A long while back I wrote a post about the Collins family:

When I was a kid, my mother and Mrs. Collins, the mother of an equally-aged girl named Lindsay used to take care of a lot of chores together and swap babysitting duties. Both Lindsay and I had fathers that worked at the Air Force Base and mothers that stayed at home. At the time I think we thought we had nothing in common because she was from Mars and I Jupiter (before the men take over Mars and the women migrate to Venus, the girls are from Mars because they’re superstars and the boys are from Jupiter because they’re stupider), but our backgrounds were nearly identical. Her brother Richie was in little league with my brothers Mitch and Ollie, and since they were all from Jupiter, even moreso.

Though our families aren’t as close as they once were, the Collins family throws an annual party on the weekend night before Christmas Eve . I attended this year and was reminded how meticulous the Collins household is. It is in many ways what one would think the perfect family would have. They have a complete Dickens library on the shelf. Beethoven’s works are on the piano. Christmas is more nativity scene and less Santa Claus. There is no television in the living room. The entire place feels like it was geared towards young human development the way that all the experts say that they should be developed. As near as I can tell, that’s the only difference between the Collinses and Trumans, and it speaks better of the former.

The Collins stopped having their annual Christmas Party a few years ago (in fact, the one mentioned there may have been the last one). What used to be a rather full plate of Christmas Eve parties has dwindled and their was actually a good chance for me to see a bunch of old schoolmates and get caught up. I was sad to see it go.

The real tragedy of the Collins family, however, was what happened to their kids (explained in the above-linked post). The daughter joined a religious cult. The son moved hundreds and hundreds of miles away and broke off contact entirely. Upon returning home, I heard that Richie and his parents reconciled. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. Less than six months after that (just recently), he died. He was 38. I can only imagine how grateful they are that they were able to reconcile before his death. But before the reconciliation, and before his death, there was at least the potential of reconciliation and life.

According to BBC, Brazil’s economy has overtaken that of the UK:

CEBR chief executive Douglas McWilliams told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Brazil overtaking the UK was part of a growing trend.

“I think it’s part of the big economic change, where not only are we seeing a shift from the west to the east, but we’re also seeing that countries that produce vital commodities - food and energy and things like that - are doing very well and they’re gradually climbing up the economic league table,” he said.
Continue reading the main story
Brazilian economy

A report based on International Monetary Fund data published earlier this year also said the Brazilian economy would overtake the UK in 2011.

Brazil has a population of about 200 million, more than three times the population of the UK.

The first job I had in Estacado was helping the state CPS move its computer systems. I was one of only two white boys on the crew of a dozen or so. Most were Hispanic. One of them was a Mexican-American who was trying to learn Portugese. I asked him why, when he was already bilingual in such a useful language. He said that Brazil was where it was at in South America and that there was a real need.

When I thought about it, it made sense. Brazil’s sheer size is important, of course. But I had another datapoint of interest. Back when I was in Colosse looking for work, I kept seeing what could only be described as the perfect job. Except, after having read and salivated over the job description and requirements, they would include a sentence at the end “Must be fluent in Portugese.” Aside from the frustration to putting at the end what should have been at the beginning, I found it odd that Portugese of all languages was the one barring me for a job. Spanish, I could understand. But Portugese?

This is an old article, but I ran across it because I googled the subject, seeing yet another picture of Vlad Putin and thinking that he must have had plastic surgery.

How a professional screw-up gave an engineer a criminal record.

There is no disputing this statistic.

Apparently, Europe is not in a mess because the Greeks and Spanish are lazy. They work harder than the Germans.

A sperm donor is told to… errr… abstain, or face $100k fine.

How Ethiopian adoption industry is duping families and bullying activists.

I don’t want to hear any more about how carriers are complacent in thwarting mobile phone thieves. Let them be complacent! The alternative may be to refuse to activate any phone that they don’t personally sell you. It’d solve the problem and cost customers more money than stolen phones ever will.

From Bakadesuyo, the always popular question: Do young women prefer jerks or nice guys?

Deconstructing the temper tantrum.

We’re exporting Japanese cars to South Korea.

I’m at place that I didn’t know was legal in the city of Colosse or the state of Delosa: A coffee and tobacco bar. Smoking has been banned from most public establishments for at least half a decade now. But here I am and here it is.

Doing a little research, there was some movement to allow for hookah places. For some reason, this was viewed differently than good old fashioned cigarettes. In an effort to be worldly and tolerant, the city chose to allow it. But not cigarettes. That was, apparently a bridge too far. Treating cigarettes as being particularly pernicious as far as tobacco goes is nothing new, of course. But the frame of mind is striking and a reminder that smoker demographics is at least partially a driver behind anti-smoking regs. It’s one thing to tell the imagined stereotypical smoker to beat it, but some of the same people that are more than happy to do that feel kind of bad when it starts seeming intolerant towards other cultures. I still need to write my extended piece on smoking policy, but that’ll have to wait.

Anyhow, it didn’t take long before they decided “okay, we’ll go ahead and let people smoke cigarettes within these small parameters, too. Smoking (cigarettes or otherwise) in tobacco shops was legal, but until recently it was not allowed in places that sold other things (such as alcohol or, in this case, coffee).

It’s actually kind of a neat atmosphere here. You have a fair number of South Asians and Middle Easterners (”Sammies”) here (the Mayne area having notable populations of each). A girl in front of me is playing the violin. A few stoner kids (18, I would assume, though they don’t look it…) are sharing a hookah to my right. At the “bar” area are some good ole boys. The last time I was here there was a black man chatting with them. The Sammies are half-cigarette, half-hookah smokers. The guys at the bar or cigarettes. Periodically a couple middle aged guys come in with (or buy from the store) cigars.

You could totally use this place as a setting for a Cheers-like program, if you could get Lowe’s to keep from pulling its advertisements.

Anyhow, this reminds me of one of the things that really is remarkable about smoking in this country, at least historically: it manages to bring people from all sorts of walks of like together. In a lung-destructive way, to be sure, but in a way that few other things due. And anti-smoking regs helped put all of these people together. A CEO smoking side-by-side with dockworker. Good Ole Boys at the bar talking to young Indian-American men at the table, in this case.

It’s something we’re losing, of course, as tobacco use gets a class marker. Eventually it will be more like Deseret, where the smoker’s circle consisted mostly of the insurgent non-LDS population. Even there, you had born-against next to atheists. But in Deseret, as long as you’re not a Mormon, you have something significant in common with everybody who isn’t a Mormon (even if some of them believe that others of them are hell-bound). But this represents a renaissance of sorts. The CEO long left the smokers’ dock at my former employer. Smoking (cigarettes) increasingly becomes something poor people do. But maybe hookah will provide something people are more reluctant to criticize so acrimoniously.

Postscript: The funny thing is that I am not here because it is a “smoking coffee shop,” but rather because it has better coffee than the other place and much, much better hours (fantastic hours for suburbia). Even here, I go outside to smoke. I’ve apparently been conditioned against smoking indoors even where it is allowed. Actual bars may be an exception, and I would make an exception if it were a hundred degrees or zero degrees outside. But it’s pleasant out. And maybe bad weather wouldn’t make a difference. Yesterday I smoked outside in the rain under the insufficient canopy outside.

I believe Apple when they say that the abortion clinic thing was unintentional. The real question to me is… would they approve of an app that lets parents know that their kids are looking for an abortion clinic?

I’ve pondered switching to e-cigarettes. I fear this bodes ill for that ever happening. I’d never smoke it in the workplace, but I fear before all is said and done, e-cigarettes will be made just as inconvenient as the regular kind. Not because they’re remotely as bothersome, but because the war on tobacco has become so punitive in nature.

Rural America is fighting back against a proposed Department of Labor regulation that would hinder the ability of young people to work on farms.

A look at who is dropping out of the labor force. Also, is it a good sign that people are quitting their jobs?

St. Louis disbanded the occupiers in the right way. There are some things the police across the country have taken grief for, but far too many were excessively confrontation. The only counterpoint is whether the missteps of others made the St. Louis occupiers know what the alternative to evacuation was.

The occupiers, meanwhile, are looking at occupying homes with faulty foreclosures (or allegedly faulty foreclosures). If they target the right houses, I think this could be a worthwhile project. But they’d better be sure, otherwise they are disrupting the proper eviction of deadbeats.

Step 1: Bring back the wooly mammoth. Step 2: Find out how they taste.

If the government was putting guns in the hands of bad guys in order to track them and learn about the flow of illegal guns, that’s one thing. If they did it to make a political argument, that’s inexcusable.

An interesting view of the Occupy Movement, from China.

Is Verizon throwing in the towel on FiOS?

Someone who owes somebody some money used to have our phone number (assuming they didn’t choose it at random). We no longer answer calls from “Toll Free” because I’m tired of being pestered by Mike Huckabee and Steve Forbes about this or that (I guess an upside of his run for the presidency is that I used to get pestered by Newt Gingrich and don’t anymore). Historically, none of them ever left a message. But the debt collectors are starting to. They call about twice a day.

The message goes something like “This call is for Jane Jones. If this is not Jane Jones, please hand up now. This involves debt collection and if you are not Jane Jones and you do not hang up, you are guilty of violating federal confidentiality laws.”

Of course, my answering machine doesn’t hang up. So, it’s a felon. I guess I am, too, since I have listened to the message all the way through. Oddly, there’s nothing after the stern warning that tells me anything that I didn’t already know from before the warning except for the name of the debt collection agency and the 1-800 number to call in order to pay up. But you know, that would actually be a helpful thing to tell me before the warning, if only so that I can call them back and let them know that Jane Jones can no longer be reached at this number. If I call back, though, they will know that I listened longer than I should have (and that my answering machine and I are both felons).

I do actually question what legal liability, if any, I would have here. I can’t imagine that it is any. Or any of significance. I’ve read that those disclaimers at the bottom of emails saying “If you are not the intended recipient, you are legally bound to delete this email and pretend that you never read it.” And that has a stronger case than the phone messages, since at least they don’t presume I am going to not read it (or, in the case of phone messages, listen to it).

So no doubt it’s just a matter of covering their posteriors in case they get sued for some confidentiality breach.

Anyway, one of these days I will answer the phone and let them know about Ms. Jones. I already fielded some debt collection calls shortly after we moved in for somebody else. After the second or third time, they stopped calling. These calls from “California State Debt Collection*” have been going on for several weeks now.

* - This debt collection agency - not actually named CSDC - has a very official-sounding name. I think it might be supposed to make it sound more serious. You’re not dealing with a debt collection agency, you’re dealing with a government agency. Even if it’s not a government you actually live in the jurisdiction of. It’s kind of clever, when you think about it.

By brother Mitch got my father a book about a national championship football season of Dad’s University of Ouachita Warthogs football team that culminated in a great bowl game.

I got my father a DVD of the bowl game in particular.

Dad was impressed that we worked together to get such complimentary gifts. It was, however, completely a coincidence. Mitch and I shared a look that it would be better, and Dad happier, if he thought we worked together on it.

While anything that talks about “superiority” and “German” is inherently unnerving, I thought this insight on German reunification was fascinating.

An unbelievably cool tool that lets you see the impact of a meteor hitting the earth. And you get to choose the size, density, distance, and trajectory of the meteor!

Rod Dreher writes of hate as an element of style. Dreher brings up several good points about the obnoxiousness of it all.. and yet how we are better off for their existence.

Joel Kotkin continues to fight the good fight against the meme that people are fed up with suburbia.

A curious pair of statistics: smokers outearn non-smokers in their first job, but nonsmokers’ wages grow much fast.

An interesting look at who’s dropping out of the labor force.

How doctors approach death.

Reporters are credulous, studies show.

How to make your Windows PC boot faster.

The most expensive street drunk in Tacoma. Total tab: Approximatly $2,407,100.

I am in a hotel near the airport of Deseret’s capital city. I was supposed to be flying back to Colosse today, but things did not work out as planned. After a few hours in the car driving down here, I was informed that the first leg of my flight was postponed due to weather. That postponement would mean that I would miss my connecting flight. No other flights, on any other airlines, were going to get me to Colosse. And because it was an “Act of God” I would not get lodging for the night. So I type this from a hotel room.

What’s particularly annoying is that I paid for extra legroom for the flight down and according to the contract, I won’t be getting that money back. Also, I prepaid for checked luggage. Tomorrow, I will have to pay for my checked luggage again.

It’s well documented, and not an altogether negative thing, that airlines are keeping their fares low by nickel and diming. I say that this is not an altogether negative thing because it makes sense for people who bring along extra stuff and want extra legroom to pay more. However, while they are required to make alternate arrangements for Acts of God to get passengers to their destination, and not upcharge you for the ability to do so, I guess they get a pass on the nickel and diming.

Either that or the lady behind the counter really hated me and none of the above is true.

Imagine yourself in a coffeehouse, book store, or some other third place. A man who appears to be in his late-twenties walks up to you and says, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, but do you have a cell phone?” Do you:

(a) Say “buzz off”

(b) Say yes, suspiciously.

(c) Say yes and ask why without suspicion.

(d) Say “go away”

(e) Say yes, grab your cell phone, and hand it to the stranger.

My answer, I must confess, would be (b). I wouldn’t lie or be so rude as to tell them to buzz off, but I guess I am just suspicious of strangers walking up and asking me something like that. It’s not necessarily a rational thing, but once I did loan my cell phone to a stranger when they proceeded to use it for twenty minutes trying to get a hold of somebody. I wasn’t in a hurry, but my plan was not to hang around where I was for twenty minutes. Then being the villain anyway for asking for my phone back before they were quite done.

I was the late-twenties guy (I’m not in my late twenties, but I look like I am) and asked that to a guy at a coffee shop in Redstone. He went with (e), though before he could actually give me the cell phone I told him what I was wanting (”Could you call my cell phone? I can’t find it.”). He called the cell and proceeded to walk around the coffee shop and help me find it.

It’s not unlike back when I was living in Deseret. Shortly before I left Colosse, my car was broken into and a few thousand dollars worth of stuff was taken from my car (it’s a long story as to why I had a few thousand dollars worth of stuff in my car). I called the Colosse PD, who couldn’t have been less interested if they had tried. I had to basically force them to take the serial number of my laptop in the event that it resurfaced at a pawn shop.

Flash forward to Deseret and I left my jacket somewhere. In my jacket was a checkbook. A couple months later, someone wrote a check to a pizza delivery place with said checkbook. I’d already canceled the account that the checkbook was cancelled to (something I had intended to do anyway, since the bank had no branches in Deseret) but the loss of my last checkbook expedited matters. Anyhow, the pizza delivery place sicked the credit collection dogs on me. In order to get out of it, I had to file an affidavit.

I apologized to the detective for taking up his time. But his response couldn’t have been more different from the Colosse PD’s. He got a subpoena for the cameras for the day in question. They didn’t have that, so he interviewed employees there. He gave me updates every two or three days. I didn’t stop him because I was interested in retrieving the jacket if it was at all possible. After about a week, he apologetically said that he had burned all leads.

Of course, we can ask “What else would a detective in small-town Deseret actually do with his time?” No doubt, there is some truth to this. But I became acquainted with the Detective over time because he lead a handful of drug arrests at the apartment complex I was living at. He was not an unimportant guy. Flash forward a little later after my car had been broken into and the culprit arrested, a DA visited me personally to ask if the plea bargain they had worked out was okay with me or if they should pursue it to the maximum extent of the law (I told her the plea bargain was fine).

One of the natural inclinations that, when I substitute teach, is not to put myself in the class. What I mean is, if I have a middle school class (for instance), I can usually guess half way through any period where I would fit in within the class’s dynamic. These are the students who would torture me. Those are the students who would be my friends. Those are the students who would unfortunately be my friends. Those are the students who would be kind but distant. That right there is the fat girl who would make fun of my weight to ingratiate herself with the popular-mean-nonfat girls. At the end of the day I do my write-up, and I should not mention - or fail to mention - a student on the basis of how I would expect they would have treated me at my middle school.

It’s a little different with the grade school kids because the social patterns aren’t all set yet. The notion of “I can’t be friendly with you because then other kids won’t like me” hasn’t fully set in yet outside of less than a handful of toxic individuals. I was actually a little surprised by this despite the fact that it matches up with my grade school experience. I remember a couple of kids at West Oak Elementary getting a really hard time, but it was rather an exception. I had previously thought that I had glossed this over because I wasn’t on the receiving end of much of it myself. But I am coming around to the idea of social patterns not having formed.

To jump back to middle school and high school and the inclination I have to resist, I guess it goes back to that saying that you graduate from the public school system but you never really leave it. The social patterns that establish themselves there long outlive their original context. I remember Eva saying that she and a previous boyfriend were having a hard time relating to one another because he was super-popular in school and she wasn’t. It sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Yet I am not sure it is. When your perception on that place that you spent seven hours a day for thirteen years of your life is so different, you can approach everything social with different assumptions. The justice of schoolground popularity, for instance. More basically, whether or not you can assume that people will like you.

Now, the older you get, the less all of this matters. But it does matter straight up through marriage. I don’t consider it a coincidence that all of the major romantic interests in my life have ranged from not-particularly-popular to unpopular. The friends through which you meet the person you marry are often (though not always) going to be people that you meet and become friends with while you labor under whatever impressions you have of your interactions with other people that you got from school. This isn’t set in stone (my brother Mitch was not-particularly-popular in high school but became Mr. Social in college), but it’s a general tendency I have seen.

All of this being really horrifying, when you think about it. Our social expectations being derived at a time when social alliances have no consequences beyond social standing. When being useful isn’t socially useful, for the most part. When being smart doesn’t help. When following the rules doesn’t help (and can hurt). These are the seeds from which our self-perceptions are often planted.

When talking about outsourcing our brains to google, it’s worth noting that knowledge makes you a better googler.

The return of the laugh-track. There’s actually a lot of interesting info in the article about the process. Not just the… editing… but also how they choose their studio audience. On Married With Children, for example, they’d pack the audience with Marines and other service members. For Dear John, they got divorcees.

The earliest ads for Amazon.com were based on the premise that Amazon had an insane number of books and so where did they put them? Well, here is the answer.

It’s commonly discussed around here that women are more likely to initiate divorce than men. Why? Well, one reason could be that divorce is most likely to be instigated by the parent that will get custody of the children. The data is a bit dated. That being said, it’s noteworthy that in the couple of cases I am familiar with where the man left the woman (and there were children involved), the father got primary custody. I wonder what the numbers look like for childless couples? Also, some data suggesting that more lax divorce laws led to a decline in females murdered by their partners.

It’s commonly argued that teacher quality has declined over time, but it’s not necessarily true.

Ways to inflate your IQ.

Seriously, why did anyone ever think this would not only be a good idea, but would sell for $100? I would say something about how they must not have seen ebooks coming, but it looks like ebooks predate these things. Sometimes I think companies come up with something to confuse the technologically illiterate holiday buyers trying to figure out something to get for their wiz-kid grandson.

The glory of the original Atari logo.

Parks & Recreation: The sitcom that actually loves Middle America.

Why the intro to Batman: The Animated Series, is the best opening sequence ever. A scene-by-scene analysis.

Much of last week was spent on computer stuff. It was a bad week, some of it my own fault and some of it not. The main goals were to (1) assemble and get a new PC up and running and (2) install a new SSD hard drive on one of the laptops. Though assembling a PC can be fraught with hazard and it’s a pain to go through and reinstall everything, it all should have been pretty straightforward. But nothing that was supposed to go right went right.

I expected that I might order a wrong part due to carelessness, or that I might forget to plug something in and freak out when the computer doesn’t boot like it should, but neither of these things happened.

Instead, things started happening everywhere else in the constellation. The laptop that was plugged in to the TV downstairs stopped working. The laptop I assigned to replace it wouldn’t do the one and only thing I really needed it to do: play video. So the laptop I had to use was the one I wanted to put the new hard drive in. So before I could get to that, I had to format and restore the one that wouldn’t play video (the typical things, such as installing new codecs and drivers, didn’t work). Then, after having taken the PC I am replacing apart, one of my other PCs started acting funky and was no longer reliable. That meant placing a last minute order for a new power supply as I had isolated that to be the problem.

Everything with the new PC worked except for the high-falutin’ video card. Except, it being a new PC, I didn’t know the video card was the problem. So I had to run all sorts of tests to isolate that as the problem. In my investigations, I discovered that the video card wouldn’t work through a DVI-VGA adapter, which meant that even if it did work, it wouldn’t do what I needed it to do without a new monitor and KVM switch. But even accounting for that, the card still didn’t work. I called tech support and was on hold for four hours before giving up, leading me to question their “24/7 commitment to customer support.”

Then, the power supply I ordered didn’t fit into the machine I ordered it for. It was the right size, so it wasn’t an obvious mistake on my part. However, to get to the place where there was room for it, I had to go through a place where there wasn’t enough room to get it through. There may be a way to remove one of the offending bars, but it’s going to be a pain.

Note, while video cards and power supplies can be cheap, these weren’t. They cost $110 and $150 respectively. Oh, and I discovered that because of the pure awesomeness of the motherboard I got, having a 4-slot video card wasn’t even necessary because the mobo would let me use the PCIE card in conjunction with the mobo card.

So then on to the laptops. The F&R on the video-problemed laptop went smoothly until I installed a piece of “updater software” that updated everything from “working” to “not working”, forcing me to start again from stratch.

And the new SSD HD didn’t work. It took me several hours to figure that out (to rule out the possibility that the problem could be anything else).

Then, out of nowhere, the initial laptop that failed causing me to play the 3-card monty with my laptops suddenly started working perfectly again. I mean, a working laptop is better than a non-working laptop, but it rendered a lot of what I had been working on unnecessarily.

With the exception of a desktop sitting on the sidelines for lack of a power supply, and the inability to see video on one of my other desktops (I can still access it through Remote Desktop), things are working okay.

It does make me wonder a little - only a little - if there isn’t something to the whole notion of having “a computer” instead of “thirteen computers.”

On the other hand, throughout all of this I never lacked for a computer no matter what I did. Even on the PC downstairs, if I had really been adamant I could have hooked the Pentium Vista computer up and still been able to watch something. So it was and does remain nice that short of a nuclear bomb, I always have something.

It’s for alcoholism and suicidal threats. Anyone? This is time-sensitive.

You might think I’d be good at telling people what to do, given what I do for a living, but it’s different when you’re not being paid to give advice. And in my job, I make a big point of (acting like I’m) not judging people. Plus I don’t really have the moral upper hand — I’d hate to quit drinking. Just thinking about this made me drink. I’m friends with this person probably in part because we both like to drink.

By way of demographics, it’s a guy, of course. A not-unexpected outgrowth of this.

If you want someone to be your friend, get them to do you a favor.

How does it not occur to somebody that using medical records for scrap paper is a bad idea?

Alex Knapp schools us on the seduction, and limits, of the exponential curve.

When Southern Tech (a large public university) and Piermont (a well-to-do private one) played their rivalry game this year, there was some cross-forum smack-talking between the fans of each. Not just about our teams, but our universities. I’m not going to get into what they call us (it involves our school’s racial demographics), but my knock on them is that “Well, some school has to educate those who won’t have a job at Daddy’s firm when they graduate.” It’s a cheap shot, but maybe not that far off-base.

This look at American-European values and how they conflict should surprise no one.

A magic trick that reveals unconscious knowledge.

My only exposure to the BitCoin is when one of my computers got absolutely hammered by some malware that apparently had the objective of stealing bitcoins from my computer, should I get any. Or something like that. Why anyone thought this would work, I do not know. I’m not sure I would bet on this, either.

This is a video on a $25 computer that plays high-definition video. Naturally, it doesn’t come with much attached.

It seems to me that the press does not know what to do when a prevailing narrative no longer fits. So when suddenly the pastoral, declining landscape of the Great Plains is booming, they don’t know how exactly to cover it. So they find a way to turn it into a negative. I am not slow to call bias on coverage of everything between the coasts (outside of Chicago), but I think this is more of a narrative issue than a coastal bias (or liberal bias) one.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about the deification of Steve Jobs is that he will give bosses an excuse to be a jerk for the forseeable future. They’re not being an arse. They’re being like Steve Jobs. It’s not unlike the managers at the places I have worked that read these business books and then only remember the most self-serving stuff. I remember one boss (boss’s boss, actually) who was a die-hard fan of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Then I actually read the book and discovered that his evangelism was… selective… in nature.

A story from a couple years ago about NBA players going back to college. Oklahoma State’s quarterback is actually a former professional baseball player. Interesting factoids: The average annual salary in the N.B.A. is $5.85 million, and players are generally secure in the near term. Their retirement years can be completely different. An estimated 60 percent of N.B.A. players are broke within five years of retiring, and 78 percent of N.F.L. players are bankrupt or under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce within two years. If the players unions really wanted my support, they would be coming up with a lifetime payment plan so that the money they make from their careers is more modest, but lasts a lot longer.

The New York Times has a good piece on the rise in audiobooks. Now that I have them set up on my smartphone, they’re hard to go without.

I had a kindergarten class today. It was a relatively light day, as far as academics go. The afternoon was spent with a Christmas “play” (more like a recital, but they called it a play). The rest of the day was spent with Christmas books and a couple short movies. Almost none of them involved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

This was a problem.

Because over and over again, in any picture book or movie that showed the reindeer without Rudolph, the same response occurred: “WHERE’S RUDOLPH?!?!?!?!?!” My options of explaining this were three:

(1) Rudolph is a registered property of some media rights company and so any story where Rudolph appears must therefore pay this company money. In an effort to make their product less expensive and therefore enjoyed by a larger number of people, writers and producers of Christmas material where Rudolph does not play an integral part will leave Rudolph out of it. This, of course, diminished the enjoyment of the story for kindergarteners everywhere. So tell your parents to write your congressman in opposition to future copyright extensions so that eventually Rudolph can be more widely enjoyed by children such as yourself.

Pros: Accurate and potentially motivating young people for political involvement.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about.

(2) Think of it as though there are multiple parallel dimensions. What takes place in one universe does not necessarily take place in others. For instance, in this story, there are talking bears and wolves. As we know, in our dimension, bears and wolves don’t talk (and are more likely to attack one another than be best buddies). So, while Rudolph may exist in the world of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he does not necessarily exist in this world of talking bears or wolves or this other world where dogs talk to one another in various accents.

Pros: Concedes the possible existence of Rudolph and places the context of the story within the storybook worlds where they are being told.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about. Except the words “Rudolph doesn’t exist.” They will understand that part.

(3) Rudolph is dead.

Pros: Short and to the point.

Cons: Will make kindergarteners cry.

(4) This story takes place before Rudolph was the lead reindeer. Remember how, at the beginning of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer how Rudolph wasn’t a part of the sled team? This story is like that.

Pros: Does not foreclose existence of Rudolph (and therefore Santa), comparatively short and to the point with an example they may be able to understand.

Cons: Kids have an incomplete understanding of “before” and “after.” Plus, if for instance there are only two reindeer, they will wonder why only two were necessary at the time of the story but Rudolph was one of several. Coming up with an explanation of how union regulations requires the hiring of more reindeer, or how animal rights advocates insisted on it, would require a greater understanding of the real world than kindergarteners are likely to have.

I went with #4, though left out the part about union regulations and instead opted for an explanation that the story took place when there were less people (errr, bear-people) and therefore less presents required carrying and therefore fewer reindeer were required.

To get to a more serious point, this actually is indicative to me of the problem of indefinite copyrights. Rudolph has extended beyond something that some guy made up for Montgomery Ward and into a cultural icon. Not even a pop culture icon, but a through-and-through cultural one. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate that Santa Claus himself wasn’t invented under the current copyright regime.

(To any kindergarteners reading this blog, that last part is a joke. Because, of course, nobody invented Santa Claus!)

A while back, Katie Alison Granju wrote about Tennessee changing its divorce by way of court decree forbidding judges from forbidding “sleep-overs” between a parent and significant other, post-divorce. Granju isn’t sure what to think:

As for me, I admit that I’m kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I do struggle with a deep-seated, somewhat kneejerk distaste for the idea of kids waking up to mom or dad’s latest hook-up reading the sportspages in the breakfast nook. Additionally, I don’t think that a parent who has gone through the hell of seeing his or her marriage end in whole or in part due to infidelity should have to endure the secondary pain of begging a judge to keep the third party in the marital break-up from spending the night in a home where the children are present.

But on the other hand, a blanket ban is clearly discriminatory toward gay parents, who have no ability to marry their romantic partners in Tennessee, and thus, under a blanket ban they wouldbe de facto barred from ever again having a meaningful family relationship with another adult until the children were grown and gone. Plus, I’m kind of with the libertarians on this one in that I don’t want the courts telling me how to raise my kids and run my household unless and until I clearly demonstrate that my behavior is causing real harm to my offspring.

I find the reasoning in the second paragraph to be a little weak. This isn’t about an automatic ban, but rather one that a judge can issue or not issue. Presumably, a gay couple would be more likely to say “live and let live” since neither one of them can marry (in Tennessee, at any rate, at the present time). It’s straight couples, where marriage is at least an option, where one partner or the other might say “You/we can wait until we’re remarried.”

But it is an interesting question and I guess in the overall I am similarly conflicted. Bans can be enforced if the other parent can prove some specific harm, but it’s hard to prove harm without making divorce proceedings much more acrimonious than they would already be. “My soon-to-be former spouse is a slut, your honor.” or even better, “My ex-husband has demonstrated a history of having bad taste in women. Uhmm, except me!”

One of the thoughts that comes to my mind is that such a ban is convenient to ask for in the event that one side or the other remarries quickly. You know, if maybe they already had their spouse picked out before the papers were files. It would strike me as a double-whammy for a cheater to turn around and say “No sleepovers until you are re-married like I am now!”

On the other hand, in cases of joint custody, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say “Hey, you can have the sleepovers when the kids are at the other parents’ house.” Of course, that only works if the kids bounce back and forth. It becomes a little more complicated when one does have the kids around almost all of the time.

I think I lean slightly in favor of allowing sleepovers absent the demonstration of harm of one sort or another. I can think of instances where I would not want it to happen, but the scenarios are so variable and diverse that I am not sure how much faith I would have in a judge correctly sussing it out.

An obvious link that hadn’t occurred to me: our levels of incarceration hurt our mobility. People in jail can’t leave, of course, but there are other reasons as well. Richard Florida also writes about the make-up of “Stuck America.”

A look at Stanford’s free online education experiment.

ED Kain argues that America needs 1Gbps Internet in every home. I honestly don’t think that top speeds are the issue. The primary issue is reliability. Both in terms of having it available everywhere and in reliability of speed. The maximum speed is just a number. The average speed is more helpful. The minimum speed during periods of high usage is the most important thing.

The story of a woman who jokingly tried to sell her husband on eBay.

I love this! We should use landfill junk to expand Manhattan.

An interesting story on the link between video game playing and creativity. Kudos to the article for not conflating correlation with causation (it wouldn’t be surprising if more creative people were attracted to video games in the first place). The fact that computers and the Internet were “unrelated to creativity” is itself interesting, as these things are supposed to be the death knell to creativity compared to reading Dickens, locked in chains, in a basement.

What law schools can learn from Zappos!

Half Sigma likes to talk about how unhealthy marathoning is. Could cardio exercise itself be a problem?

I agree with the “weirdly sinister” description of this 1967 IBM ad that Jim Henson put together.

Should antivirus companies be allowed to overlook spyware put on your computer by the police? I find this question refreshing, as I fear the question may ultimately become: Should they be allowed not to overlook it?

Also, to what degree should police be allowed to use license plate readers? I’m having trouble coming up with a good libertarian argument against this, other than just a vague sense that the government should not be able to track us so easily. But the expectation of privacy on where you drive your publicly-registered vehicle has to be pretty minimal.

So in 1999, a federal judge ruled that police can bar people with high IQs from becoming police officers. From a constitutional standpoint, this makes sense. And in a way, I guess it’s personality profiling. But once this makes its way to the courts, what police force wants to defend the policy that cops shouldn’t be too smart? It’s a series of jokes that write themselves.

Up until about the eighth grade, the first semester ended about two weeks after we returned from Christmas vacation. Then, some law was passed that allowed school to begin earlier in the year. A few days off and inservice days were shifted to the Spring, and the semesters were separated by winter break. Shortly after I graduated high school, there were grumblings that the school year was starting too soon. The local theme parks and other summer-fun places were complaining that they were left with only a little more than a couple months of business. So they tried to pass another law forcing districts to wait until September to start school. Education experts, in turn, argued that starting the semester earlier in the year was problematic because it would require splitting up the first semester again, which was problematic because of the brain drain that occurs over those two or so weeks.

As I read about this debate, I scratched my head. First, if they forget it over two weeks, then they never really learned it. Second, though, if we’re worried about what happens over two weeks, what about the two to three months of summer?! One of the frustrations for K-12 for me was that how it seemed that half of each year was spent reminding us of what we had learned over the previous year and forgotten over the summer (except that I didn’t forget, which made it even more frustrating). I was reminded of this when I read the following snipit from Reihan Salam’s piece on education:

Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist President Obama tapped to serve as his chief economic adviser, co-authored an important paper with Molly Fifer in 2006 on summer learning loss. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at a big skills disadvantage in early grades, but that gap grows with each passing year. One reason is that while middle-class kids take part in enriching activities during the summer, ranging from camp to stimulating conversations with educated parents, poor kids are far less likely to do so. With that in mind, Krueger and Fifer called for a program of summer opportunity scholarships paying for enrichment programs during long vacations. It’s an excellent idea that should be pursued.

But what we really need is a cultural shift in which all of us take more responsibility for our education. We are not empty vessels into which credentialed professionals ladle knowledge. Rather, we are a special kind of animal uniquely good at learning through imitation and practice. Somehow we need to find better ways to capitalize on this fact — inside school walls and outside as well.

Or, of course, we could eliminate and/or divide out the “long vacations.”

There are a few arguments against this one. The theme park lobby being one of them. They like having things condensed in a way that allows them to concentrate all of their business over a short period of time (though, apparently, there is such a thing as “too short”). And a lot of leisure activities are season-specific (beaches, for instance). The fall and spring, where at least a few weeks of vacation would be harbored, can be too cold for outdoor swimming (where applicable) but too warm for playing in the snow (where applicable).

The second argument is that a lot of schools up north are not cut out for summers. They have non-existent or insufficient air conditioning. Which strikes me as insane no matter where you live. I hear this in particular about the northeast and that just strikes me as bizarre. They brag about how much money they spend on schools, but don’t shell out for adequate air conditioning systems?

The last argument is that summer school is necessary for some kids to get caught up.

In any event, I am unmoved by these arguments when you consider the degree of brain-drain that does occur over the summer. The third is the only really problematic one, to me. For the students that fall behind, I think the solution to that is with a quarter system where some classes over some quarters are repeated. While useful for shorthand, I think that overall the tendency to delineate too much by “grade level” is problematic. I would prefer more of an assessment/promotion approach on a class-by-class basis. So if we did go to a year-around system, I would support other changes occurring at the same time. Up to and including allowing families to pull their kids out of school for family trips, in the event that the months-off are staggered between the school. Staggering months-off could also go a ways towards alleviating the Disneyland problem.

As for the air conditioner problem, buck up and pay for it.

A minor pet peeve in TV shows. For various reasons, they often use fictitious entities like universities and sports teams. I know why they do it and I don’t mind at all (says the guy who fictionalized the entire United States of America). But if you’re going to do this, jot down the name of the entity you created and use it in the future.

I’m watching an episode of Cold Case, where they have a fictitious Penn University. Not to be confused with the University of Pennsylvania, which they used in a previous episode (I think in that case it was referring to the real Penn). Having these two coexist doesn’t sit entirely right, but I wouldn’t make waves about it. What does bug me, though, is that Penn U’s mascot is the Jaguars. That bothers me because another episode had a Pennsylvania University with a mascot of the Warriors.

People. It’s a single show. This is not like asking DC Comics, with its dozens and dozens of titles under scores of writers/artists, to keep things straight.

Las Vegas was also really bad about this. UNLV existed in that show, but then they would have “Nevada State University” (there is a Nevada State College - little more than a community college - but no NSU) in a plot involving a crooked card-counting professor. Then, a season later, they had Las Vegas State University. This isn’t quite as bad as the above since NSU, LVSU, and UNLV can all co-exist, but would it have been too much to ask them to dip into the same well when they needed a fictional U?

On the other hand, Law & Order, despite spanning several shows, was actually decent about using the same universities repeatedly. They were less good about sports teams, however. giving New York two additional basketball programs.