Uncooperative Crickets: March 2009

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Classes were cancelled at my school...after I taught. This is actually good, since I am really treasuring my class dates now that the end is near. I need to get through so much material...

This is mercifully a week without grading. I am going to turn that into a week of research, I think.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Bound to happen sooner or later

My brackets aren't looking good. I had both Memphis and Purdue winning; neither did.

I'm not going to write more. I need to make up a project, a test, grade, prepare dinner for tomorrow, and fix a couple things on the car. Enjoy the games.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

It was a long day of work yesterday, it will be a long day of work today. Today, though, I am sticking around for a "math talk" that I am excited about. Basically, a colleague is going to speak about the use of statistics in economics and social science, and that many statistics that we use as evidence to back up our arguments fall prey to a common misconception. I was unaware of this misconception before I spoke to the speaker. I'll tell you more tomorrow.

I am starting to feel the crunch of the end of the semester. I have mapped out what I need to do each day for the rest of the semester. I hope that I am not too optimistic about what I can do each day. We'll see.

Games tonight. My picks are: Purdue, Pitt, Memphis, and Villanova.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Short post today, because I have to do a ton of emails, go home, and do my taxes...and it is already after 5 pm.

I did a non-"accept a friend invitation" Facebook thing yesterday. It was invigorating.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

I was supposed to give a colloquium today, but it was cancelled due to the need for help controlling the upcoming flooding river. It makes me thankful that I do not live in a part of the country that needs to worry about floods. Instead of giving the colloquium, I went home early to concentrate on research (which hasn't happened yet).

NCAA correction: I picked Wake Forest to upset Louisville, so I have already missed a Great Eight pick.

EV updated: ordered a new charger. The new annoying thing is that the hood won't open. This has nothing to do with the car being electric, and everything to do with the car being 23 years old.

Monday, March 23, 2009

NCAA Rounds 1 and 2

BSG! BSG! I watched the end of Battlestar Galactica this weekend. She was quite a series. Now, I think that it is extremely difficult to end a series well. The first time I watched Buffy, I thought the end of season 5 was a brilliant ending to the series (less so the second time); the end of season 7 was decent. I liked the end of Sports Night the first time I watched it. That might be about it. Basically, I am pretty forgiving.

I think that BSG needed a little forgiving, but not a ton. Spoilers below.

I have a horrible first round of the tournament, going 20/32. That's pretty bad. However, I got back on track in round 2, going 13/16 (two of my misses were a result of poor choices in the first round - I didn't pick either of the teams playing the game). To compare, President Obama went 18/32, but then 14/16 in the second round. We both had picked Florida State and Wake Forest winning, and I additionally had picked Marquette. Fortunately, all of my Great Eight teams are still alive (like Bill Simmons, I am going to try to revive the name "Great Eight" over the "Elite Eight").

More EV news: the $50 charger I bought for the new battery is not powerful enough to charge the battery overnight. This means that the car works great at the beginning of the week, so-so in the middle, and it drags home on Friday. I will be ordering a more power (and more expensive) charger today, and then I hope to be done with EV stuff for a while.

I am going to another college to speak tomorrow, so today is pretty much dedicated to preparing the presentation and the Humane Society.

BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS! BSG SPOILERS!

Basically, I think that they ended too much on the side of religion at the end of the series. I wish that they would have left it a little more open, although I don't know how they could have done that. I also wasn't crazy about the ending with the robots. I was not so much interpreting the last scene literally (I don't think that the main point of the series is "Be nice to robots, or else"), but many of the robots were a little cheesy. Perhaps they were taken from real-life ads, but still.

Speaking of endings, I would have liked it if they had basically ended the show when Cavil and Adama made the deal. Ending on "'Why should I trust you?' 'It's a leap of faith.'" would have been interesting. We would have had to wonder if Cavil was good for his word, and if there would be lasting peace. This seems pretty much like real life. Of course, we would have had to engineer the rest of the finale to answer questions about Kara Thrace and Earth, and that may have been tough.

PS: I liked Kara Thrace entering "All Along the Watchtower" into the FTL drive, but wasn't crazy about her disappearance. I didn't hate the latter, though.

Friday, March 20, 2009

I did as well as the President on the first day of the NCAA tournament. I am four-for-four so far today.

Ford is coming out with an EV in 2011. Good on them!

I've been thinking: you know how we are always told to diversify our portfolios? Well, why doesn't that apply with the U.S. economy? In other words, how did we get to the point where we have businesses that are "too big to fail." That just seems like poor planning on all of our parts, and now we are paying for it.

Mano (again) has an interesting take on AIG bonuses. Basically, he is saying that they are just distracting (perhaps intentionally) from the real problem at hand: that AIG was basically just laundering TARP money that ended up going to companies like Goldman Sachs (where Hank Paulson used to work). He seems to be crying "conspiracy," which always troubles me. In particular, I don't understand why giving a second round of TARP money to Goldman Sachs is any worse than giving a second round of TARP money to AIG - this may just be because I don't understand the problem completely. Still, he has a point that we might be taking our eye of the ball (where "ball"="real problem").

Jake Tapper is grilling the Obama administration on transparency. This is from thinkprogress.org, one of my favorite websites. However, I don't understand their suggestion of hypocrisy. I don't think that Tapper has an obligation to allow everyone to follow him on Twitter, but I do think that government should be transparent. Again, without knowing much about the situation, I think that Tapper has a point.

Tonight: art crawl, grading, and starting to prepare talk I am giving on Tuesday
Tomorrow: department retreat, preparing talk, and series finale of BSG!
Sunday: ????

Thursday, March 19, 2009

More on Bonuses

Boooooo to the Obama administration if this is true. For those of you who are link-averse, someone in the Obama administration asked Chris Dodd to include a loop-hole in the bailout that effectively allowed AIG's executives to take large bonuses. Kudos to Chris Dodd for acting as a whistleblower (possibly at his expense - he will not be as popular running for re-election), but I wish that he had named names.

I picked my NCAA bracket. I don't have many upsets of note - my biggest ones are Purdue over UConn, Wake Forest over Louisville, and VCU over UCLA. My Final Four picks are Kansas, Memphis, Pitt, and UNC, with UNC beating Memphis in the championship game.

I did not really follow college basketball this season. Also, my picks are remarkable similar to President Obama's picks.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

It has been suggested that I am an executive-lover, that I think that all executives should receive large and frequent bonuses regardless of the status of their company. To those critics, I direct their attention to here.

I also want to take a second to point out that the Republicans in power are being a bunch of punk-faced weasels. Senator McConnell is suggesting that he favored limiting executive pay when he in fact opposed it. These are lies. He is suggesting that the Treasury Department isn't doing their job, when he actually was working against them.

UPDATE: More Republican deceit.

There may be good reasons why the executives deserve the bonuses, and I am willing to listen to people who want to convince me (like Dana Perino, although I think that she is mistakenly/misleading with her definition of "middle class"). I am not so arrogant to think that I am right. However, I draw the line at McConnell-style deceit.

Dated story, but Pastor deflected gunshot with Bible. As Bill Maher points out, the headline doesn't do the story justice. The Bible stopped a bullet, but three other bullets managed to evade the miraculous Bible and kill the pastor. I feel bad for the pastor and everyone who knew him, and my purpose isn't to mock him. My purpose is to mock the American press who is so anxious for miracles that they create one out of a completely non-miraculous event. If you fire enough bullets at the front of a church (which is, unfortunately, what happened), you are bound to hit a Bible sooner or later. Shame on the people who tried to get a great headline when the man died.

Finally, Olivia and I started playing a game I call "stalk." Basically, I get on my hands and knees, hide behind a corner, and peek out every now and then. What I see is basically this:

Sometimes I jump out and scare her away, and sometimes she does a flying leap toward me. It is great, great fun.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

I have been told that my weblog is too cryptic, and there are too many links. Today (and probably "only today"), I will try to summarize what the links say.

The pope thinks that condoms aren't the best way to prevent the spread of AIDS. "The pope said a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease." You know what would also help fight the disease? Little tiny sprites wielding even tinier pickaxes who enter bodies through the nostril and hack at all of the HIV viruses until they can no longer replicate. That would also help fight the disease, and is only slightly less likely than everyone suddenly taking a "moral attitude" toward sex.

My EV is back from the shop, and I enjoyed driving it to work today. I think that this summer I will try to rig it so that it runs on my own sense of self-satisfaction.

We clipped some of Olivia's claws yesterday. Olivia is not a fan.

Monday, March 16, 2009

EV Update!

I FINALLY picked up my EV from the shop. It had been there for 6.5 weeks. This was not due to a problem with the car, but rather to poor scheduling (and not on my part). Only 5 hours of labor was billed in the 6.5 weeks, although I think that I got a little bit of a discount due to the long wait. I like the guy, and I mostly like his work, but we'll see if we go back to him again. Right now, I am thinking "no." The good news is that the car is definitely faster and zippier (I added 8 more volts).

Today was an unexpected day off. Classes were cancelled due to a power outage at the college. I think that it must have screwed something up fierce, because I just got an email saying that non-essential employees shouldn't be there. I am imagining a giant Lightning Monster terrorizing campus, with only a small band of dedicated employees remaining to fight it.

Today:

Lesson plans
Homework and a quiz
Errands
Humane Society

Probably no time for research, but hopefully tomorrow. I friend sent me something last week that I really want to look at, but I haven't been able to get to it due to in-laws and math speakers.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Tenure and Journalism

Jon Stewart completely destroyed Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last night. This is what journalism should be, and it is a shame that it had to come from a fake journalism show. With all of the talk about accountability that has been going around, it seems like Stewart is one of the only people out there who seems to have the guts to call someone out. Jon Stewart is truly a patriot.

I am also proud that Stewart stole my "Arthur Ponzarelli" joke. I have finally made it.

Kentucky is thinking about doing away with tenure at its community colleges (thanks to Sympleko for the link). I think that I am breaking with the position that I "should" hold as a liberal, but I actually don't have a problem (at this moment) with doing away with tenure at the K-12 and community college level (more on colleges and university below). I haven't thought about it much, but I don't really have a good reason why people at this level should receive tenure.

Now universities are a different matter. Universities are essentially knowledge factories that influence all sorts of facets of our lives - they are not just places you go for four years to get drunk. Because they play such a key role in knowledge production, I think that university faculty should be given tenure to allow them to study whatever they want. I think that it is good that there are physicists out there trying to get things to time travel. This could lead to a cure for cancer some day (I have no idea how, though). After all, the mathematics that was en vogue in the 1600s ended up playing a vital role in the internet (prime numbers were the original basis for encryption). I believe that all of this is good (at least, if one things that progress is good). So faculty members should have tenure so that they do not feel pressure to study what the politicians/administration/populace wants them to study.

Now, this may seem completely self-serving, considering that I am a math professor. However, I teach at a liberal arts college (as opposed to a university). While I am certainly looking forward to tenure, I think that liberal arts colleges are a gray area. Certainly, knowledge is generated there, but it is not nearly to the same extent as a university. For now, I think that it is similar enough to a university that the faculty should have opportunity for tenure, but I do not think that community colleges make the cut-off.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on why tenure is actually a good idea for K-12 teachers. I am a huge fan of K-12 education, and I support teachers. However, I just don't see the need for tenure (but I want to).

Thursday, March 12, 2009

I almost went to see Watchmen last night, but I decided to stay at home with my suddenly surprisingly affectionate kitty instead.

I basically caught up on work yesterday, and it is a good feeling. My inbox is currently completely empty, which is how I like it. I am hoping that I can keep up with that. One of my students is about to submit a thesis, so that is almost over. Now I can do some more math.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Skye went on a short trip for her spring break, so I am a bachelor for the weekend.

Bill Maher summed up my ideas on the government pretty well here. Fast forward to the 4:00 minute mark if you want the best stuff.

Via Truehoop, a funny (but somewhat mean) commentary on Brian Cardinal: Your Dad Plays for the Timberwolves.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Conservation of Anger

I am not thrilled with President Obama's proposal for teacher merit pay. The basic idea is that teachers would get paid more if their students achieved more. I find this very problematic for a couple of reasons:

It is very difficult to get an accurate read on "student achievement." The easy way out is a multiple choice test, but they rarely measure things that are actually important (I would much rather have a bunch of citizens be able to solve problems and judge the relative merits of arguments than to recall facts like "The French and Indian War started in 1754"). President Obama wants to develop a state-of-the-art assessment system, but I think that we are a long way off from any sort of cost-effective, large scale measure.
Even if we could accurately measure student assessment, this would not be a good idea. Almost all of the research in motivational psychology says that if you want better teachers, do not have them focus on rewards. The summary phrase Alfie Kohn uses is something like "You want people concentrating on what they are doing rather than how they are doing." Many of you have probably experienced this when your boss hovers over your work station - most people find it more difficult to do good work in this case than if the boss weren't there. Teacher merit pay would have teachers focus on the how rather than the what, and the research says that they will take fewer risks and be less creative teachers. I would also imagine that there would be a lot more "teaching to the test."

If President Obama really wanted to increase student learning, he would consider ideas like year-round schooling. There is getting to be a decent amount of evidence that this increases student learning significantly (no sources, sorry). This is similar to the idea that if President Obama/Congress really wanted to conserve gasoline, they would lower the national speed limit back down to 55 miles per hour. This would be easy, cheap, and nearly immediate. You see, at speeds higher than about 40 miles per hour, the fuel efficiency decreases proportionally to the square of the velocity. Very, VERY roughly speaking, if you double your speed, you should expect only one quarter (rather than one half) of your original fuel efficiency.

Both of these options are disruptive to people's daily lives, though, and I do not think that the government (Republican nor Democrat) has enough guts to do either one of these.

While I am talking about fuel economy, here are a couple of things to remember: it is much, much smarter to switch from an inefficient car (an SUV, for instance) to a mildly efficient car (a Camry) than it is to switch from an efficient car (a Corolla) to an ultra efficient car (a Prius). This is because there are weird arithmetic things going on with the units. If you have an SUV that gets 10 mpg (a simple example), it will use 10 gallons in 100 miles. If you were to double the efficiency to 20 mpg, you would use only 5 gallons in the same 100 miles, for a savings of 5 gallons of gas.

On the other hand, if you double the efficiency again to 40 mpg, you would use 2.5 gallons of gas, a savings of 2.5 gallons over the 20 mpg car. So upgrading from 10 mpg to 20 mpg saves 5 gallons/100 miles, but upgrading from 20 mpg to 40 mpg only saves 2.5 gallons/100 miles. Every little bit helps, but some things help more than others. So, please, trade your SUV in for a sedan.

On anger: I am currently less mad at the bailed-out banks, and more mad at George Will.

This American Life, the most trust source for...well, anything, did another story on the financial state of the country. They basically said that the outrage directed at the banks for not using the bail-out money for lending is misplaced. The root problem, they say, is that banks do not have enough money to pay out to people if they want to take their money out of the bank. This is bad. The bail-out money helps stabilize them by providing them with enough money so that their assets match their liabilities. Lending out that money would make the problem even worse, since their assets would decrease further and their liabilities would increase.

My decrease in anger toward the banks is met with increased anger toward George Will. Now, Will has been one of my favorite three conservative pundits for some time, along with Pat Buchanan and David Brooks (top four, if you think that John McLaughlin is still conservative). I like that he can clearly write about a different perspective, and I find that he makes me consider ideas that I hadn't thought of before. I am mad, though, because it looks like he might have a history of playing fast and loose with the facts. Mano's posting summarizes this well, and was the reason I initially thought of this (although I had been reading a decent amount about the global warming lie recently).

Monday, March 09, 2009

I'm back from a spring break that never really happened, due to a job-related trip. So I basically worked for 4 of my 5 days off. It was fun, but it isn't nearly as relaxing as staying at home.

Olivia Awesome is getting awesomer, and the in-laws are in town. I am hoping that my EV gets back from the shop today or tomorrow so I can show it to my father-in-law, who is into that kind of thing.

Uncooperative Crickets