On the topic of caricatures, I happened to visit Ben Garrison's web site the other day. First, he's a decent caricaturist. Good enough to get away without labeling most of the people he draws. Second, he works at it, cranking out a political cartoon every two or three days. That's comparable to a political cartoonist like David Horsey, who draws at a similar level of detail. Third, you could convince me that the whole thing is, not a grift, but that he's found a niche drawing stuff the Tea Party and MAGA crowds will pay for. He sells the original pencil work for a price much like the price the Foglios ask for original Girl Genius pencil work*. So, as long as you don't mind the content**, fair value for the money.
* I've read every Girl Genius online page. I've been in awe of Phil Foglio for 20 years, cranking out three pages every week. I'm even more awestruck by the idea that he and Kaja still have all of the original pencil work -- >3,000 11x17" pages.
** I love Steve Hanks's water color work. But I'd rather have a choice of more landscapes and kids, and less naked ladies.
A few years back the LA Times didn't want use Latinx, so conducted a poll among their readers to see what was preferred. About 75% of the fill-in-the-blank responses were "Mexican-American".
When I was a lad I lived in NW Iowa, in the days when a large amount of the population were descended from the Great Northern Railway's recruiting grain farmers in northern Europe to move to America. There were seven Lutheran churches in town. Once you found out which of the Lutheran churches someone attended, you had their grandparents' country of origin pinned down.
The judge has scheduled a hearing for April 22. The two sides will argue over a number of things, including whether the contract is actually a surety bond at all.
Eclipses are cool. So are tropical-storm force straight line winds, which we're supposed to get up to tonight. The local power authority's wind farm is up on the Cheyenne Ridge. They've already shut it down to protect the turbines. Xcel has shut down service to 55,000 customers because of fire danger, and say those outages will be 24 hours or a bit longer. That doesn't include unplanned outages due to damage. Have I mentioned lately that in my municipal utility's service area >99% of distribution wiring is buried? The utility is reporting zero outages at this time.
My own impression is that Israel is trying to force the rest of the world to evacuate Gaza, or watch the Palestinians die. The problem, of course, is there's no one else that wants to absorb a couple million Palestinians.
In Arizona, the House Republicans have passed a bill that would refer a constitutional amendment to the voters. Said amendment would dismantle AZ's very popular mail ballot system. >80% of registered voters have voluntarily put their names on the permanent no-excuse mail ballot list. The bill is currently in committee over in the Senate.
Assuming the referendum makes it to the ballot, the AZ Republicans are braver than I am. My experience observing western states is that a proposed amendment that people feel strongly about drives turnout. Proposing to dismantle a popular system strikes me as a really bad idea. I don't think AZ is going to be as close as the pundits seem to think.
Ditto for Nevada, just because it's on a now years-long trajectory favoring the Democrats.
Now imagine the whole ISS tumbling down. NASA is asking for an initial billion dollars to develop a "space tug" with the intent of using it to crash the most durable parts of the ISS into an isolated part of the South Pacific Ocean. In early 2031, I believe. Somehow I have to think that the cheapest proposal they'll get will be SpaceX bidding a one-off modification of Starship, then handing the job over to Gwynne Shotwell to get it built. They're not ever going to let Gwynne retire.
Even in the rural-ish states where I went to high school, schools that were big enough did the same thing, giving the college prep kids the opportunity to start algebra in 8th grade and tacking a year of calculus on for 12th grade. The smaller schools didn't have enough students to justify having a calculus class.
We abhor rote memorization as a pedagogical tool but it might just be the best form of instruction for math even though it is extremely boring...
This misses the entire purpose of math. All of the rote learning is preparation. The purpose arrives when you get to the part most people seem to seriously dread about math classes... word problems.
Math is hardly the only thing that we teach by rote memorization. Foreign languages come to mind. Memorize the thousand most common words. Memorize the grammar rules so you can build sentences. Lots of people never get past the point of translating from, for example, German to English in their head, then translate their response from English to German and say it. What a glorious day it was when I first started thinking in German, without the translation steps.
When I was at Bell Labs long ago, one of my bosses went off to a leadership class about once every six months. We bribed the department secretary to make us a copy of the training material they had sent to him so we had some idea of what was coming.
Let me add that when I taught calc 1 a few years ago at a community college that had to meet the standards of the state's four-year universities, that was the assumption: mastery of polynomial, trig, and exponential/log functions.
Back when I took it, yeah, all the stuff that went with transcendental functions, plus some basic analytic geometry.
When I went off to college, I was invited to be in the "honors" calculus class. Three semesters of calculus done in two semesters. The first day Dr. Lewis handed out a quiz that was intended to determine if you had a good grasp on transcendentals.
Most STEM students have some version of my trick memory: they can memorize a whole bunch of facts and figures temporarily, then forget them at the end of the semester. At the undergraduate level, they don't need to relate the facts from medieval European history to the facts from medieval Japanese history. In the M part of STEM, in differential equations you need to remember the rote learning stuff from calc 1 three semesters ago, or you'll fail.
I largely wasted a semester of physics because I took the self-paced version and let myself get to the point where I had to pass the exams for nine units in nine class days. Turned into an exercise in memorize and (mostly) forget.
The "standard" high school math sequence is algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, pre-calc. The reason is that it prepares the students who are going off to the state university to study engineering (hundreds/thousands of them per state, year after year). At college they do calc 1, 2, and 3, a semester of linear algebra, and a semester of differential equations. That's the math they need for all of the classical engineering fields. For those students, high-school calculus is just advanced placement.
If I were planning a high-school math sequence for the non-engineers, it would be quite different. Probably not workable because historically, it's been really hard to recruit high-school math teachers who could do a good job on probability/statistics* and assorted discrete math.
* Just to show my biases, you can't really understand continuous distribution functions and the statistics that follow without understanding integrals.
There are also people who are better at music than others. My father and I were a little bit in awe of each other. He couldn't read music, but could listen to a recording, fool around a bit, and then sing it for you with all the right chords on the guitar. Ask him to do it a half-step higher and he'd hum the new first note, then sing/play it correctly the first time. He was a musician; despite all my years in school band, I was a technician. Dad said he was amazed that I could apply some piece of math to a problem in one field, then look at a problem in a different area and casually say, "Same math."
I learned to play on rural Midwestern public courses. None of them had a groundskeeper per se. In those days, becoming a PGA member generally didn't mean the touring players. It meant the people who went through the PGA training on how to manage a golf club. Turf care, sure, but also all the rest of running a particular type of small business. Oh, and how to teach someone to play golf.
The course where I learned the most was a little 9-hole place in the next little town over. If I got there by 8:00, I had the course to myself and could play 36 holes and be done by 2:00. From time to time after hitting a bad shot, I would turn around and the old pro would be there, 30-40 feet away in his little golf cart. "Want to know why it was a bad shot?" he'd ask. "Want to know how to get a better result?" And when I said yes, he'd pull out a half-bucket of range balls and I'd learn the right way to do something.
Barges hit Mississippi River bridges multiple times each year. Sometimes multiple times in a month. The old Mississippi River bridge at Vicksburg by itself seems to average multiple collisions per year.
At the time the bridge was built, there were 90,000-ton bulk cargo ships already sailing capable of taking out the bridge piers as designed. Everyone knew bigger ships were coming.
The state/federal highway authorities chose to build a bridge downstream* from all of the port's cargo terminals. If one of the consequences of that should have been a new requirement for tug assistance over much greater distances, who should pay?
* Baltimore has small tides, but sufficient to affect the current**. Also holds true, I suspect, for extreme precipitation effects.
** Years ago when I was supervising a group of high-powered tech experts the building was on the edge of a "river" that was actually a tidal estuary. One of the big guns in the group -- meaning one of the top three or four experts in the field in the country -- lived on the other side of the estuary and his commuting choices were drive several/many kilometers, or canoe 200 meters. His preference for much of the year was to canoe. He couldn't paddle against the peak tidal flows. If we were hosting a meeting where I needed him, I consulted the tide tables to see if I could schedule things to accommodate him.
I used to know a forensic mechanical engineer. He always told me that a surprising number of physical things just break and that my opinion was biased by the amount of time I spent around software.
OTOH, I maintain that there will always be bad or mediocre human-produced art, it just won't be commercial.
I'm a hack, and I know it. I have five known fans: two granddaughters, two kids, and a woman I've known since graduate school. When granddaughter #3 is a bit older, she may also be a fan. Based on my experience with granddaughter #1, the AIs have a long way to go until they can respond to "Why doesn't your dragon lady have legs, Grandpa?"
Retirees will continue to paint bad watercolors, and do bad landscape sketches, because it's much more satisfying than telling an AI, "Start from this picture and do a landscape sketch. No, make the lines more irregular. No, make the steeple blue, not green. No, the leaves are too realistic."
After an online discussion about browser user scripts to defeat the efforts of bad designers to make content ugly and unreadable, an acquaintance fed a short description into one of the code-generating AIs. The resulting script loaded and ran on Greasemonkey/Firefox/Linux. No errors showed up on the browser console. The code did what the description said it would. It chose reasonable values for the arbitrary constants it needed.
Some years ago I wrote a script to do similar things. The overall structure is more complicated because I had to do things to offset browser behavior that caused performance problems. The AI script is straightforward and doesn't address those issues. It is entirely possible that between when I wrote mine and now the browser has gotten smarter and fixed those problems.
One of these days I'm going to simply a copy of my script, taking out the performance hacks, and see how it runs.
On “Briggs Views “When It Comes Home””
On the topic of caricatures, I happened to visit Ben Garrison's web site the other day. First, he's a decent caricaturist. Good enough to get away without labeling most of the people he draws. Second, he works at it, cranking out a political cartoon every two or three days. That's comparable to a political cartoonist like David Horsey, who draws at a similar level of detail. Third, you could convince me that the whole thing is, not a grift, but that he's found a niche drawing stuff the Tea Party and MAGA crowds will pay for. He sells the original pencil work for a price much like the price the Foglios ask for original Girl Genius pencil work*. So, as long as you don't mind the content**, fair value for the money.
* I've read every Girl Genius online page. I've been in awe of Phil Foglio for 20 years, cranking out three pages every week. I'm even more awestruck by the idea that he and Kaja still have all of the original pencil work -- >3,000 11x17" pages.
** I love Steve Hanks's water color work. But I'd rather have a choice of more landscapes and kids, and less naked ladies.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/8/2024”
A few years back the LA Times didn't want use Latinx, so conducted a poll among their readers to see what was preferred. About 75% of the fill-in-the-blank responses were "Mexican-American".
When I was a lad I lived in NW Iowa, in the days when a large amount of the population were descended from the Great Northern Railway's recruiting grain farmers in northern Europe to move to America. There were seven Lutheran churches in town. Once you found out which of the Lutheran churches someone attended, you had their grandparents' country of origin pinned down.
"
The judge has scheduled a hearing for April 22. The two sides will argue over a number of things, including whether the contract is actually a surety bond at all.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Road Trip To The Eclipse”
Eclipses are cool. So are tropical-storm force straight line winds, which we're supposed to get up to tonight. The local power authority's wind farm is up on the Cheyenne Ridge. They've already shut it down to protect the turbines. Xcel has shut down service to 55,000 customers because of fire danger, and say those outages will be 24 hours or a bit longer. That doesn't include unplanned outages due to damage. Have I mentioned lately that in my municipal utility's service area >99% of distribution wiring is buried? The utility is reporting zero outages at this time.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
My own impression is that Israel is trying to force the rest of the world to evacuate Gaza, or watch the Palestinians die. The problem, of course, is there's no one else that wants to absorb a couple million Palestinians.
On “About Those Swing State Polls”
In Arizona, the House Republicans have passed a bill that would refer a constitutional amendment to the voters. Said amendment would dismantle AZ's very popular mail ballot system. >80% of registered voters have voluntarily put their names on the permanent no-excuse mail ballot list. The bill is currently in committee over in the Senate.
Assuming the referendum makes it to the ballot, the AZ Republicans are braver than I am. My experience observing western states is that a proposed amendment that people feel strongly about drives turnout. Proposing to dismantle a popular system strikes me as a really bad idea. I don't think AZ is going to be as close as the pundits seem to think.
Ditto for Nevada, just because it's on a now years-long trajectory favoring the Democrats.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
Now imagine the whole ISS tumbling down. NASA is asking for an initial billion dollars to develop a "space tug" with the intent of using it to crash the most durable parts of the ISS into an isolated part of the South Pacific Ocean. In early 2031, I believe. Somehow I have to think that the cheapest proposal they'll get will be SpaceX bidding a one-off modification of Starship, then handing the job over to Gwynne Shotwell to get it built. They're not ever going to let Gwynne retire.
On “It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Algebra 2”
Even in the rural-ish states where I went to high school, schools that were big enough did the same thing, giving the college prep kids the opportunity to start algebra in 8th grade and tacking a year of calculus on for 12th grade. The smaller schools didn't have enough students to justify having a calculus class.
"
We abhor rote memorization as a pedagogical tool but it might just be the best form of instruction for math even though it is extremely boring...
This misses the entire purpose of math. All of the rote learning is preparation. The purpose arrives when you get to the part most people seem to seriously dread about math classes... word problems.
Math is hardly the only thing that we teach by rote memorization. Foreign languages come to mind. Memorize the thousand most common words. Memorize the grammar rules so you can build sentences. Lots of people never get past the point of translating from, for example, German to English in their head, then translate their response from English to German and say it. What a glorious day it was when I first started thinking in German, without the translation steps.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
Released. Tripped the editors' four-letter word filter.
On “It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Algebra 2”
When I was at Bell Labs long ago, one of my bosses went off to a leadership class about once every six months. We bribed the department secretary to make us a copy of the training material they had sent to him so we had some idea of what was coming.
"
Let me add that when I taught calc 1 a few years ago at a community college that had to meet the standards of the state's four-year universities, that was the assumption: mastery of polynomial, trig, and exponential/log functions.
"
Back when I took it, yeah, all the stuff that went with transcendental functions, plus some basic analytic geometry.
When I went off to college, I was invited to be in the "honors" calculus class. Three semesters of calculus done in two semesters. The first day Dr. Lewis handed out a quiz that was intended to determine if you had a good grasp on transcendentals.
"
Its not morality, its the ability to manage and lead.
Do you and the MBA schools who claim to teach that agree on anything?
"
Most STEM students have some version of my trick memory: they can memorize a whole bunch of facts and figures temporarily, then forget them at the end of the semester. At the undergraduate level, they don't need to relate the facts from medieval European history to the facts from medieval Japanese history. In the M part of STEM, in differential equations you need to remember the rote learning stuff from calc 1 three semesters ago, or you'll fail.
I largely wasted a semester of physics because I took the self-paced version and let myself get to the point where I had to pass the exams for nine units in nine class days. Turned into an exercise in memorize and (mostly) forget.
"
The "standard" high school math sequence is algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, pre-calc. The reason is that it prepares the students who are going off to the state university to study engineering (hundreds/thousands of them per state, year after year). At college they do calc 1, 2, and 3, a semester of linear algebra, and a semester of differential equations. That's the math they need for all of the classical engineering fields. For those students, high-school calculus is just advanced placement.
If I were planning a high-school math sequence for the non-engineers, it would be quite different. Probably not workable because historically, it's been really hard to recruit high-school math teachers who could do a good job on probability/statistics* and assorted discrete math.
* Just to show my biases, you can't really understand continuous distribution functions and the statistics that follow without understanding integrals.
"
There are also people who are better at music than others. My father and I were a little bit in awe of each other. He couldn't read music, but could listen to a recording, fool around a bit, and then sing it for you with all the right chords on the guitar. Ask him to do it a half-step higher and he'd hum the new first note, then sing/play it correctly the first time. He was a musician; despite all my years in school band, I was a technician. Dad said he was amazed that I could apply some piece of math to a problem in one field, then look at a problem in a different area and casually say, "Same math."
On “The Public Links”
I learned to play on rural Midwestern public courses. None of them had a groundskeeper per se. In those days, becoming a PGA member generally didn't mean the touring players. It meant the people who went through the PGA training on how to manage a golf club. Turf care, sure, but also all the rest of running a particular type of small business. Oh, and how to teach someone to play golf.
The course where I learned the most was a little 9-hole place in the next little town over. If I got there by 8:00, I had the course to myself and could play 36 holes and be done by 2:00. From time to time after hitting a bad shot, I would turn around and the old pro would be there, 30-40 feet away in his little golf cart. "Want to know why it was a bad shot?" he'd ask. "Want to know how to get a better result?" And when I said yes, he'd pull out a half-bucket of range balls and I'd learn the right way to do something.
On “Bridge Derangement Syndrome”
Barges hit Mississippi River bridges multiple times each year. Sometimes multiple times in a month. The old Mississippi River bridge at Vicksburg by itself seems to average multiple collisions per year.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024”
The Kurds against everyone for the last century.
On “Bridge Derangement Syndrome”
Not disagreeing, just extending the discussion.
At the time the bridge was built, there were 90,000-ton bulk cargo ships already sailing capable of taking out the bridge piers as designed. Everyone knew bigger ships were coming.
The state/federal highway authorities chose to build a bridge downstream* from all of the port's cargo terminals. If one of the consequences of that should have been a new requirement for tug assistance over much greater distances, who should pay?
* Baltimore has small tides, but sufficient to affect the current**. Also holds true, I suspect, for extreme precipitation effects.
** Years ago when I was supervising a group of high-powered tech experts the building was on the edge of a "river" that was actually a tidal estuary. One of the big guns in the group -- meaning one of the top three or four experts in the field in the country -- lived on the other side of the estuary and his commuting choices were drive several/many kilometers, or canoe 200 meters. His preference for much of the year was to canoe. He couldn't paddle against the peak tidal flows. If we were hosting a meeting where I needed him, I consulted the tide tables to see if I could schedule things to accommodate him.
"
I used to know a forensic mechanical engineer. He always told me that a surprising number of physical things just break and that my opinion was biased by the amount of time I spent around software.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024”
OTOH, I maintain that there will always be bad or mediocre human-produced art, it just won't be commercial.
I'm a hack, and I know it. I have five known fans: two granddaughters, two kids, and a woman I've known since graduate school. When granddaughter #3 is a bit older, she may also be a fan. Based on my experience with granddaughter #1, the AIs have a long way to go until they can respond to "Why doesn't your dragon lady have legs, Grandpa?"
http://www.mcain6925.com/ordinary/little-monsters-tea.png
Retirees will continue to paint bad watercolors, and do bad landscape sketches, because it's much more satisfying than telling an AI, "Start from this picture and do a landscape sketch. No, make the lines more irregular. No, make the steeple blue, not green. No, the leaves are too realistic."
"
After an online discussion about browser user scripts to defeat the efforts of bad designers to make content ugly and unreadable, an acquaintance fed a short description into one of the code-generating AIs. The resulting script loaded and ran on Greasemonkey/Firefox/Linux. No errors showed up on the browser console. The code did what the description said it would. It chose reasonable values for the arbitrary constants it needed.
Some years ago I wrote a script to do similar things. The overall structure is more complicated because I had to do things to offset browser behavior that caused performance problems. The AI script is straightforward and doesn't address those issues. It is entirely possible that between when I wrote mine and now the browser has gotten smarter and fixed those problems.
One of these days I'm going to simply a copy of my script, taking out the performance hacks, and see how it runs.
On “Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Struck By Container Ship, Collapses”
No, but there were bulk cargo carriers in excess of 90,000 tons capacity sailing by the early 1970s. Everyone knew bigger ships were coming.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.