You have GOT to be kidding me…

Anybody that knows me now knows I am really big on math and math education. I have three girls and I drill math all the time. I have always thought their education was my responsibility and if they learn something at school, that’s great. But whether they do or not, what they eventually end up learning, I have either taught them or allowed them to learn.  I try to watch their test scores and homework  to monitor this but now I am realizing that it’s not just the test scores and homework, it’s the whole concept of the curriculum. If I thought this were the shit that my kids were being taught, I would turn the whole board of education building into a hotdog stand. I intend to look a WHOLE lot deeper into the issue really soon. This is a 15+ minute video but if you have kids in school you really should watch it. If you are a teacher, I’d love to hear your feedback – positive or negative, on it. I really would love to hear from a supporter of this stuff to try to wrap my mind around why anyone thinks this is a good idea.

Now, let me make a couple of things clear. I understand the concept of some of this stuff. I even USE a variation of some of this stuff. For instance: In the problem 133/6, mentally, I thought, “6 will go into 120, 20 times. 13 left over. 6 will go into 13 2 times and have 1 left over. Answer: 22.1667.

By trade, I am an engineer. I do not have an engineering degree so I am not a degreed engineer but it is what I do for a living and have done for the better part of 25 years. I have taught myself everything above 11th grade math. I use calculators on a regular basis but I have found that knowing the multiplication tables to 20 and the squares of 1 – 20 have served me very well to do most math in my head. My standard precision on a problem is to the 1/1000 place. In my line of work, I think in 1/1000 – not fractions so I automatically convert fractions to 3 or 4 decimal places. I can take a tape measure and tell you what the force of a hydraulic or air cylinder is to a precision that is negated by the coefficient of friction of the material used in the seal on the piston. In my head. I ain’t braggin’ – I’m just sayin’: I know a thing or two about learning math. Some of what was in that video are tricks I taught myself after I learned the basics of mathematics. The important thing to consider here is that for a 20 or 30 or 40 year old guy to learn this stuff is one thing; but to try to get a 9 or 10 year old kid to learn the mental shortcuts BEFORE he even understands the basic concepts is bullshit on an unimaginable scale.

My problem with math education has always been that it starts out WAY too abstract. Word problems are made out to be some type of demon for kids. But in reality, all math starts out AS a word problem. I want to buy 2 6-packs of beer at $5.95 per pk. and I need to know if that is more than $11.75 per 12 pack. (I like good beer – don’t judge!) When I walk in a grocery store, nobody hands me a sheet of paper that asks if 2X5.95 is <, >, or = 11.75 – I gotta figure it out. Word problem. I could go into all sorts of a bitchfest over how calculus is taught but I won’t. Suffice it to say, from some of the text books I have bought on calculus, you could master the subject and still not have a friggin CLUE what to do with it or when to use it. My point is, the basic concepts of math are hard enough for a kid who is brought up in a world of fluid definitions. There is very little that is “right or wrong” for kids today. There is very little concept of “go, no go” for them. But math is a game of “go, no go” – either you are right or you are wrong. There are no degrees. To throw a kid into abstract conceptualization before he comprehends the basic parameters is stupid.

It seems some people are trying to turn math into a social issue – colored in individual perceptions and judgments, as opposed to a defined science. Those people just need to cut it the hell out!

Merr-appy ChristmaHanuKwanzika

(Ed. Note: I know I’m posting this early. I want to get ahead of the issue because if I were to post it after someone sent me one of the 50 million e-mails a year about boycotting this or that because of this subject or that, they may think I’m “aiming” it at them. I’m not. This is just an observation I made a long time ago. Enjoy!)

Merry Christmas!!!

Such a loaded phrase…those who say it have the best of intentions, but some of those who hear it, may be “offended”.  I have to tell you that I truly don’t know what being offended is. I know what pissed off is, like when someone accuses you of doing something you didn’t do, but as far as hearing someone say something with good intentions and getting pissed or hurt or “offended” , man, my brain just is not wired that way. I don’t think many people at all actually “get offended” when someone tells them Merry Christmas, I think the vast majority of them are just assholes who like to get mad about stuff – gives them a feeling of purpose in life.

Now before too many heads go to bobbing in affirmation of that little screed, I need to warn you that that particular knife cuts both ways. Why would you get offended if someone says “Happy Holidays” to you if they mean well and are truly wishing you a happy time? I find it both hilarious and sad that a person will stand there in righteous indignation and lambast the “ultra-sensitivity of the politically correct these days” one minute and the next, blow a freaking gasket because the 85 year old greeter at Wal-Mart says “Happy Winter Solstice” instead of “Merry Christmas’. What is really interesting is that it is that very duality that gave birth to the issue in the first place.

I remember back when I was a kid going to church, and being around church folks for the most part, that every year when Christmas came around there would be this groundswell of grumbling about how Christmas was too commercialized; how the real purpose of the holiday was getting lost; how it should be a celebration of the birth of our Savior but it was getting to be just an excuse for some people to sell a lot of stuff and others to go into debt for the next six months. This theme was carried right down the nave of the church to the pulpit where it was bellowed with voices of thunder and righteousness (I went to a Baptist church so even if something started out quiet, it ended up being thundered). I even remember there being petitions circulated to get Rich’s and TG&Y and Richway et al to quit using the phrase “Christmas Sale” and “Christmas Blowout” and such as that. People would raise hell because there were all these Santas and reindeer and elves decorating the stores and yet they were using the word Christmas – a word made from the combination of “Christ” and “mass” to signify the “Christ Mass” celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. This just would not do!

Now I agreed with all that in principle. I under stood that, as some people said, perhaps a majority of the people were “hijacking” Christmas to have drunken parties and give toys to kids and lingerie to wives. But while I agreed with those assertions, I also still wanted that really cool telescope from Sears. Yeah, I kinda saw this as a dichotomy but not too much. I mean the very people at church that nodded in affirmation of the injustice of this theft of one of our most holy days, still gave their kids more and cooler stuff than I got, for the most part. So, these people were participating in that which they so firmly decried. What ev, What did I know? I was a kid – must be missing something.

As I got older, I noticed something – there were fewer and fewer stores using the word “Christmas” in their holiday promotions. It started out with “Christmas / Hanukah” then Kwanza came along and what’s a store to do? They just started saying “Holidays” to wrap them all in a neat little bundle. It’s like the stores were saying, “Whatever you celebrate, have a good one! And buy your presents for your celebration from us!”

“Surely”, I thought, “this will make those folks happy that were so worried about stores hijacking Christmas.”  I gotta admit, this was before I developed my “Soap Opera Theory”. If you haven’t read that yet, it might be worth clicking the link.

So the answer is “No”, the people who wanted the stores and secular world not to hijack Christmas got pretty pissed when the stores and secular world quit hijacking Christmas. A modified case of “Be careful what you ask for…”

Well, what are the complaints now? At first it was a variation on the “Taking ‘Christ’ out of Christmas” that was a problem when people started abbreviating Christmas as “Xmas”. But it just became a matter of taking Christmas out of winter sales while still acknowledging that people of all stripes are having celebrations from the end of November to the beginning of January. Some celebrate Christmas, some celebrate Hanukah, some just celebrate a time when Santa comes or when all their friends and family get together and exchange gifts and have fun. Whatever you celebrate, December is a banner time to do it. Very cool sales, party stores are in full bloom, people seem to be in a relatively good mood considering the shortest day of the year, and therefore the longest night, should otherwise drag the happy meter down a notch or two. As a matter of fact, my wife’s birthday is December 22 so lucky me gets to take advantage of Christmas Holiday sales whilst I search for her present.

How could this be a problem? I just don’t know. On a purely logical level, I really don’t know. Is it a matter of “It was our holiday first so you’ll have to play by our rules if you want to celebrate it”? If so, does that mean I can’t go buy my wife a present because it’s in the Christmas season? And, besides, you really don’t want to go there against the Jews. They go WAY back. WAY back. And so do most of their holidays.

Is it that you truly believe that your belief, faith, and joy in the celebration of the birth of your savior will be harmed or lessened because Wal Mart (Your Savings Place!) doesn’t reinforce your religious convictions for the 20 minutes you wander the aisles of their store? If so, that’s a personal problem between you and God. I mean, rly? Srsly? Do you go to Wal Mart for your Salvation? Do they have to be your source for EVERYTHING? Do you require the gasoline pump where you buy your gas to print out “Merry Christmas’ on your gas card receipt or just print the receipt so you can be on your way because buying regular unleaded doesn’t HAVE to be a religious experience? I mean, I’m every bit as thankful for that tank of gas as I am for the rutabagas I get in the produce section (more, actually, cause I hatez some rutabagas), so why would one require one retail transaction to affirm their faith and not another? Like I said, logically speaking, I just don’t know.

So before you sign one of these ridiculous petitions to boycott this or that store for not saying “Merry Christmas”, just chillax a bit and think – Does it really matter as far as what is important to you in this world? My guess is, probably not.

The Soap Opera Theory

Since it will probably be referenced in future posts, I’ll go ahead and spell out my Soap Opera Theory here. I’ll probably link to this post when it’s mentioned in the future as an explanation of it.

People today, especially in the developed world, have 1/100^th of the things to worry about than people living in grass huts in the Kalahari do. For that matter, an American middle class person has a lot less to worry about in 1979 or 2009 than a comparable person had to worry about in 1879 or 1909. Seeing how this is a relatively recent phenomenon (not worrying about lions eating you, Polio, the Common Cold killing you, a broken arm could get infected and kill you, pumping water from a well, NO hot water, washing clothes on a rock in a stream, outhouses, etc.), it is the human condition to have something to worry about. If a man is deprived of something to worry about, he’ll find something – even if it has to be fabricated, he’ll find it.

Before wide-spread utilities delivery, there were no electric or gas stoves, washing machines, dryers, water heaters, TV, light bulbs, refrigerated pre-cut meats and canned veggies from a store – many things like this. A man went to work in the fields or at a factory or something and a woman stayed home and worked her tail slap off. Chopping wood for the stove, hauling water to heat for washing and bathing, washing clothes by hand, sweeping, collecting eggs, butchering chickens or sides of stored beef or pork, emptying and washing “slop jars”, just an ungodly assortment of things to do. Men worked their tails off to afford just the necessities of life. Food used to consume 30% to 50% of the average household income. Supplies to repair the house and whatever else were in constant need (remember, before Duramax paint and things like it you can get down at Lowe’s or the hardware store, people whitewashed raw wood and felt lucky if it last 4 or 5 years – the WOOD, I mean, not the whitewash.) It was a struggle just to survive, being “comfortable” was not usually an option.

So fast forward 100 years and you have indoor plumbing, running hot and cold water, electricity, natural gas, all the appliances made possible because of these wonderful things, cars to get to the once non-existent stores to buy stuff you used to have to make, store bought clothes with UV resistant fabric, denim, just a million things to make life easier. Now, we find many instances of men working outside the home and women staying home and keeping the kids and house. With all these modern conveniences, the home maker had a little free time on her hands. Also, kid gets sick, take him to the doctor and an antibiotic would fix him right up. I know it’s still hard to run a household, but it’s one helluva lot easier than it used to be. So these women had time on their hands to at least watch a 30 minute or one hour TV show and soap operas were born.  Housewives everywhere latched onto them. It was like a romance novel you didn’t have to read. But I noticed with my mom and grandmothers and aunts and all, that they would get terribly upset about some of the goings on in the soap operas. Cry, even. Then they’d get on the phone and talk about what a bad guy some guy was on the show or how they felt sorry for some chick that was being cheated on and good Lord! I mean they got into it. It occurred to me the people in those shows had WAY more problems than normal people did. And that was the point – they had worries, normal folks didn’t. Soap operas were a way for people that didn’t have much to worry about to have something to worry about! Eureka! It was an outlet for people to get upset about something to alleviate the boredom induced by not having a whole lot to get upset about.

So the “Soap Opera” theory states: “When one has little or nothing to be worried, angry, or upset about, one will find something to fill that need. Man, in his natural state, must have problems to solve or injustices to rail against. In the absence of these things, substitutes must be searched for or fabricated.”

Hollywood is a good example of this. The insanely rich, spoiled, has everything handed to them set of people have to have a “Cause”. If things are too easy, they feel a diminished sense of self-worth. And to show that they are just like “normal people”, they make a caricature of a “normal” or “poor” person in their minds, and fight for what they believe that person needs or wants. They get all bent out of shape about these things for the same reason housewives cry about “Amanda having that baby and that no-good Richard is cheating on her with that floozy nurse at the hospital…”

So, that’s my Soap Opera Theory based on my years as a student of human nature.

Where does the time go?

I was a geeky kid in a few ways. One of those ways was my insatiable appetite for science fiction. It’s called “sci-fi” today because people are lazy and can’t be bothered to pronounce three syllables when two will get the job done. But when I was a kid <cue the squeaking rocking chair, the light spring breeze and the cool glass of lemonade on the porch>, we said “science fiction”…and we LIKED it!

I was also geeky with machinery. My dad was a tool and die mechanic (machinist) and a maintenance man in an industrial plant. (Coincidentally enough, I pretty much ended up doing the same thing but much later and that’s not we’re talking about right now so DROP IT!) He was also what you might call a post-modern conservationist. That is, he hated to see something thrown away. I don’t mean garbage, I mean good stuff like ignitron tubes, lathes, conveyor belt stands, high voltage transformers – ya know, good stuff. He built a big workshop behind our house and proceeded to fill it to the brim with “good stuff”.  This is where I played. This is where I was built.

I remember going to Disney Land (or World, I dunno – the one in Florida. I was young. Don’t judge). We went to EPCOT and walked through that thing where it showed how the house of tomorrow would be. It was like walking through a slide show of Popular Science magazine covers. All the video phones and talking houses and robots going around folding underwear made a guy wonder, “If everything is done on it’s own, what are people going to do?”

Of course, the helpful recorded voice coming from the heavily guarded paper cone speaker at the displays would claim people would have much more time for recreational pursuits and family time lost in relaxed entertainment. My pre-teen mind called “Bullshit” on that concept right off the bat. I didn’t know why at the time, but something didn’t add up. It would take a few years to put that particular square peg in its corresponding hole and thus began my journey in life of not just doubting conventional wisdom, but being actively hostile toward it.

I was a lazy kid, I own that. But it worked out for me. I married my love of science fiction with my access to more machinery than the average kid had and I decided I liked the concept of robots doing things for me. If not actual anthropomorphic androids, then at least some type of automated system to perform simple or menial tasks. As I sit here right now, one thing blazes through the years like a 2 megawatt laser and that is; the phrase that used to make my heart race more than anything was “remote control”. Caveat – I mean in my PRE-adolescent years it was “remote control”, after adolescence, it still pulled a really tight second to “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine”, so in truth, it lasted longer. And don’t say you weren’t thinking along those lines – pervert.

So, anyway, I used to build things. I’d wire things up and see what damage they would do. I learned two important things doing this: Planning makes all the difference and The Law of Unintended Consequences. I would dream up all sorts of amazing contraptions and systems of contraptions. Kind of a Rube Goldberg without using so many animals. I would dream up these things and then think how much easier life would be with the ability to turn the lights on or off while still in bed. Or push a button on the night stand and breakfast gets cooked before you get up. Or something to feed the dog on a regular schedule automatically, or better yet, by REMOTE CONTROL! Whew, I feel flush.

In these dreams, I’d think about how if I didn’t have to get up to do something, I could stay in bed or watch TV or something like that. It all boils down to my desire to project my will across time and space in order to be lazy. Funny thing is, I would spend days working on a set of wires and actuators to turn my bedroom light on from my bed. The resulting time savings of a successful deployment would never add up to a significant fraction of the invested time. When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, he said, “Because it’s there.” Word up, Ed. That resonated with me. Some things you do just because you want to do it. My point is, I knew even then that my contraptions weren’t, in the final accounting, saving me anytime but it was just cool to do it. And I knew if I ever did actually come up with something to save time, I’d filled that saved time with doing something else.

Back to EPCOT. They claimed that when we were in a position to have all the things we used to do in 1975 done for us by technology, there would be nothing left to do but watch TV or play in the yard. Even today, I hear people lament that with all the technology we have that is supposed to save us time, we have a more hurried lifestyle today than we ever have. “Why is that?” they cry like a babe into the storm. I chuckle to myself and offer and explanation – but never unbidden, “Want me to tell you why?” I say. When they don’t offer me the opportunity to perform a physical impossibility with myself and random objects at hand, I try to relate things to the past and present simultaneously.

I have a friend who is looking for a dress. She has a wedding to attend. She is looking for just the right dress so she isn’t exactly stopping by Wal Mart on the way home from work to pick something off the rack. She’s SHOPPING. A couple of her friends have offered suggestions of places to look. “There is a dress shop in Kennesaw (about 70 miles northwest of here) and a really cute one in Athens (about 30 miles east of here) and you might find something at Ga. Mall (about 25 miles north of here) but probably not cause they don’t have ANYTHING cute. But a couple of places in Atlanta (35 miles west of here) are worth checking out but you HAVE to check out that shop in Alpharetta (about 40 miles north-northwest of here) cause it’s so CUTE!!”

Now my friend could have a house that shakes itself out every morning and a car that gets its own gas and a dog that feeds himself and a robot that does all the laundry and cooking and she is still going to be rushed to death over the next couple of weeks just finding a dress, assuming she tries all these suggestions. Get in the “wayback” machine and let’s go back about 70 years. Would a rational person even know about dress shops spread over 5000 square miles much less consider visiting them? No. They had to make do with what was within six or eight miles.

Do you, or someone you know work over 20 miles from home? Yeah, probably. 100 years ago, if you had to walk or ride a horse, would you work 20 miles from home? 10 miles? Five? Probably not. Five miles then would take as long to get to as 50 now, and don’t even talk about the rainy days. So give a guy a pickup truck in 1909 and he could save a lot of time getting to work and going to the General Store to get supplies and all. But in 1909 it was a big deal if you had ever been out of the state you live in. Both my brothers, in disparately different lines of work, probably average five to ten states a WEEK in their jobs. With the microwave ovens and computer banking and movies on demand, do you think they have inordinate amounts of time to kick back with the family at a play or playing checkers? Not so much.

To wrap this whole thing up in a nice little package, When someone asks you why we have even less time to do stuff we want to today than we did “back then”, you’ll know, it’s because if you give us a minute, we’ll take an hour. Give me a little time to do just one more thing, and I’ll do two. That time is saved, yeah, but we can’t wait to fill it up. This technology doesn’t just give us more time, it gives us more time to do other stuff. And we do. And THAT’S where the time goes.