanently excludes me from major blog status, I guess.

Mistake #5: You don’t participate in the conversation.

Ha!  That's not my problem!

Mistake #6: You don’t make your content accessible.

By this he means catering to people with short attention spans who like the fragmented style that drives me nuts in newspapers and magazines:  short paragraphs, side bars, pull quotes, lists, etc.  I can learn a bit from this; in fact, I've notice my style changing somewhat in this direction, but in general I consider it a vice.

Mistake #7: You don’t create catchy headlines.

Not gonna change here.  The site he recommends for learning to write good headlines made me gag.  However, I do need to learn to make the headline more informative of the content.

Mistake #8: Your first paragraph is weak.

Definitely a problem.  I often prefer to use the first paragraph for background or to set up the main point, but that's because I egotistically assume people want to read everything I write.  I need to learn to put more relevant information content up front, so people will know sooner whether or not they are interested.

Mistake #9: Your post is off-brand. 

If you are a hobby blogger, you can get away with the occasional post that strays from your primary message or brand. But if you are trying to build traffic, you need to find an editorial focus and stick to it. A tighter focus leads to higher traffic.

Hobby blogger it is.  I would have to have a lot more time to devote to writing to pull this one off, because I could only do it by having several blogs, each with a different focus.  I guess my brand is "eclectic."

Mistake #10: Your post is about YOU.

Yep.  Self-centered and egotistical as it may be, I write about what I know best.  My first, largest, and most important audience is family and friends, and they really do want to know what's going on in our lives.

I realize this makes it boring for the wider audience, but so be it; they have Google.  That kind of reader comes here via search engines, thus finding the posts that might be helpful without having to wade through the rest.  These readers are as eclectic in their tastes as I am.  If my statistics are accurate, they are most especially interested in converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit, why Firefox might suddenly seem invisible, xylitol, American Sign Language, the dangers of epidural anesthesia in childbirth, and the connection between homosexuality and fertility. Who'd have thought?

This article about the mathematics department at the University of Rochester credits much of their recent success to an online homework system developed by two U of R professors.

Any system that results in 80 percent of undergraduates taking calculus, without any requirement to do so, bears looking into.

The program, called WeBWorK, was developed by Professors Michael Gage and Arnold Pizer in 1995 to help them give better and more timely feedback to students on calculus homework. Instead of handing out hundreds of identical homework assignments, professors assign homework via WeBWorK and the software customizes the problems for each student. No two students receive the same problems, so copying answers is not an issue, but more importantly, the program gives students real-time feedback on whether their solutions are correct. Gage and Pizer found that with such instant feedback, students try again and again at a problem, seeking the help of fellow students to understand the concepts that will lead to the correct solution.

The program has proven such a success that it has been adopted by more than 100 schools and universities around the country, with more than 100,000 mathematics students checking their homework every week, says Ravenel. A study at Rutgers University in 2002 showed that students who used WeBWorK fared far better on tests and in the mathematics course overall when they used WeBWorK for their homework.

The National Science Foundation has invested more than $2.5 million to help support the development and implementation of WeBWorK, and recently the Mathematics Association of America took over administration of WeBWorK to help spread it to more institutions and students.

I wish they'd had WeBWork when I was at the University of Rochester!  However, since it was developed in 1995, and yet Janet never experienced it when she was there several years later, I'm guessing that they must not have it for the more advanced classes where I could really have used it.  I don't see it working well for analyzing proofs.  Nonetheless, there is great potential there for introductory classes in many fields, and I hope the open courseware movement will quickly adopt the WeBWork system.

You'd think that being freed from the 9 - 5 routine, Mondays wouldn't bother me.  (What's with 9 - 5 anyway?  When I was employed I never worked that few hours in a day!)  And normally that's true.  This week was another story.

It began when the alarm went off at 4:30...a.m.  That's when I took Porter to the airport for a week out of town on business.  Still, that was only bad in hindsight; normally getting an early start imbues the day with productivity, and I was looking forward to digging right into my many awaiting projects.  I returned home, drove into the garage, walked through the door, entered my office, and turned on my computer.  Which promptly turned itself off.  Further attempts disclosed the unsettling warning, "Fan error."

So there I was, husband-cum-resident computer expert winging his way to New York City, and my computer on strike.  My barely two-year-old computer.  That is to say, the computer that was just seven weeks out of its two-year warranty.  Might as well take out the garbage.  Which I did.  And ate breakfast.  And started a wash.  Amazingly, what I did not do was panic, which was either the grace of God or denial or both.

I next began the process of setting myself up as a user on Porter's "home machine."  It's old and has very limited disk space, but I was able to get access to mail and Internet, which quelled my feelings of isolation.  I sent out e-mails warning family members that the telephone would be the best means of communication for a while.

Then the phone stopped working.

Then I went to get the laundry out of the dryer and found it still wet.  And the dryer cold.

Then I heard from Porter:  His computer had also failed.  Should I have been paying more attention to the dangers of a potential EMP attack?

Eventually cooler heads prevailed, and I concluded that, unlike all other disasters natural and man-made, this was not George W. Bush's fault.  The phone I fixed by rebooting the base.  I couldn't reboot the dryer, but we do have an excellent, honest, and dependable repairman, who worked his magic the next day, replacing the heater.  (In the meantime, I relied on my good old Japanese dryer.)  My computer had to wait till Friday, when Porter installed the new fan he had ordered during the week.  (I had earlier, with much fear and trembling, managed to take the computer apart sufficiently to blow the dust out, but that had made no difference.)  Porter's a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but this was his first attempt at laptop repair, and it was a rousing success.  He is much better than I am at not being intimidated by all the "do not attempt this repair yourself" warnings.¹  It's a good thing, too, because his next repair project will follow close on the heels of this one.  He managed to get his own (work) computer functional again, but it has been determined to have sufficient problems that he'll be getting a new "shell" into which he must transfer certain parts of his current machine.

Now we are poised to welcome another Monday, and I am once again looking forward to a productive week of work.  My projects are many and varied, but nearly all require the computer in one way or another, and so a lot of work ground to an abrupt halt at the beginning of this week.  If I'd known my computer fast would only last four days, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more.²