Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm sure there must be a legitimate reason behind the new Federal Trade Commission rules for bloggers, but it looks pretty nonsensical from my perspective, another example of one-size-fits-all rules that inconvenience millions in an attempt to collar a few offenders.  It invites comparisons with the TSA's airport screening, except that I'm a lot more worried about terrorists than about those "I lost 300 pounds on this simple diet" ads.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.  Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.  Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products.  [From the Hartford Courant, October 6, 2009]

So here goes.  I suppose I'll have to put it in my About link, too.

I have no idea what others should expect from anything I review or comment on.  I'm one person, not a research laboratory.  You may love a book I find objectionable; you may dislike the recipe I say is fabulous.  Such is life.  Sometimes I get books for free, from publishers, which I'll acknowledge in the review, but no small tip is going to make me say I liked a book when I didn't.  (So far, I've received all of one book this way, and I haven't read it yet, which is why you haven't seen any such acknowledgement.)  I also get incalculable return from Lime Daley, but I like to think that's because of my familial relationship with the owners, not because of any endorsements I make on this blog.

I don't mean to pick on the FTC; they have a tough job.  But I'm much more interested in disclosures, say, of gifts given by textbook publishers to school boards, or from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.  When Internet bloggers attain the respect, authority, and power of doctors and school boards, when it takes more than common sense to realize their reviews might not have universal applicability, then I may be convinced of the need for regulation.  I won't be in that category anyway. 

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

What was truly wonderful about the games was the social interaction.  One of my favorite memories is of the houseful of relatives who had come to share Thanksgiving with us.  We had a borrowed terminal and the old-fashioned type of modem—new technology then—into which one fitted the telephone handset after dialing in and hearing the carrier tone.  We took turns typing commands into the computer, and everyone participated in solving the puzzles, each person contributing his own special knowledge and way of thinking.  The idea of "cooperative games" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, being associated with the misguided self-esteem movement in public schools some years ago, but these, truly, were cooperative games, in which we all won and to which everyone had something to contribute. (More)

Learning the lesson of Napoleon and Hitler.  Never underestimate Russia.  C. S. Lewis observed that mankind tends to alternate between taking the Devil too seriously and not taking him seroiusly enough.  Without making any implications on the order of "the Great Satan" or "the Evil Empire," it's a good analogy for the way we look at other countries, whether friend or enemy.  During the Cold War, for example, our fears of Russia—especially in the 1950s—were probably exaggerated, and it's likely that now we're not sufficiently worried about how far the influence such a large country with so many resources might reach.  Here's a New York Times article on the activities of Moscow's mayor, not to provoke fear, but to make us think.  The article is a bit dated, but the ideas are not.

 

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And it doesn't even mention health care.  This analysis of then president-elect Obama's upcoming challenges was written nearly a year ago.  It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide how well he is meeting them.

U.S. President George W. Bush demonstrated that the inability to understand the uses and limits of power can crush a presidency very quickly. The enormous enthusiasm of Obama's followers could conceal how he—like Bush—is governing a deeply, and nearly evenly, divided country. Obama's first test will be simple: Can he maintain the devotion of his followers while increasing his political base? Or will he believe, as Bush and Cheney did, that he can govern without concern for the other half of the country because he controls the presidency and Congress, as Bush and Cheney did in 2001? Presidents are elected by electoral votes, but they govern through public support.

 

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And now for something completely different.  A long and ususual but fascinating look at changes in Austria (and the world) since the days of Kaiser Franz Josef.

My favorite section of the newsletter we get from Wycliffe Bible Translators is where they give some interesting example of the challenges of accurate translation.  The "back translation"—translating back into English something that had been translated from Engilsh to the new language—often reveals subtleties and misunderstandings that can be quite funny.

As it turns out, one doesn't need to be documenting a rare, unwritten language to find translation humor.  Our new printer came with the following warning:

This product is supplied with a plug that has a protective earth pin.  This plug will fit only into an earthed electrical outlet. This is a safety feature.  To avoid risk of electric shock, contact your electrician to replace the electrical outlet if you are unable to insert the plug into it. Never use an earthed adapter plug to connect the product to an electrical outlet that lacks an earth connection terminal.

First we made pets of our children; now we make children of our pets.  The title of Caleb Stegall's Against Pets might make some turn away in reflexive disgust, but it is a reasoned and worthwhile commentary on the bizarre twist our relationship with animals has taken.  How far we have come from the shepherd's down-to-earth love for his sheepdog, and from C. S. Lewis's description of the ideal earthly relationship between man and beast:  Man is no longer isolated.  We are now as we ought to be—between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants and playfellows. (That Hideous Strength, chapter 17.)

 

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Where have you been all my life, GK?  G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is another one of those classic, cultural icons totally missing from my educational experience.  I guess the best thing I can say for having never met him in school is that he wasn't ruined for me, so discovering him now is a delight.  What Is America? is an essay worth reading in full, not the least because Chesterton's style does not lend itself at all to capture by excerpt.  (More)

"Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish."  Jim Manzi, writing in National Review Online, makes an eloquent case against the use by the United States, or any civilized nation, of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.  Most arguments on the issue, for or against, are hardly worthy of the name because they assume what they think they're proving.  Manzi acknowledges the complexity of the issue, examines the historical record, and concludes that our current situation is not one in which the tactical advantages gained by waterboarding would offset the strategic losses.

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The music is a little too red, don’t you think?  Although true synesthesia—the bizarre crossing of the senses that enables some people to hear colors and taste sounds—is rare, researchers have discovered that most of us have this ability to some degree.

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It's a pretty random collection of tidbits this time.  Enjoy them or ignore them as you like.

• Eat your heart out, Imelda Marcos.  People will collect anything, but I have to wonder if even Otto C. Lightner (the “collector of collections”) would pay $2000 for a pair of sneakers.

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As an avid fan of mystery stories, I’m sure I would enjoy The Da Vinci Code, especially since I’m attracted to Robert Langdon by name alone.  As a rational human being, however, I’m reluctant to open its pages.  Not knowing any better, I’ve enjoyed such quasi-historical movies as Amadeus and Braveheart, learning only later how fast and loose the productions had played with the facts.  Now it’s too late:  the false images are burned into my consciousness, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace them with the truth.

That’s the worst of historical fiction.  At its best, it provides a wonderful gateway into the fascinating field of history itself, breathing life into the dry and confusing swirl of names, dates, and places that normally overwhelms us in school.  But truth should never be sacrificed on the altar of art; if you want to tell the story your way, make up your own characters—don’t lie about real people and events.  The Teaching Company, one of my favorite educational organizations whose products I highly recommend, produced two complimentary lectures on fact and fiction in The Da Vinci Code; because we were specifically given permission to pass them on to our friends, I’m posting links to them below.  If TTC complains, I’ll take them down.  They’re each about half an hour in length. (More)

• A chance to excel?  A school district in Colorado is eliminating both grades and grade levels in a radical attempt to help its students learn.  In theory, students assume more responsibility for their own learning, and take as long or as short a time as they need to advance from one level of the material to another.  This has enormous potential for good, though I’ll withhold judgement until I see whether or not it truly encourages students to learn more, faster, or if administrators will be content with results like a first grade classroom that took a year “to create—and refine—a classroom code of conduct…which includes items such as "don't hit people" and "we will not play with hair."
• Food for thought.  From Percival Blakeney Academy, a thoughtful look at homeschooling through an analogy with home cooking.

  [Wh]at about a family eating a meal planned by the mom but cooked by a housekeeper or cook? Or a takeout meal served at home on one's own dishes? Or a frozen lasagna baked in your own oven with bakery bread and your own salad? Or a make ahead meal prepped in a commercial dinners-to-go kitchen by the mom from their menu card and then cooked up weeks later at home? Which of these is home cooking and which isn't? Is there a difference between home cooking and eating at home (and does the difference matter)?

• The Great Homeschooling Divide (or one of them).  Here’s a mom who effectively voices the position of those who homeschool because they believe public/private schools aren’t good/affordable enough.  My gut reaction is, these people don’t GET homeschooling AT ALL.  But that’s unfair.  Finding no suitable alternative is a legitimate reason for homeschooling, as long as it’s understood that if every school were suddenly, magically perfect for everyone, many of us would still insist on home learning.  To borrow from the above-mentioned analogy, I don’t care how great the restaurant is, it will never replace the family dinner table.
• In case you thought your state's homeschooling requirements were onerous.  Educating Germany, a website in English—though some links are to articles in German—in support of educational freedom in Germany, in which homeschooling your children is likely to result in having them forcibly removed from your home.
• Legislation, sausage...and textbooks.  Did you ever thumb through your child’s textbook and lament, “Who writes these things, anyway?”  Turns out that’s a dangerous as wondering what went into the hot dog you just swallowed.  More so, maybe.  A former editor at a major textbook publisher tells what you don’t want to know.

  I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don't have an author! I must sign someone today!"

Many years ago, Porter attended a course taught by Bill Oncken, which added at least two phrases to his vocabulary:  "Don't be a monkey-picker-upper," and "Feed it, or shoot it, but don't let it starve to death."  The first advises against meddling in tasks (monkeys) that don't belong to you, especially after you've delegated them.  The second requires you to work on tasks, or scrub them, but never let them languish.

I have a backblog of over 100 items about which I want to write—and that's only the ones in my bookmark list, which are less important than those on my mental list.  Flush from success with whacking my e-mail inbox from over 200 down to less than 30, I feel Bill Oncken's ghost hovering over my shoulder and challenging me to take on the backblog.

If these were real monkeys, the ASPCA would have had me arrested months ago.  Some of them have already died of starvation; all I must do is dispose of the bodies.  Some intrigued me at one time, but I now don't find them worth the time and effort; these I will happily execute with a click of the delete key.  Some remain healthy enough to go into a "priority pen" until they can be tended to properly...after I extend Oncken's options a step further:  I intend to take most of these monkeys and turn them loose to forage on their own.

Thus I am reviving my "Casting the Net" series, and you will see, in the coming days, posts with several short comments and associated links.  I hope to put in enough detail to enable readers to decide quickly whether it's a subject worth pursuing or ignoring, but you won't get the detailed commentary and quotations I normally like to include.

It's either that, or declare blog bankruptcy.

You'd think the apprehension of a brazen sex offender would be an unqualified cause for rejoicing, but the Swiss government is already being excoriated for nabbing Roman Polanski and holding him for possible extradition to the U.S.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, reactions to Polanski's arrest were swift and damning. France's minister of culture, Frederic Mittterrand, says he is "stupefied" and is demanding Polanski's immediate release. The country's highest officials are already talking to Swiss and U.S. officials in hopes of ending the detention, it was reported Sunday.

The Swiss Directors Association is also condemning the act, calling the arrest as "a grotesque farce of justice and an immense cultural scandal." Directors and actors worldwide have begun circulating petitions calling for Polanski's release.

I don't care how many film awards the man has won, nothing excuses the rape of a 13-year-old girl.  I don't mean he can't be forgiven, and I don't mean it's not understandable that a man might be driven onto dark paths following the spectacular and much-publicized murder of his wife and son.  There are mitigating circumstances that his lawyer could justifiably raise at his trial.  But why should he be exempt from justice because he is an artist, and famous?  And why should France, a country I love and respect in many ways, and of which Polanski is a citizen, wish to harbor a child molester?  That seems much more worthy of Europe's condemnation than the molester's incarceration.

Too much politics lately.   Time for something lighter.

Here's what looks like a Japanese game show where the contestants must wake up, get ready for school, and be out the door in less than five minutes.  That's just a guess—the only words I understood after "three, two, one, go!" were "bento" and "sandwich."  I love it for the reminders of Japan, and for the really cool lunch the mother makes for her child to take to school.  Note the Japanese way of quick shirt-folding.  Can any of my Japanese-speaking readers (all one and a half of you) tell me what on earth she is doing with the shirt? And why that would be part of a normal morning routine?

I never did understand brushing one's teeth before eating, though.

Until recently, Cairo had a refuse-collection system unlike any you'll find in the United States, but it worked—and might even be commended for its efficiency and environmental responsibility.  Cairo's households enjoyed free or inexpensive garbage collection, right from the door, by the zabaleen ("garbage people"), an impoverished community of Egyptian Christians living in an area of Cairo known as "Garbage City."   The collectors and their families then sorted the trash, reusing, repairing, and recycling what they could, and feeding the organic waste to their livestock, primarily pigs.

Sanitation workers do not generally enjoy high status anywhere, and the zabaleen are despised not only for their jobs, but also for their poverty, their religion, and their willingness to keep pigs as livestock.  However, as even American cities discover during a protracted sanitation strike, we do not do well to devalue other human beings, least of all those responsible for keeping us from suffocating in trash. 

In a misguided effort to stave off a swine flu epidemic, Egypt ordered that all the pigs be killed, even though the disease is not, in fact, spread by pigs.  By the law of unintended consequences, Cairo's citizens are now more vulnerable to disease than before.  The zabaleen no longer collect the trash, and the government's effort to replace them with multinational corporations has largely failed.  The poorest of the poor have lost their only livelihood as well as their source of food, and Cairo's streets overflow with filth.

I don't write this to belittle Egypt or the Egyptian government, but as a warning.  Our country has a problem:  Our healthcare system, once arguably the best in the world, is falling apart.  (We can disagree over the causes, or even the definition, of "falling apart," but that's not the point here.)  There's no shortage of wrangling over what the intended consequences of a federally-imposed health plan might be, but whatever shakes out of that debate, I fervently hope that we will consider the possible unintended consequences before killing off the pigs.

(Sources used for this post included The New York Times and Wikipedia.)

Today marks our Constitution's 222^nd birthday, in honor of which I present another depressing civics quiz.  The questions are drawn from the test prospective U.S. citizens must pass, and if these standards applied to all, apparently 97% of Oklahoma's public high school students would be in danger of losing their citizenship.  I'm sure no one is under any illusions that the problem is limited to Oklahoma.  Here are the questions; for the answers, and what percentage of the students surveyed answered each question correctly, see the original article.

1. What is the supreme law of the land?   
2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
4. How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?   
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
6. What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
8. We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
9. Who was the first President of the United States?
10. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

What I find interesting about this quiz is that, although I did get answer every question correctly, I would say few if any of my answers were due primarily to what I learned in school, but rather to merely living life.  When it comes to history and politics, I admit to being abysmally ignorant; I wangled my way out of Pennsylvania's required semester of American Government by taking an extra year of independent study physics.  (Don't ask me why they let me get away with that, but I trust the Statute of Limitations covers it somehow.)  I loathe politics in general and other than voting am shamefully neglectful of my civic duties.  Yet even with my notorious lack of observational skills, I couldn't avoid learning enough to pass the test.  Perhaps my additional years on this planet do count for something.

My Swiss family doesn't let me forget that "universal health care" does not necessarily mean a system like that in the United Kingdom.  For this I am grateful, because of the horror stories that keep emerging from that system, such as the cases of Charlotte Wyatt, Leslie Burke, Linda O'Boyle, Jayden Capewell, and too many others to write about.  It's worth looking at alternatives, and T. R. Reid's The Healing of America does just that.

I haven't read the book; my opinion is based on the New York Times review. There's much I don't agree with in the review, and I'm sure in the book also, but I like the gimmick:  Reid had shoulder problems that were interfering with his golf game, and he decided to present the case to 10 different doctors around the world.  The results?  (More)