As a very privileged, white, upper-middle class male, I often wonder about my true level of racism. I like to think of myself as a very tolerant person, and no one has ever accused me of being a racist. Still, I have to wonder about stereotypes that are embedded in my subconscious. Am I more likely to cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking past a black person at night than if it were a white person (all things being equal)? I would hope not, but I can't make guarantees. Do I think that black people can jump higher than white people? Well, yes - I do believe this one. I have some evidence from playing basketball with many people. But I have known several whites who could jump out of the gym, too. Perhaps it is a form of racism because I expect black people to be able jump well (conveniently ignoring the counterexamples), but dismiss my WFWH ("white friends with hops") as anomalies.
I don't lose sleep over it, because I know that I am working on it, and I know that I am definitely not an overt racist. But questions about my level of racism bother me from time to time.
But then I read about things like this. It took me a good long while to even figure out the idea behind this email. Finally it hit me: "Black people like watermelons" is an old-fashioned stereotype about black people. Man, you need to be really racist to think of this, to send it, and then to suggest that everyone should just laugh it off. It is always dangerous to think this way, but I am reassured that I am nowhere near as racist as that mayor.
Then I get sad, because I am reminded that this isn't all that uncommon outside my circle of friends. We finally have a black president, but we still have a long way to go.
My grading is coming to a close. I have a take-home midterm that I collected today, and I am collecting journals tomorrow; I'll probably just give them credit for completion to make everyone's life easier.
Olivia "Cat" Awesome is starting to adjust to the new house. She has (re-?)learned to play, and is now eating a healthy amount. Also, grading in a basement late at night is much, much more enjoyable when a cat periodically comes to purr and lie on you.
Tsjaz points out a ridiculous travel by a Duke player. It is so bad that I think some editing may have been done to the video.
Harvard University is hitting tough times. Let's all pass around a hat. (courtesy of Sympleko).
A semi-interesting story about a good Samartian who got hit by a truck after pushing three people out of its path, only to get a jaywalking ticket. It seems that the good Samaritan helped cause the accident by jaywalking. This story is really just an excuse to show this video (originally from Mano Singham's Web Journal, which I think Bad Z would really like).
It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
I was disappointed that the new episode of BSG was not available online this weekend. I read that scifi.com (not linking to them as a passive aggressive means of punishment) is going to start waiting eight days to post new episodes. I decided to suck it up and wait until Saturday to view the episode that was shown on Friday. I haven't had much trouble with spoilers, and I ask that you not ruin any thing for me. I'll be watching each of the last five episodes a week late.
I now have a first draft of my paper done. This is a relief, since I definitely have something to submit. However, I still have to do a lot of revisions, and that might take the rest of the week. It will get done, though.
Here is my schedule for the week:
Monday: Grade differential equation projects
Tuesday: Grade homework and in-class exam for differential equations
Wednesday: Grade exam for elementary education class
Thursday: Grade take-home exam for differential equations
Friday: No grading! Unless I'm not done grading from Thursday
I also have to revise my paper. This will not be a great week.
We are enjoying Olivia. As I suggested before, we got her from the Humane Society, which is really the only place you should ever go to get a cat (by "Humane Society," I mean any sort of rescue organization).
This type of stuff makes my blood boil. It seems to be that Republicans do this all of the time, although that might just be because either "Republicans are doing it now" or "I don't notice when Democrats do it." I think that Republicans probably are more likely to do this, though, because they seem more concerned about power. This is why they usually win.
I surprisingly topic Straight Dope post. I am also happy that he is discussing the definition of intelligence, which is something that I am trying to (passively) figure out.
Norm McDonald is hilarious. I propose that he and Adam Carolla are the two funniest people alive today (Note: I'll probably change my mind on this tomorrow). Check out two Norm Clips:
In case you are too lazy to wait for the Courtney Thorne-Smith segment on Conan, here it is:
Speaking of funniest men alive, it was nice to see Andy Richter again. I will soon be seeing more of him.
Last night was mostly dedicated to writing. I have a paper that needs to be submitted by March 2nd, and this has (allegedly) been my focus for the past week and a half. I find, like so many other things, that I enjoy the writing process once I am doing it, but I have a tough time getting into it. I probably could have been done with this in December, but I procrastinated.
Other things that fit this category for me: running, basketball, going outside the house to see friends, going outside the house for any reason, and math research. There are others. I think that I just have a lot of inertia.
Skye and I volunteered for the second time at the Humane Society yesterday. Now she fell in love with a cat, and wants to take it home so much that we put a deposit on her. We'll see what happens. We are in an interesting situation - she is much more pro-"pet now" than I am, although I am traditionally more pet-friendly. The reasons for this on my end are two-fold:
As much as I hate to admit it, I think that I might be mildly allergic to, at least some, cats. I am not sure that I want to spend my life with itchy eyes and sneezes. It kills me a bit to admit this.
As much as I hate to admit it, I think that I am scared that the cat will scratch up our new furniture. I normally would care so much about the furniture, but we just spent a lot more money than I am really comfortable with on it (i.e. we didn't buy them at a garage sale).
This trade makes me sad. I always thought of the Hornets as a well-designed team: they have a great point guard (Paul), a great mid-range shooter (West), a great defensive center/rebounder who knows his limitations (Chandler), a defensive stopper (Posey), and a bunch of good outside shooters (Stojakovic, Peterson). It makes me sad that they are taking out a cog in a well-built machine.
Aside: for some reason, the Hornets do not know that Chris Paul is on their team.
Grading is done, and soon I can think about just writing the paper that I have been organizing for a week. Maybe I start tonight.
I forgot to mention yesterday: BSG was good and revealing, although not as suspenseful as the previous week. It was necessary, though, and I like knowing all the new information. I thought that Lost was okay. Dollhouse was decent and has potential.
I had a dream last night that a friend of mine from high school (CC) was throwing a party. At this party, he was going to turn most of the guests into zombies. For some reason, I was not going to be turned.
Despite the fact that everyone knew that he was going to zombify (in fact, a book was written on the feasibility that CC could even do this), people were still planning on going. Despite the fact that the party was to be in Massachusetts, people were still planning on going. I don't hang around with very smart people in my dreams.
Skye and I re-watched Boogie Nights last night. I thought it was okay, but not great. I like Magnolia much better. I think that it mostly bored Skye.
Skye and I decided to be social on Saturday. We hosted two other couples, and had a nice meal and game of Pit.
I set a deadline to finish one stage of a paper by Sunday night. Since Skye and I were having so much fun yesterday, I decided to ignore the deadline; I don't think that I would have ignored the deadline before. I am taking this as a sign that I am growing as a person, although I suppose that some would argue that I am regressing.
I didn't care a lot about the NBA All-Star weekend. I rarely do.
I'm not in a good mood today. I am, however, looking forward to seeing Wednesday's episode of Lost, tonight's BSG, and tonight's Dollhouse soon. I am particularly excited about BSG.
This is ridiculous. I am perfectly okay with Gregg not accepting the job; in fact, it might avoid an ugly situation: if he had accepted, the governor of New Hampshire may have been tempted to replace him with a Democrat. While I would appreciate this as a Democrat, I would be very appalled as a democrat - that is, a person who likes democracy. It would clearly go against the people's will.
I don't understand why the GOP is emboldened by Gregg stepping down. "Obama looks stupid - he tried to include us in the process, and we declined! See? Obama is actually a jerk." This doesn't make sense to me.
I had an interesting experience recently. I initially judged two people that I met together in a group. Person A was judged to be a friendly, out-going and generally nice guy. Person B was judged to be sullen and possibly mean. After a couple weeks of getting to know them, I think that I should have switched the two judgments: Person B has been very nice, and Person A has been a bit of a jerk (confirmed by others).
I think that I mispronounce two words: "jewelry" and "comfortable." I think that I say "jewlery" and "comfterble." I've been working on the former for a while, so I think that I do okay with jewelry. I just realized that I might be messing up comfortable, although I am close to the first pronunciation on this page.
Skye and I just graduated from three-star NYT crosswords to four-star ones. The new ones are harder.
A discussion of the greatest sitcom character of all time. I don't know what the answer is, but I can't bring myself to include cartoons in this discussion. Here are my favorites, in no particular order:
GOB Bluth
Tobias Funke
Perry Cox
Archie Bunker
David Brent
Gareth Keenan
I am probably forgetting others. What do you all think?
It's nice to see Tsjaz posting again. I think this means that the wrist is getting better.
Skye and I volunteered at the Humane Society for the first time yesterday. (Important background for the next sentence: I have always loved dogs, and I have been working on convincing Skye to allow us to get a dog; she has been resistant, and has been working on delaying getting a dog for as long as possible). Skye couldn't fall asleep last night because she fell in love with a dog there. We likely won't get her ("Ella"), but we are discussing it.
I fear I must take back some of my Obama-praise. Gregg Easterbrook writes that Obama's cap on CEO pay is actually voluntary. Worse yet, CEOs from AIG, Bank of America and Citigroup are exempt. This is all ridonculous. So jeers to Obama for political showmanship without substance.
Worse yet: limit CEO pay doesn't actually change a whole lot. AS pointed out by the AP, many CEOs making $1 per year actually take home a lot in other forms of compensation.
More on Easterbrook: he does us all a favor in that link by reminding us of predictions that pundits previously made. He focuses on football, but mentions some political and financial predictions, too. Lesson learned: nobody knows anything about anything. With 24-hour news and sports stations requiring material to fill the day, an easy way to fill time is to have people talking about their opinions and predictions. Most of these turn out to be wrong, though, so you are listening to people who don't know much more than you. This is how we, as a nation, have decided to spend our time? Terrible.
I actually thought up maintaining a website that tracks the predictions made at the end of each episode of The McLaughlin Group. If I thought that anybody cared, I might do it.
So there you go. Our society's problem is a lack of accountability, and Easterbrook seems to be the only guy out there doing something about it.
Speaking of accountability, let's all hope that Obama releases Bush's secrets. The argument against him doing this is terrible: that he shouldn't do it since he will be subjected to the same thing later on. What better motivator to do only things that you would be proud of?
Finally, let's all watch Howard Kurtz being a stupid, unaware jerkhead. I just wish Couric would have given him more hell than she did (at least she didn't totally blow-off his stupidity).
Hey! The Grammys were on last night! Did anyone know this? I know of many, many people who love music, and I know of very, very few people who care about the Grammys. Back when I was funny, I thought about throwing a Grammy party in, say, November. I wanted to see if anyone would realize that they don't show until February.
BSG is great; jeers to those who proclaimed that it jumped the shark three episodes ago. Such near-sightedness. I liked this last one so much that I watched it twice this weekend. I really care about the characters.
In my math course for elementary education majors today, we will discuss the fact that Pat Summit just won her 1000th game. More accurately, I will be discussing why we care, and how it is pretty arbitrary why we care more about her 1000th win than we care about her 1003rd win.
Today: Teach, basketball, Humane Society. If there is still time, I will write more of my paper. It has a hard deadline of March 2nd, but I am only giving myself until Sunday to come up with a reasonable draft. I will probably give myself one more week to edit it, and then I'll be done.
Unproductive day at work. I taught, played basketball, talked to two students, and then talked to two friends. I can't quite figure out basketball: I have been guarding a former semi-pro basketball player. He dominates everyone, but I feel like I can slow him down a bit (I helped shut him down two days ago when I spent the entire game double-teaming him with another good defender). Now, this guy has been getting a little too physical with me. Basically, I am going to start thinking about calling offensive fouls on him. The catch, though, is that I am not sure if that is fair. I could be that I am fouling him on basically every play, and that he is being nice in not calling them. This may be frustrating him, so he is taking out his frustration on me.
However, I started thinking today that maybe I am not frustrating him because I am playing like a hack; maybe I am frustrating him because I am making it harder to score. Imagine he is Shaquille O'Neal; then, either:
A student came to me with an awesome math problem. He is applying for summer research, and I hope to advise him on it (and his thesis).
An interesting thing: I fake-interviewed a professor for a position at Gonzaga in Mechanical Engineering. It is interesting to figure out how to interview people, but it is more interesting to figure out how to interview a person in a field you don't know for a college you don't work for.
I hired him on the spot.
Skye and I watched Taxi to the Dark Side last night. Essentially, it is a documentary on U.S. torture policies over the past eight years. Here are the depressing things about the movie:
Afghanis and Iraqis (and at least one British subject) went through hell. I cannot imagine what it is like to be tortured, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy. I also acknowledge that some (some) of the people who were torture may have actually been my worst enemy. I still don't wish it on them.
We got bad intelligence out of it. So they went through hell, and in some cases for absolutely nothing.
The U.S. soldiers' lives were severely hurt. They interviewed a lot of soldiers who tortured, and they seem to be damaged from the experience. At the very least, many of them were charged with crimes (although I have to imagine that they are emotionally damaged, too).
I am not judging the soliders. I know enough about Milgram's experiments that I am unable to honestly answer: "Well, I would have acted differently in that situation - I wouldn't have tortured them."
Here are the good things that came out of the U.S. torture program:
Maybe, MAYBE, we got some good intelligence out it.
This is the best case scenario, but it is unlikely. Severalstudies show that torture is not effective at gathering information (nor is it moral or legal).
I am very, very happy that Obama is president now.
Thanks goodness. Obama is limiting corporate bonuses for the companies who were bailed out. Can we all get behind this one? (I am assuming the CEOs of AIG do not read this weblog).
I can't quite figure out exactly why the corporate retreats/bonuses/Superbowl parties/private jets bother me so much. It could be because I am not crazy about taxes (who is?), and I want to see my tax money go to something that benefits (most) everyone. It could be that I don't like feeling like a sucker ("Give us money and we'll lend it to people to get the economy going again. You'll do it? Thanks! (Sucker!)"). It could be that it violates my basic sense of fairness. It could be that I am judging the CEOs as greedy (it is probably a correct judgment), and maybe I view greedy people as "bad." It could be that I love America, and these CEOs are hurting America. I don't really know - I can't quite locate the source of my feelings.
Still, I don't fully know why we are even giving them $500,000. Are these companies scared that "underpaid" executives will leave and go ruin other companies? Why would companies want to keep CEOs who ran the company into the ground? As Michael Lewis wrote in the previously-linked article, some CEOs don't even know what the company does! I say give them $100,000 per year (still roughly twice my salary as a Ph.D. wielding professional in charge of educating America's youth) and have them write hand-written thank you cards to member of the House and Senate for allowing them to keep their jobs (after all - the US Government is now a prime shareholder in these companies).
This is debatable, but the single biggest problem that caused our recession is that people who couldn't afford homes were able to buy homes. Here is my reasoning/understanding of how the recession happened:
People all over the world suddenly had a lot more money than they had in the past through somewhat regular growth in economies. They wanted to invest it to make money, and probably preferred to invest it in US Bonds. Greenspan basically said, "Screw you, I'm going to lower the interest rate so low that we won't have to give you much of anything for the bonds." The people with the money decided to go elsewhere for a safe investment that would return a greater rate of interest: mortgages. By buying mortgages, they would have a pretty safe investment that returns 4-7%. Eventually, though, there weren't enough mortgages to satisfy the people with the money, but the money people kept demanding more mortgage-backed securities. The response was to start giving mortgages to people who were borderline (and soon after, "clearly not qualified for a mortgage"), thereby creating more mortgage-backed investments. When Wall Street noticed that some of these unqualified people started defaulting on their mortgages, they started essentially gambling on which loans would default via "credit default swaps." This ended up being a HUGE market, with maybe $40-50 trillion dollars in credit default swaps at one point (for comparison, the world stock market is only worth about $36.6 trillion).
Once a lot of people started defaulting on their mortgages, companies who had gambled a lot on the credit default market lost HUGE amounts of money, and some went under (I'm looking at you, Lehman Brothers). This created the nasty spiral from last fall.
The point is: if the unqualified didn't get their loans, the people who wanted the mortgage-backed securities would have had to go elsewhere, and the whole credit default swap market would not have been so huge.
So riddle me this: if the problem was that people were able to buy homes they couldn't afford, why would the government make it easier for people to buy homes? It would be different if these were gifts, but these tax credits must be paid over time (interest free, but they still have to pay them back). How is this different from mortgage companies giving people loans that they couldn't afford? At least they nominally vetted their clients - Uncle Sam just wants to give it away.
Also, it is true that the loans are interest free, but most of the people who defaulted on their loans didn't pay in enough to cover the original cost of the house without the interest (note the lack of source here: I just feel that this is probably true).
So it seems like this collapse could have been avoided by not giving loans to people who can't afford them. Now, our government is trying to give out loans, many of which will go to people who can't afford them (and if they can afford the loans, one might wonder why the government would pay them for something they can already afford). This seems like a bad strategy - "the hair of the dog" doesn't work for hangovers, and I doubt that it will work for the housing market.
Skye is excited because we got a spinner bike yesterday. It is the start, and possibly end, of our home gym.
We have been budgeting for solar PV panels, but we are thinking about changing our minds on it. This is in part because Minnesota is not offering a rebate right now, and it is unclear whether the coffers will be re-filled. We are thinking now of using that money on some combination of insulation, solar heat, and solar hot water. These are more cost effective anyway, so they are probably both more energy-efficient and cheaper.
Be wary of Republicans who say they oppose the stimulus plan because it costs too much. That being said, I am a little concerned whether the stimulus package will work. I don't know enough economics to know if Keynesian theory is correct, but neither does anyone else - this is untested. That being said, I am in favor of the stimulus package in principle, since I think that we need an infrastructure overhaul (I don't know if you heard, but a bridge collapsed here a while back). Also, I think that we should build up a green energy infrastructure, as that is the energy of the future. So I definitely think that the recession is a good excuse to do this, although it feels a little deceitful to use that as an excuse. Maybe Keynes was right, though, and the package will jumpstart the economy.
One more thing: it was a crime that Warner's fumble was not reviewed. I saw two replays of it, and my opinion is that the call was correct. However, it was close to being an incomplete pass, and should have been reviewed. The Cardinals still had a definite shot at winning if it is ruled an incomplete chance. That was not a good job at officiating.
Skye and I watched the Superbowl last night at Qdoba. This is what happens when you don't have TV reception and/or local friends to invite you over. The burritos were great, though. There were probably 6 other customers there during the game - we owned the place.
I was pulling for Arizona, but I am pretty much over it. I like Warner and Fitzgerald (the Minneapolis guy).
Speaking of lack of local friends, I went on a retreat for new faculty and met some new ones. I had a really good time with (most of) them. The training portion was better than expected, although they are rarely great. The social part was a lot of fun.
BSG: What a cliff-hanger! Could they? I think that they could. I can't wait until Friday.
Scrubs: Skye and I finished season six. It had a couple of bad episodes, but then returned to form. I do not think that it jumped the shark.
