Happy New Year

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And happy old year, too!

Here is an awesome video.

Some violin jokes are to be found here.

The Politics of Being American

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What does it mean to be “American”?

To some it means to love liberty.  It means freedom.  It means never being told what to do.

It means having the opportunity to accumulate enormous wealth.

It means being able to afford an enormous car, even if from an environmental point of view, owning it puts a burden on air and water quality.

It means being able to buy cheap goods, even if it is produced by poorly-paid foreign workers.

It means being able to have a guaranteed white-collar job, even without knowing as much as, or having the skills of, your foreign counterpart in an equivalent job.

It means being able to afford expensive medical treatment, and being able to afford an expensive legal battle if your doctor makes a mistake.

It means being able to live like a king, far from the accusing eyes of the poor.

It means being able to use up all the wilderness in the USA, but being able to go look at interesting wildlife anytime you feel like it.

It means being able to have good, organic food wholesomely produced in small farms that do not exist anymore.

It means being able to fill up your enormous gas-guzzling SUV with oil that was stolen from poor people who live somewhere else.

It means having the right to have your children taught senseless fairy tales about nature, and yet have them be sufficiently well educated to be able to produce the drugs required to treat the diseases that your lavish lifestyle will surely cause in the poisoned environment you live in.

It means demanding a sophisticated world with expensive services which you do not want to pay for with taxes.

It means having an excellent education for your kids, taught by poorly-paid people whom you curse and vilify at every opportunity.

It means never going to the polls to vote, but being furious at the idiots who are elected to office.

Do we want to continue to be American?

Choosing a Major

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I hope my readers don't think I'm acting beyond my mandate if I offer a few suggestions about choosing a major.  This is for college students; others should leave this page at once.

It might be a bit too annoying if I were to give detailed reasons, but I'm going to give you a peep into my thinking anyway.  The world is too full of people giving instructions with very little supporting arguments.

1.  You must pick a major you're interested in.  Sure, you have to find a job, but if you can't stand a subject, you will be miserable for several decades.  Select one of your two most favorite subjects.  If you have to be practical, you can go with the one that promises more employment opportunities.

2.  Make sure you take your writing courses and your math courses seriously.  You could have a major in basket weaving, but your writing ability and your ability to do double-entry book-keeping might get you a job, especially if this employer can't afford a fully-qualified accountant.  Being able to use MS Word and MS Excel are also good for employment.  Your major is not the only thing that matters.

3.  In these times when everybody is going to grad school (this might be news to you, but college degrees are becoming commonplace), you must keep an eye on possible graduate school "majors".  In theory, you can go to grad school in (say) Economics, even if your undergrad degree is in History.  But in practice, Economics graduate schools tend to think that an undergraduate degree in Mathematics or Engineering is a better preparation for an Economics graduate degree.  On the other hand, your undergraduate major might not be a deterrent for a graduate degree in Music, for instance.  But you must have a solid background in music theory and performance.  I guess I'm saying: keep graduate school in the back of your mind.

4.  As I have often said, statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Government) show that people change occupations, and even career areas, on the average of three times in a lifetime.  You may start off in a job in Marketing (though your major was Art), and end up working for a non-profit.  My wife got an undergraduate degree in Archeology and History, but her first full-time job was as a writer for an Engineering journal, and now she is a grant writer for the county government.  If you're good, you could get hired to do a tricky job no matter what your undergraduate major was.

5.  You can declare and un-declare your major a couple of times; nobody is going to insist that you stay with your original choice.  Keep taking courses in all the areas you're interested in, so that you keep your options open.

6.  If you want to make money, don't go into teaching.  Well-meaning friends may urge you to go into teaching, because "You would make such an awesome teacher!"  But you would be a miserable awesome teacher who can't pay her bills.  Until the situation changes and our culture begins to take teachers more seriously, hassle them a lot less, and pays them a lot better, the nation is going to have to make do with teachers who go into the profession because they can't make more money elsewhere.  On the other hand, if you're a Mother Theresa in the making, by all means teach.  Or teach, and moonlight as a tax accountant.  And get a bullet-proof vest, because who knows?

To conclude, a major (in the theory of tertiary education that holds sway at the moment) is an area into which a college student goes in some depth.  Your general education courses provide breadth.  The idea of college is not to make you more employable in terms of your subject knowledge (though, inevitably, that does happen), but rather because your college experience should have given you a better perspective on life, culture, and the world, than most people without a college experience.  This is valuable to many employers.  (Unfortunately, many of your college-mates have been able to go through college without an iota's change in their perspective.  They have to somehow keep that fact hidden from more perceptive employers.)  The general education courses give you that perspective, and your major trains you into thinking deeply about at least one subject.  Some people find it difficult to think deeply about anything, and these people should not be in college.  So pick a major in a subject you like sufficiently well that you aren't afraid of going into it in depth.  Remember, if you're a sophomore now, you might be quite a different person by the time you need to go into your major in depth, and you might not be as scared of intellectual stuff at that point.

Arch

Business—My Take

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‘Business’ has meant to me—and will continue to mean—simply the old idea of trade taken to a more sophisticated level.  A trader obtains goods that he or she thinks will sell well in some other locality, transports them there, and sells it at a profit.  The service is mostly that of transporting the goods to where they will be more useful.  (In some languages, ‘cooper’, ‘carter’ and ‘merchant’ all mean the same thing.)

In more recent times, when cities grew large enough so that everyone did not know everyone else, to buy what they needed directly from the supplier, the storekeeper would obtain goods that someone could supply—usually in bulk—and sell it to someone else, who knew to look for the good in the Store.  The service here was that of warehousing the goods, hence the word Store.

Today, a business is either a manufacturing business, or one that provides a service, or one that combines the services of transporting and warehousing, and possibly dressing the goods up (packaging), and profits today are, of course, an order of magnitude higher than they were in the good old days of the tradesman.

America was built on farming, to begin with.  But soon tradesmen began to acquire political power, and the myth was born that America was built by business.  Because the life of a storekeeper is a lot easier than that of a farmer, over the centuries businessmen have had the leisure to dream up many more shady schemes than those in other occupations, in order to acquire still more economic power, and America has certainly been the place where economic power buys a great deal of political power.  Americans love to despise the political power that Chinese businessmen have been able to acquire, but of course it was American Business that showed the world how economic power could be profitably abused.

Today, business is worshiped so much in the US (and to some extent, everywhere else) that when there is an economic slump here, people are called upon to go out and spend, to “help The Economy recover.”  Consumption, and consumer spending is considered a sort of economic panacea, because (encouraged by Business) US economic theory is based on consumption.

I, for one, do not believe in this myth.  Consumer spending helps business.  Business does not help anything except business itself.  Business has discovered the futility of helping the community, the arts, or education.  The only thing on which Business would consider spending any loose change that lies around, is marketing, which is simply a particularly evil brand of the old advertising.  So our towns and cities are simply covered with enormous, ugly billboards that advertise everything from cigarettes to alcohol to no-good crooked politicians.  Business is not a charity that needs our support.

Now that Business has learned the benefits of offshoring any sort of unpleasant material or activity, and now that banks in other countries have learned the benefits of providing a home to US funds, any money that Business has left over is shipped straight offshore to the welcoming arms of foreign banks, and do not help the so-called US economy at all.

Ironically, small businesses, which simply do not have the resources to rip-off the population as efficiently as Big Business, do identify with Big Business!  This is funny, and it is even funnier when small businesses wail and complain about the woes of Big Business, even if the complaints are completely inapplicable to them.  Small businesses are unlikely to offshore their needs, and certainly not their bank accounts, though they may aspire to do that someday.  Neither do they have to pay the sorts of taxes that Big Business should be paying.  And most laughable of all is how much individuals who are actually unemployed defend the rights of Big Business to pay very little tax.  “Some day,” an unemployed person can be heard to say, “I anticipate being extremely wealthy, and I do not want to have to pay taxes on that day.”  This can only be caused explained by their education having been distorted so as not to explain that people with higher incomes are required to pay taxes at a higher rate.  Some things in the USA simply defy reason.  Hello, y'all!  Raising the taxes of Exxon does not mean that small businesses have to pay higher taxes!  You got that?

We also used to have laws forbidding petroleum giants like Exxon from swallowing up other competing businesses.  But now, behold: Exxon has swallowed up Mobil.  So Exxon can spread fear that gas prices will rise if their taxes are raised.  If there was a suitable degree of competition among these oil companies, in theory, smaller companies would sell gasoline at lower prices, and Exxon would have to sell at the lower prices, just to stay in business.  But if Exxon is the only game in town (and I wonder which administration is to blame for having allowed Exxon to acquire Mobil, and do we honestly think that it was to the public benefit that the merger was to take place?) then certainly they can raise the price of gasoline, and certainly in towns where there are only Exxon gas stations.  How has the population been made to think that monopolies are good?  And Americans don’t like to be called stupid.

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Christians and their Gun Laws

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I guess we honestly need to find out, once and for all, whether, as the NRA and pro-gun folks (lumping them all together) claim, the existing gun laws are not vigorously enforced.  Is it true?  Is law enforcement turning a blind eye to illegal gun sales?  Or is the law pretty much impossible to enforce?  If the existing law is simply unenforceable, or inconvenient to enforce, or if enforcement is not appropriately funded, then something has to be done.  We must deploy the few miserable pennies that the wealthy allow us to levy in taxes to effective law enforcement.

Christianity, as I understood it in my youth, was a very demanding religion, and not for the faint-hearted or the feeble-minded.  But now it appears that most of those who adhere to it like glue are precisely those.  The large evangelical mega-churches coach the faithful more to protect the leaders, and then protect their own narrow interests, rather than to see to the welfare of mankind at large.  The attitude seems to be that the masses have their reward in heaven; the faithful must lead a cushy life now.  This is not the gospel I remember.

Well, it belongs to them, and I suppose it has evolved.  At least the Mormons and the Christian Scientists go about it honestly: they have modern prophets who have elucidated the message of the scriptures.  The rest of them are twisting the meaning of the gospel.

A recent poster making the rounds conflates the ridiculous storm in a teacup of the Starbucks' "Holiday" mug falling short of its Christmasyness, and the recent mass shooting(s).  It's naive to think that agnostics or atheists are less violent than Christians for philosophical reasons.  The sort of violent horror in the US that the meme refers to is hardly caused by reason of some ideology or philosophy.  On the other hand, maybe it is, but it appears to be the norm to always put it down to insanity.  We probably ought to create a splinter group of Christianity into which we can quickly assign the culprits of mass shootings, and blame that sect, rather than insanity.

So what's going on?  Are the majority of Christians innocent victims of a small, violent minority among them, who force the rest of them to refrain from the kind of charity that the horrible economic straits of our poor demands?  Is there a pernicious core in the Christian church that holds some mysterious power over the Chosen, that prevents them from encouraging their representatives to enact effective gun control laws?  Or is it that the system does not work, and the deceitful candidates for public office cannot be trusted to carry out the wishes of their constituents, and simply pander to the lobbyists of special interest groups?  We know that the gun lobby is among the most powerful in Washington.  Few electoral districts have candidates who have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.  We are a nation of cowards.

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Entropy or Progress?

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I recently had to spend a lot of time with an elderly uncle and aunt (and they would probably resent being characterized as ‘elderly’ if they saw this post).  And, while they have more marbles than most citizens have, despite their combined ages of 181 (and you can go right ahead and be insulted, if you want to), they are increasingly resentful about almost every aspect of life.  They were very unhappy about “Gay Marriage,” they’re unhappy with Donald Trump —that actually goes for most of my friends and relatives— and scornful of Bernie Sanders, and critical about the curricula of most schools (they were both teachers in their day), and on and on.

Listening to their rants, night in and night out, I realized that what they’re upset about is that things are being done differently than they were in the seventies.  More drugs in the streets, more teens getting pregnant, more misbehavior in Washington (DC, that is), the News readers on TV aren’t as well informed, stores don’t carry the food items they used to, and so on.

Of course, they’re older, so you expect grumbling about things.  But they grumble about good things, too.  They have a cell phone, but they grumble about features on it that they do not use.  In other words, they grumble about service packages, which are different from the very small selection of service packages that were available in, say, 1980.

The funny thing is that they’re ultra liberal, and their only beef about Bernie Sanders is that he goes off the deep end.  (They think he should be President, and Hillary C. should be Vice President, never mind the political implications of that setup.)  Having a female president is probably one of the newfangled, unproven ideas that they have absolutely no faith in.

But, you see, that is the essence of Conservatism.  Change is bad.  The most intelligent (OK, I’m being judgmental here) conservatives would say that too rapid change is bad, but change is inevitable.

I stumbled on the following insight when trying to endure the endless grumbling of this pair of relatives.  They equate the constant onslaught of newfangled-ness with disorder.

If we only did things the way we’ve got it completely figured out, we wouldn’t have all these snafus.  If we only didn’t have Obamacare, the Health Insurance companies would know exactly how to painlessly rip off their consumers.  (Right now, the ripoffs are painful, and Health Insurance companies are playing a dangerous game.  The lack of transparency of the old insurance system guaranteed a certain amount of immunity from public scrutiny, which is no longer present.  Utility boards are increasingly aware of the profit margins of insurance companies, and one of these fine days, they will see legislation controlling it.)

It was the disorderliness of public life that was at the heart of which initiatives conservatives would support, and which they would not.  The new wave of T-Party conservatives uses the liberals themselves as their compass: if the Democrats want it, it must be bad, which is a lazy way of analyzing political initiatives.  Instead of looking at the problems of society with a view to ameliorating them, conservatives assess legislation based on the merits of whether it will help business (Big Business, because small business cannot afford lobbyists) and whether it will help vilify Democrats.  They have moved away from the principle of does it increase disorder?

Everyone is familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

In any isolated system, the total Entropy increases.

Entropy is a mysterious quantity to most people.  I only know to explain it by example.  For instance, if you have a container with every gas molecule in it bouncing about with the exact same speed, its entropy would be zero.  If one molecule goes at a different speed, the entropy increases a little bit.  If all the molecules are zipping around at different speeds, the entropy is huge.

Someone (James Clerk Maxwell) proposed an experiment as follows.

Get a sample of gas into a container divided into two parts, with a door in the middle.  There is a little demon at the door, and he (or she) lets fast molecules pass from one side into the other side (the "fast" side), and lets slow molecules in the fast side into the slow side.  Gradually, over time, the slow side will accumulate the slower molecules, and the fast side will accumulate the faster molecules.

The resulting total entropy will be lower than it was before the demon got to work, because the spread of the speeds in the two halves is less than they used to be.  The gas molecules were disorderly before, and a little more orderly now.  So, in principle, entropy can be lowered, but it involves knowing the speeds of individual molecules, so that the disorderliness can be systematically reduced.  Incidentally, this experiment demonstrates that information is the opposite of entropy, so entropy is a measure of lack of information.

According to Wikipedia, entropy is also a measure of how much heat (or other energy) is present which cannot be made to do work.  As you can imagine, low-temperature heat can't do very much work, even if there's oodles of it lying around, such as in our office-rooms, for instance.  In trying to make the air in my office do some work, I have to do even more work to extract the heat in the first place.

Unfortunately, as the population grows, and other processes take place that cannot be helped, the size of the same old problems we’ve always faced become larger, exacerbated by the extremely wealthy manipulating the laws to keep more of their wealth.  So the government has to feed, clothe and shelter a larger population under the poverty line (some of whom have incredibly large TV sets, to the indignation of conservatives), with lower tax revenues.  Why can’t we feed and clothe them as we did before?

This constant howl about why can’t we do it as we did before?  which the conservatives bring up is disingenuous, because a lot of what conservatives did before was accomplished by fooling with deficits, so that expenses were simply put off until the Democrats were once more in office, and needed to clean up the mess the Republicans had left behind.  The present mess is that Republicans did not put through any major maintenance of public highways and airports and harbors and research facilities, which must now be undertaken with lower tax revenues.  They were hoping that it would take exactly four years for Democrats to confess that they were not up to the job of mucking out the Aegean Stables.

Republicans are not going to be much better at mucking out anything, except their perceived handicaps of Democrats in the Washington bureaucracy.  They can save a few pennies by firing hundreds of career bureaucrats in Washington, but their own young bloods will demand an enormous salary for doing the same jobs, and will do them badly.

What Republicans are best at is creating imaginary crises which they can proceed to solve, such as the fictitious Social Security Crisis, which will probably get solved, if some idiot of the GOP is elected president, by borrowing money from the Veterans Administration, or from some useful part of the budget, and giving it to some conservative think-tank.

Liberals and Democrats do not change things just for the heck of it.  It is necessary to solve ever increasing problems creatively, with ever-decreasing tax revenues.  And, while nobody is watching, even with an inflation rate that is miniscule, businesses everywhere are raising prices, just because they can.  So things change, all in favor of Business, which are the darlings of the GOP!  I will blog very soon about Business.  And it will not be favorable.

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Paris, and a Sane Response--Paul Krugman

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Many analyses by Paul Krugman seem to be right on the mark, and this one is no exception.  People in the US and the UK and France and Germany, and Ireland, in short, all the countries that sometimes feel like making an overwhelming response to terrorism, should do some serious, rational thinking, to have their thoughts ready for such events as those of Paris.

Paul Krugman, a Left-Of-Center columnist and political writer, gave a very succinct analysis of the events of Paris, and all such acts of terrorism, those that have made it to our awareness, and the dozens that have not.

The intention of the terrorists is to provoke a more outrageous response from the highly-armed Western nations (US, UK, Russia, etc) than the random violence they caused.  They get more bang for their buck from the response, than from the senseless murders themselves.

For instance Donald Rumsfeld (Paul Krugman writes) capitalized on the indignation following 9/11 to do what he considered a clean sweep of the Middle East, and attacked Iraq, which was remarkable for being a nation in which there was a delicate balance between the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam, not to mention a small minority of Christians as well.  Now what do we have?  Not only have we killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, we have thrown the entire region out of balance.

Vast multitudes in the US find it tiresome to dwell on the subtleties of International politics.  Is the answer to simply blunder in and make grand gestures?  Those who find it unthinkable that direct action cannot solve the problem of terrorism must be sat upon.  Direct action can only put our children in even greater danger.  Only by no military action can the efforts of terrorists be eroded.  Political action: certainly.  Humanitarian action: yes.  Education.  Persistence.  Resolve.  But counterattack: not a good idea, says Paul Krugman, and after reading his article, I tend to agree.

Meanwhile, my immediate sympathetic response to the horror of the City of Paris seems to have only resulted in those from other parts of the world that suffered attacks both before and after Paris feeling slighted.  There is a constant undercurrent of terrorism out there, and there is a growing multitude of friends and families and compatriots of the victims of terrorism crying out for retaliation, feeding into the intentions of the terrorists for a grand conflagration.  A grand conflagration only helps the terrorists.

The Deal with Bernie Sanders

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I just read the most amazing article about what one journalist thinks is going on with Bernie Sanders.

This piece by Matt Taibbi was linked to by someone on my Fb page, and I think it articulates almost all of the thoughts that I have been trying to verbalize over the last year or so.  While most political journalists and bloggers are carrying on about how "un-electable" Bernie Sanders is, Mr. Taibbi writes that Bernie Sanders is so focused on his somewhat unpopular message simply because he's one of the few politicians who believes the system is not broken.

The other liberal candidates, e.g. Hillary Clinton, appear to be more moderate and electable simply because (Matt Taibbi says) they're cynics, and they're bought up by Big Business, and at the end of the day, they will play the game of the interests that have bought up the political process lock stock and barrel, whereas Bernie Sanders is completely uninterested in playing any sort of game.

To understand the complexity of Matt Taibbi's argument, and to appreciate the evidence he puts forward in support of it, you just have to read the post in its entirety.

When I first read it, what caught my eye is the fact that the political scene has to be viewed in the context of how Citizens United remains standing, despite the considerable force that liberals within Government and without have brought to bear on it.  Others may pay lip service to wanting to bring it down, but Bernie Sanders is almost the only one who goes about every day as if Citizens United must fall, and life must go on after it does.  Most of us (Taibbi writes) can't bear to think about "the little old lady who is on the point of freezing to death," at least not for very long, because some utility has decided to shut off her heating.  But Bernie thinks of nothing but these things, which have no business to happen in an enlightened country such as we wish ours is.

That's Bernie Sanders explained.  I sure wish it is true.

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Donal Trump is showing us how not to be Stupid

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We have to take a good hard look at ourselves.

Just repeating the mantra that everyone other than ourselves is stupid clicks with (unfortunately) the sort of people with whom we have very little in common.  We want to connect with people who will help us solve the problems that we face now, and will face shortly.  We can't be choosy about who's going to help us.

Trump might not be an idiot, but this constant ranting does tend to suggest that his best days are behind him.  Unless he is brilliant, and is implementing a Machiavellian scheme to convince the nation that he is stupid and harmless, he really is stupid and harmless (there I go, doing exactly what Trump himself is doing).  So he keeps us guessing whether his silliness is a brilliant smokescreen, or genuine silliness from the essence of Trump.  I vote for the latter.

On the other side of the coin, it is time we stopped poking fun at the GOP, and took stock of how we should proceed.  Sanders and Clinton have set an excellent example in the debates: they declined to indulge in mudslinging (though they were not reticent about criticizing each other on substantive issues, even if the actual words they used were carefully calculated), and it is time we stopped simply grumbling, and made concrete suggestions which conservatives can support, even if unwillingly.  If there is one criticism of Bernie Sanders, it is that he seems to have turned his back on compromise.  This is understandable, because the GOP, at least, seems to be uninterested in compromise.  John Boehner's resignation seems to suggest that he had decided that non-compromise had been taken as far as it could.

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Sleeping Positions

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I saw this one on a Fb post, and I thought I should share.

It is funny, and pokes gentle fun at all these psychological reports about things that are highly speculative at best.

College Students These Days

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Gone are the days when information, facts and analysis could be given to students without a lot of decoration.

I just passed a classroom this afternoon where students were playing some sort of game.  On one hand, there are lots of highly educational games for middle-schoolers which our undergrads may never have seen, and it is just possible that one of these may make more of an impact on a jaded freshman than a simple lecture, even if the lecture is beautifully delivered with Powerpoint slides, a sprig of parsley and a cherry on top.

I myself occasionally use a game or two to draw in the attention of a student whose hands are sneaking towards their cell phones to stave off utter boredom.  But then, I'm teaching future teachers, and they need to have a trick or two to lay on their future students, who are even more likely to have their attentions wander.

Some faculty getting into the action

One usually assumes that each new generation learns more sophisticated information than the last.  But we've arrived at a point where the trend is reversed: some material actually has to be taken out, to make space for games and entertainment.  I don't mean my own institution, oh no.  We would never do that.  But other institutions do a lot of this.  Cut the curriculum in half, and put in lots of fun.  No fun, no work.  Jack* is not going to be a dull boy if he can possibly help it.

But good luck getting your fresh young graduate to do the work of a senior employee, if you're hiring!  Chances are he only learned about the first 15 letters in the alphabet, because the last--however many-- had to be jettisoned to make space for the occasional period of fun.

Unless you hire somebody from our school :)

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[* An obscure reference to the old adage that 

"All work and no play

Makes Jack a dull boy."

--just in case your elementary school reading list was a trifle incomplete.]

The Nine-Point Circle

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Just for fun, my Geometry class and I decided that we would do a team Blog about this interesting result from Euclidean Geometry: Feuerbach's Nine Point Circle.  We're going to work on this in a leisurely fashion over a long period, so please check in from time to time to see how far we have gone.  We're planning to put in lots of pictures, to make the geometric reasoning clearer, but since it is being written "by committee", it will probably show the usual signs of Committeeishness.

There are a few terms that some readers might not recognize.
+ Vertex: this means the corners.  In the triangle ABC, the vertex A is just the point A, and so on.  The plural is vertices.
+ The foot of a perpendicular.  A perpendicular is from a point to a line.  The foot of a perpendicular is the point where it hits the line to which we're drawing the perpendicular.
+ An altitude is a perpendicular from a vertex to the opposite side.


Introduction
The Nine-Point Circle Theorem is an interesting result in Euclidean Geometry, having to do with a circle that that passes through six important points on any triangle.  Every triangle has several important points associated with it, and usually these points have little to do with each other.  But it just so happens that someone discovered that six of them all lie on a circle.  Furthermore, it turns out that there are three more relatively unimportant points that also lie on this circle.

To explain the points and their significance, we show them in a sequence of diagrams below.

First, we show the midpoints of each of the sides.  We indicate these in RED.

Next, we show the feet of the altitudes from each vertex to the opposite side. We show these in GREEN.

Incidentally, this sketch illustrates that the altitudes meet at one point, which is called the orthocenter, shown as O below.

Finally, we show that the points that lie midway between the orthocenter and the vertices also lie on the circle; we show these in PINK.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the actual circle:

We shall actually prove that these points lie on a circle (though it obviously does, according to the picture).

The proof of the existence of the 9-point circle is based on two previous theorems.

The first of these is the Mid-Point Theorem, which says that if XYZ is a triangle, and P is the midpoint of XY, and Q is the midpoint of XZ, then

(i) PQ = 1/2 YZ, and
(ii) PQ is parallel to YZ.

The proof of this is not difficult.

Let XYZ be a triangle, and let P and Q be the midpoints, as described above.  Consider the diagram at right.

To prove this theorem, we need a construction.  Extend PQ to point R, in such a way that PQ and QR are congruent (i.e., equal in length).  Join ZR.  Now triangles PQX and RQZ are congruent by "Side-Angle-Side".

Angles XPQ and ZRQ are congruent by Corresponding Parts.  Using the Alternate Angle Theorem, we know that lines XPY and RZ are parallel.

Consider the second diagram.  As you can see, XP, RZ, and PY are all congruent.  There is a result that says that if PY and RZ are both parallel and congruent, then PR and YZ are also both parallel and congruent.  It also means that the length of PQ is half of the length of YZ!

The second result we need is the interesting fact that if UV is the diameter of a circle, and if it is a side of a triangle whose third vertex, W, is on one of the semicircles, then angle W will be a right angle.  We give a diagram; the result follows from a little angle-chasing (notice that there are two isosceles triangles in the figure).

"The Tea Party is Breaking the GOP" -- The Republican Incompetence Caucus

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In a recent opinion piece, political commentator David Brooks, with whom I tend to agree a lot of the time, took a look at the unraveling of the Republican Party.  The GOP probably thinks that the Democrats are universally rejoicing at the confusion within their ranks, but while most liberals (including those Democrats who continue to be liberals, and you know who you aren't) can't help feel some satisfaction in how the GOP is now suffering, after all the hostility it has directed towards the Democrats and the President, the fact of the matter is that the old Republican Party, despite some of the scum that infested it in times gone by, also was home to many perfectly sane and decent politicians, including the late State Senator John Heinz, Olympia Snow, and a few others who served their constituents well, as well as the entire USA.  But of late, Republican policy has changed from conservatism and obstructionism to viciousness and recklessness.  They have stopped serving the interests of conservatives across the USA, and instead have focused on very specific goals based only on how much those goals help their funders, namely Big Business, and how much of those goals fire the imagination of the most ignorant and bloodthirsty among them, and which goals are likely to rile up liberals the most, such as opposition to gun control, and Planned Parenthood, and Evolution.  As far as Evolution is concerned, most Republicans do not care.  But they know liberals do care.  In my humble opinion, they do it just to upset us.

Brooks's main thrust is that the Tea Party, and the leadership among the younger conservatives, began to go wrong when they took it into their heads to portray themselves as revolutionaries.  What made the Republicans most attractive to their political base was the fact that they slowed down change to what they thought of as a speed at which it could be done advisedly, with all careful consideration, instead of (what they saw as) the headlong race that Democrats wanted to adopt.

But admittedly, that was not sexy.  They wanted to romanticize their conservatism, and the Conservative Press embraced that with open arms, and between them the Tea Party and Fox News have elevated Republican dysfunction to a point at which they can no longer elect a speaker for the majority party.

The Republicans have historically been ---at least for the last century or more--- the party of the Haves.  At least since the Depression of the Thirties, it is the Democrats who have been the party of the Have Nots.  But their strategy of romanticizing their conservatism, which Brooks traces to the emergence of Rush Limbaugh, made radical conservatism, which presented a picture of good old, gun-toting, testosterone-filled, white male dominated, USA First, Anti-Islamic, abortion-scorning, Bible-Thumping into something any redneck could love, and succeeded wildly with the Have Nots, to the complete bafflement of the liberals.

It did not matter that the Democrats said they would raise taxes, but reduced them instead, and that the Republicans who promised to lower taxes raised them instead; it was the promise that was important: Read My Lips.  The innocent, ignorant power base of the GOP absorbs the rhetoric, loves the posturing and the romance of the good old cowboy USA, while it is uncomfortable with the Peace-Treaty making, pro-education liberals.  Liberals stand for taking care of the poor and elderly.  Liberals stand for more school.

Conservatives promise an endless summer, with no responsibilities.  Oh sure, they demand personal responsibility.  That means you can do anything you like.

The David Brooks article really details, with clear logic, why radicalizing their platform did not work for the Republicans, and might have very long-term consequences for them and for everyone else.  They see that the problem with not passing a budget is one of marketing, public relations, which means advertising.  They don't see that not passing a budget actually harms their constituents.  They think of it as Xtreme Politics.  The GOP has become seduced by Madison Avenue.

Anyway, we have to make enough sense about what's going on to avoid complete insanity, but it is impossible to make enough sense of it to actually affect the fallout.

P.S. Readers must be careful: whether the GOP is unraveling or not is obviously a matter of perception; unravelment is not a precise term, nor does it imply that the process is irreversible.  I for one —if you haven't figured this already— regard what's happening to the GOP with more alarm than satisfaction.  It would be presumptuous to offer solutions; the GOP, after all, belongs to those who are unraveling it (if they are in fact doing that).

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Public Addresses: Uniquely American Problems

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One of the hardest things to do, especially in political life in the USA, is to communicate effectively with the public.  This problem exists in both spoken communication: the announcements politicians make to the public, on YouTube, or on the Web, or over Television, and written communication: transcripts of speeches by political persons---Candidates, spokespersons, or what have you---or political writing.

For whatever reason, the American Public has become accustomed to shorter sentences, simpler arguments, a limited vocabulary; and has shown a preference for form over content, and style over facts.

Recently, there was a question on a public discussion group whether Socialism promised things that ultimately caused harm.

Now, obviously, the harm caused by anything is most frequently in the eye of the beholder.  The consequences of any sort of political action are many, and some of them are good, and some are bad, and whether the one outweighs the other is a matter of perspective.  Obamacare is a case in point.

*Thousands have gotten medical insurance, who did not have it before.
*Insurance companies have raised their rates, despite the fact that everyone coming on board for the first time has resulted in incredible increases in revenue.
*It is becoming increasingly clear how despicable the pricing of Insurance premiums is.  But bear in mind: classical free enterprise theory explicitly states that anything is worth the price people will pay for it.  This is one reason I detest classical free enterprise theory.
*The opposition of Conservatives and the GOP to Obamacare is being revealed as ultimately political.  In other words, they only pretend to oppose it because it is supposed to be bad policy; rather it is a notch in the gun of the Democrat Party, which is unpleasant for the GOP to admit.

Amidst all this, Bernie Sanders continues to put forward ideas that have been sidelined for decades: give teachers better wages; raise the minimum wage; repair roads and bridges and parts of the infrastructure that needs maintenance.  Strengthen Social Security.  Put curbs on the power of lobbyists.  Reverse the Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision.  Control the sales of firearms.

He gives the arguments that have been given for decades, which almost everyone outside the left wing of the Democrats (and a few idealists among the Socialists) rejected, saying that it would make the country a communist paradise.  But these ideas and arguments have not been put forward boldly.  They have been mumbled apologetically by Democrats who fully expected that they would be opposed.  But now Bernie Sanders is shouting them from figurative rooftops, and a new generation of Americans are hearing them for the first time.

Can it be true that there is someone who opposes the insane interest rates on student loans?  Is there really someone who thinks guns should be controlled, other than that crazy Obama?  Can there really be people out there who are for raising the minimum wage?  But won't that bankrupt businesses that depend of slave labor, such as fast food restaurants?

Is it possible someday that we could have a public transportation system that was cheap and reliable?  Us older folks have heard these ideas for ever, but some young people are hearing them for the first time, and it is possible that pretty soon it will not be a foregone conclusion that all these ideas will be rejected outright.

But to make simple, bold, unqualified statements ("unqualified" means without conditions; not that the statement is bad) is risky.  Simple-minded people love categorical statements, but categorical statements are usually false in the world in which we live.  When an intelligent politician makes a guarded statement, it is denounced as "too nuanced."  Nuanced means that the person says he or she will do something in certain circumstances.  How else is one to make a statement?  A bold statement is what George H. W. Bush made:  "Read my lips:  No New Taxes!"  Too bold.  He did put in new taxes.  He should have said:  "I will try my level best not to raise taxes, or institute new ones."  But that would have come across as wishy-washy.

Bill Clinton was well known for being cautious in his statements, or at least moderating them when questioned about them.  Well, he was bright enough to see that qualification was necessary most of the time, and honest enough to admit it, even if he is considered to have been a president of questionable integrity.  I believe that he was just about as honest as most presidents, though Obama appears to have set a high watermark for unimpeachable presidential conduct.

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Creative Writing, and Complaints about the National Curriculum in Britain

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A recent post in The Guardian* reports that a lot of British authors plan to write a letter to the Ministry of Education, complaining about how kids are taught to write.  The essence of the complaint (see here) is that children (of roughly middle-school age, or a little younger) are encouraged to use more colorful words instead of the basic words they would normally use.  One of the authors who is planning to protest is Cecilia Busby.

[She] said her concerns about the teaching of creative writing were sparked a few years ago, when she was reading out a description of her character Sir Bertram Pendragon from her novel Frogspell to a year six class at a Devon primary school. “He is a gruff, burly knight with a deep voice and a large moustache who also happens to enjoy whacking his enemies with his big sword,” she told the class, only to be stopped by the teacher, who told her that “the word ‘big’ is one of the banned words in our classroom”.

This article got me really frustrated; the problem seems to be that modern demands of excellence on the part of teachers at all levels pushes them toward mechanical ways of increasing the 'excellence' of their students' performance.  Using bigger, more excellent words is one of these.  Remember you heard it here folks: the length of a word is not a measure of its value in the spot where you've put it.  It must be exactly the right word, in your opinion, for the meaning you want to convey.  After you have written for a while (ideally a year or two,) you develop your own idiom.  It's absolutely no use writing with words someone else would choose, because it becomes no longer your own voice.

To go back to how teachers respond to pressure to improve their teaching: this seems definitely a contrast from how my own teachers responded to pressure to improve exam results.  We practiced more, we wrote more, we read more interesting books, we showed up on weekends to do additional classwork.  But these days, there is a cadre of "improvementators" who tell teachers how to get better results.  There are improvementators for everything:

• How to get more people to look at your BLOG!!!'
• How to get more traffic to your website!!!
• How to expose your product to more people, using your FACEBOOK PAGE!!!
• How to sell more cars at your used car business by pestering people on their cellphones!
• How to get tenure at a small private college by brown-nosing the ADMINISTRATION!
• How to sell your textbook by pandering to college professors!
• How to kick-start your law practice, by using unusual, completely legal, but innovative techniques!

So some improvementator in Britain has got all the teachers asking the kids to use bigger, more flowery words.  That idea must have had its roots in some successful teacher telling his or her kids to spend a little time using just the right word for the job.  "You've used 'big' here.  How big?  Just slightly larger than usual?  Then say, a large thing.  A lot bigger?  Enormous, perhaps?"

Of course, this approach makes perfect sense; kids get lazy about writing, and need to be reminded that they should write as if they care about what they write.  One way is to have them think about adjectives and adverbs, which are the first line of attack on bland writing.

But I can just imagine this —successful— teacher being approached by her managers to help her fellow-teachers be a little more successful.  He or she becomes forced to become an improvementator.  Of course, the other teachers adopt a cartoon version of her technique, and ask their kids to use the most outrageous adjectives and adverbs they can dream up, using, of course, the inevitable Thesaurus.  Just be absolutely clear: I have nothing against a Thesaurus.  Some of my best friends are Thesauri.

If you watch TV (and of course you do!  We can help you watch MORE TV!!!) you will have seen millions of advertisements that will convince you that all these people are following some improvementator's recommendations.  Pharmaceutical companies probably have ways of suggesting how to use their drugs to increase a physician's profit, though of course that sort of thing is forbidden by the famous Hippocratic Oath, which doctors do not take anymore!

Writing well is not a simple thing.  I am by no means an expert, but thinking hard about what worked for me, I can think of the following ways in which my writing was affected for the better (in my humble opinion, of course).

(1) Read a lot.  A large volume of reading, of a variety of styles, gives you options for your own writing.  You get useful was of sorting out your own preferences; what works in what way.  Reading is the single biggest thing a good writer will have done.

(2) Write a lot of letters, and write carefully.  Personal letters get read and appreciated.  Write anywhere where they care about what you say, enough so that you have an incentive to write carefully.  I reviewed stuff for Amazon, and I had such a great time that I started writing.  I also joined a classical music appreciation list, and wrote and wrote, and of course, read a lot too.

(3) Take your writing exercises seriously.  Writing exercises are of various kinds: short response, long response, medium response, term papers.  Each one requires different skills, and you learn to pay attention to different aspects of what you're writing.

(4) Read older literature.  Modern writers use such careless language that you learn bad habits.  You can always write 'modern' if you want to; you don't need to have models of modern writing.

(5) Share your writing with good friends who write, and make friends with those who write.  They will often give you a good breakdown of what you do well, and what you do that they don't like.  It's up to you to see how much of what they tell you is worth responding to.  Part of being a good writer is to take criticism gracefully and objectively, and choosing what parts of it you need to take seriously.  (Don't make friends cynically; it is cruel to make friends with just one purpose in mind.)

(6) Read your own writing critically.  Notice what parts of it are clear, and what parts are screwed up.  Fix up the parts that need fixing.  If necessary, rewrite the whole thing.  This polishing up is invaluable.

That's about as much as I can think of, that would make sense as advice to very young people.  It is as senseless to expect every teacher of writing to be equally good at it as to expect the students in every writing class to be identical.  What makes a group of young people care about their writing is highly variable, and a school teacher can only be expected to do the basics of encouraging kids to avoid obvious mistakes and manifestly bad writing habits.  Ultimately a good writer creates him- or herself.

(7) To be a good writer, you must care about something, and write what you care about.  You must have the tools of writing ready when that moment comes.  If you care about the world around you, you read about the world, and you write about the world, and you examine your writing for effectiveness.  If you don't care about the world, what's the point in writing?  This is why it is hopeless to write just to make money.  Authors who set out to make money by studying what sort of writing makes people want to buy your writing, simply bursting with cleverness, are ultimately disgusting, and I wish they would stop writing.  This is what is behind my recommendation of reviewing products for Amazon.  If you've bought something from Amazon, I expect that it is something you were interested in, and you're going to be interested in whether or not it was worth the price, and how it could be improved.  (Never buy something if you don't like it.)  So write about it!  It's a natural.

(8) Observe.  I observe people, and I write what I see.  I'm not sure how much this will work for someone who desperately wants to be more commercial.  There are probably Improvementators out there who can help anyone become a more commercial writer, but I'm not one of them.  To me, a good writer is someone who has good ideas to write about, and can convey those ideas effectively.  Anyone who desperately wants to write, without ideas about what to write, is just a tragedy.

The world desperately needs people who write clear, attractive prose without resort to gimmicks.  Creative writing is important, but so are books that explain things to people, such as How to Change Your Door Locks.  Or, How to Cook Spaghetti and Meatballs.  I mean, just because you can cook doesn't mean you can write a good article explaining how to do it.  There is very likely an improvementator who claims to make any cook into a brilliant author of recipes (and in the case of cookery, it is just barely possible that it might be true), but the best idea is for a cook and a writer to collaborate, to write an excellent book on cooking, which neither one can do as well as that on their own.

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[To be continued; we're going looking for carpeting for our playroom.]

*Formerly The Manchester Guardian,  but I expect they guard a wider region than just Manchester these days.

Left-Wing Politics, Labor, Socialism and All That

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A lot of people, many of them our friends, are baffled about politics in America.  Fear not: people across the world are just as baffled, except for truly ignorant people who know little of what went on in the past century or so.  For them, this is the first time ever that unemployment has been so high, the first time ever that Islamists are getting into their Jihads; for them this is the first time ever that Washington is going furiously at a war that we have no chance of winning, really.

Across the Atlantic, the British Labor Party is wondering what they can do to oppose the momentum of the Conservative party, which has currently got a huge majority in Parliament.  Their problem is a little different from the problems of the US Democratic Party, but in some ways, they’re the same.

Right after the Big Stock Market Crash of 1931, and the Second World War, a senator from Wisconsin started up a witch-hunt in Congress to eliminate Communism, and supporters of Communism, from the US.  This was actually just a stunt to get himself reelected, but it got everyone just as excited back then as Iran-Contra, and Watergate, and other sideshows we’ve had more recently.  (You’ve probably never heard of these, but they were pretty exciting back in the seventies and eighties.)  Soon after people got tired of this fellow (McCarthy was his name), and the President shut down the Congressional hearings, college students across US, sick and tired of the never-ending Vietnam War, began to think that Communism wasn’t such a terrible thing, and began to look seriously at Socialism, as a less-extreme alternative.

In wartime, authoritarianism does tend to flourish, and the Vietnam generation was intensely hostile to the WW2 generation, which was in charge at that time, and against all the concentrated wealth of Big Business whose misdeeds were becoming known as people began to look for pollution, poisoning, unsafe vehicles, unfair trade practices, and miserable working conditions in US factories.

This was our generation.  Inevitably, once the excitement of being young and intensely romantic faded, and once most of us got well-paying jobs, we quietly gave up being so concerned about the underdog, because most of us were not underdogs any longer.  Instead of worrying about the working conditions of the working class, we began to worry about our own lives, which should have been a lot more comfortable that they were, because after around 1980, all the money seemed to be headed towards the coffers of Big Business once again, and middle class taxes were rising, while the taxes of the really wealthy were actually falling.  In the chaos of the scramble to control the runaway Republican Party and its agenda of undoing the controls that the Democrats had put in place, and fertilizing the ground for Big Business and the super wealthy to scrape up still more of the national wealth, we forgot that the main concern of the true Socialist was the welfare of the working people, not the Middle Class, which has always been the pets of the 1%.  The Middle Class historically has sided with the Wealthy Class, not because its interests lies with the Wealthy Class, but because it is too afraid to side with the workers.

In the US, presently, we have the highly amusing situation that the working folk have been deceived into thinking that the Middle Class is its enemy, that taxes are bad (even if they pay for foodstamps, those horrible things that buy poor people nutritious, tasteless, low-grade food), and Social Security is the invention of the Devil (even if you have no other recourse if you’re unemployed).  The working class has forgotten that, even with the high taxes of the seventies, everyone was much happier, including the upper-crust.  Everything worked: the utilities, the roads, the bridges, the schools.  Now, despite lower taxes, nothing works.

In Britain, a country where Socialism of a limited sort had worked for several decades, Tony Blair, a right-winger within the Labor Party, completely sided with the US in its wrong-headed invasion of Iraq, which will be up there with some of the biggest mistakes in military history, not to mention one of the most unjust and illegal wars ever conducted by any nation.  Tony Blair was nothing but a Conservative mole within the Labor Party, and brought the Labor Party to its knees, to lose massively to the Conservatives in 2015.  In this article, a British political writer tries to anticipate what would happen if the most credible leader of the Labor Party (someone who plays a role in British politics analogous to that which Bernie Sanders plays in the US) was elected the leader of the LP.  (In the British system, the elected leader of a party becomes the Prime Minister, if the party wins a majority of the seats.)

The Brits, too, have had their Labor Party become a little too middle class, and afraid to demand the sorts of things that Labor has traditionally insisted upon, and in fact won, and which made life in Britain good for most Brits, and possible for many Scots, since Scotland and Northern England has long been the home of the poorer folks of Britain.  (It is this long tenure of Conservatives in Parliament that has driven Scotland to desperation, and to agitate for independence.  The Scottish National Party (the SNP) has won something like 15 seats in Parliament, an unprecedented thing, which signals the Scottish frustration with the Labor Party.

Who knows what will happen in 2016, if the Democrats continue to be afraid of making traditional left-wing demands, and stay home?  We must realize that the GOP is actually a minority party, even though it makes such a good showing during elections.  We must find courageous candidates for congress, and we must either convince Hillary Clinton not to be afraid of the right-wingers, and to stand for the working class, or we must elect Bernie Sanders, and support him strongly when he wins the elections.  Keeping US politics sane, and the US government working to keep the country running is not a one-time thing.  The One Percent can manage even if no government department works properly.  They're fine if the schools have no teachers, there are no policemen keeping the peace, and roads and bridges aren't maintained, and interest on college loans are through the roof.  They can go to private schools, and their private planes and SUV's can handle even the worst potholes.  (At least, so they think.)  For the poor, and the rest of us, government must work perfectly, or life is unbelievably hard.  The One Percent doesn't need government.  The rest of us do.

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Body Shaming

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This (body shaming) is a strange phenomenon, both that it happens, and that it is taken so seriously.  It does happen in other countries, but it is shaken off with a shrug; if someone was totally out of shape, he or she would be hurt, but, well, they know they're out of shape most of the time, so it is hardly news.  It is always easy to shrug off an insult that you've anticipated.

There is body shaming, and then there is some of this garbage that you read.  It is so off the scale that one must think of the perpetrator as a pathological case.  For instance, read some of the posts on Pink's page: "Shut up u uptight fat butch dyke."  This person doesn't care about Pink's shape; he or she simply dislikes her.  Is it necessary to take offense from the pointless post?  One of the things that amaze me is that people take offense at the maniacal utterings of raving madmen.
"Did you hear what he called me???"
"Yes, sweetheart, but he's crazy."
"But it makes me feel terrible!  What if some little kid heard it, and learned those naughty words?  Just because he's crazy doesn't mean he gets to insult me, does it?"
Yes, that's what it means to live in a world where crazy people are not all shut up behind soundproof walls.  Part of being civilized is to take some shit from random loonies.  Let's get over it, as a society.  Sticks and stones, people.  What happened to sticks and stones, that admirable response to verbal abuse?

I regret that we're becoming a nation of verbal abuse sissies.  Just as we don't allow our kids to start howling when a kids makes a face at them (and yes, I know: some of our kids do howl if anyone makes a face at them.  They are not cut out for middle management) we can't allow ourselves to be bothered by so-called body shaming.

Now, if someone in public office made a disparaging reference to someone's physique, and if that physique was not objectionable on public interest grounds, e.g. someone who was so thin that they fall through a storm sewer grating, or is so fat that they obstruct a squad car chasing a felon, then we have a problem.  If people are so unhealthily out of shape that it becomes necessary to remark on the fact as a matter of policy, e.g. we will have to permit a medical insurance company to refuse to give you an insurance policy, then the remark becomes reasonable.  Otherwise, public officials should not indulge in what is being called body shaming.  But if a private individual remarks that someone is overweight, it probably falls under their freedom of expression rights.  If the individual who makes the remark is manifestly unbalanced, it probably falls under the heading of Utterings of an Idiot.  In my opinion, such remarks must be ignored, not publicized.  Get over it, people.  We have very high standards of physical fitness now, and if you're out of shape, someone is going to call you out.  I'm out of shape, and every day I take a few minutes to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of being called a fat so-and-so.  If I can do it, so can you.

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New Highly-Structured Teaching Systems: Direct Instruction, and CT3

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Brace yourselves.  New teaching methods are coming to a school near you.

In a recent post linked to from FaceBook, (Teacher Blasts Popular Classroom Training Program) a teacher describes her run-in with the No Nonsense Nurturer Program, a method for supposedly making teachers more effective.  Before you read the article, which is strongly critical of the coaching technique, you should give a little time for reflection on the problems —some of them perhaps unstated— that the method is designed to address.

I believe that part of the problem with grade school classrooms (and any sort of classroom) today is that students are not accustomed to classroom discipline.  This is just the basic behavior of being quiet and attentive in the classroom, respectful to the other kids, and respectful to the teacher.  Parents may pride themselves on their child being a lot less disruptive than some of the other children, but most people are not aware that kids are a lot worse behaved —in almost every school in the country— than they were a couple of decades ago.  A lot worse.  Some of the parents were probably themselves pretty badly behaved in class, and have probably forgotten what assholes they were as kids, and how much pleasure they got out of torturing particular teachers.  But trust me: modern classrooms are a lot worse.

Ignorant parents are quick to blame the teachers for this lack of classroom discipline.  The teacher is the first and easiest scapegoat anyone can find, and the school administration has also learned that blaming the teacher is a winning strategy from a lot of points of view.  Washington, too, has bought into the axiom that weak teachers should be removed from the classroom, and being unable to maintain discipline in the classroom is a major component of perceived “teacher weakness.”

Now, some people are brilliant at dominating a class, and keeping them on task, no matter how many unruly elements there may be in it.  Such teachers rejoice in the exercise of their charisma, and their ability to get students to do what the teacher wants them to do, and amazingly, students often love these sorts of teachers; it’s almost as though the students want to be given limits to how silly they’re allowed to get.  Much is made of this phenomenon, and a lot of classroom praxis revolves around this empirical observation.  But I think educationists over-emphasize how far this goes; the very best teachers do not dominate the class so utterly.  The older the students are, the less the Iron Lady method is appreciated, and the less it produces the desired results.

Though no one has come out and said this, the No-Nonsense Nurturer Program looks very like a sort of industrial approach to making every teacher a No-Nonsense teacher.  It is uncomfortable for the teacher at first, and the training phase is acutely awkward, as the article describes.  But given the fact that students do not learn a lot of discipline at home, the No-Nonsense teacher can quickly (and figuratively) slap the silliness out of his or her class, and get them on task, and keep them there, without pandering to their constant need for positive reinforcement that they seem to bring with them from pre-school.

Over thirty years, I too have been conditioned by my students to constantly give them little figurative gold stars for every little thing, which an undergraduate in Japan, for instance, would do as a matter of course.  American kids have grown up in an atmosphere of constant praise  —some of them; others, of course, live in a home environment of almost continual verbal abuse and demeaning, and both kinds of home background seem to result in the kids needing constant positive feedback from the classroom teacher— and sometimes they actively and explicitly elicit praise from their teacher, such as, “See how nicely I did my homework?  Look, there’s colored ink!!!”  Some teachers, such as the author of the article, are uncomfortable with being firm with a disruptive student.  From her description of how much she hated being firm with the kid, we see just how much of an elementary school environment has become the expected thing even in a middle- or a high-school classroom.  Can you think back to your own high school days, and recall an annoying kid who deserved to be squelched just so that the lesson could continue?  (Of course, some lessons are boring, and we’re rooting for the disruptive kid!  But, in hindsight, should a teacher be wasting her energy putting up with that sort of crap, or should she better spend her time doing what is expected of her?)

Well, even if we quarrel with the training program (and that’s the only way you can train a bright undergraduate into a drill sergeant), the fact remains that [1] once the training has been accomplished, that teacher is going to run a much more efficient classroom, and that classroom is going to achieve a lot more than they would otherwise, and [2] very quickly, the students will —if the empirical observation of the effectiveness of disciplining students is reliable— come to terms with the strict discipline, and learn to love it.  Or, at least, tolerate it pretty well.  Students will begin to learn that the firmness on the part of the teacher does not signal a deteriorating relationship, and that class time is precious, and there isn’t a lot of time for boosting the fragile egos of each and every kid in class.

Families are less and less capable of training kids to be realistic in their demands on interpersonal relationships with adults outside the home, and things will never improve.  Parents are just too busy being productive on behalf of their employers (who must have been trained in a similar No-Nonsense Nurturing Program for Bosses).  So classroom discipline will have a brief resurgence, until parents decide that it has to be jettisoned, because children are really too fragile for any sort of discipline!

Catholic Schools are much more effective at maintaining classroom discipline, because a nun can be firm with a child without being criticized, because of course, she has the authority of the Almighty behind her, unlike a teacher in a public school, who is, after all, just a poorly-paid flunkie of the school board.

The earphone sets, and the coaching team at the back of the classroom is probably a bit much, but it is just the sort of training scheme that you would expect from the industrial approach to all things that obtains in the latter 20th, and early 21st century.

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Jef Rouner Explains Why Some Statements Are Wrong, and Not Opinions

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I'm not sure who Jef Rouner is, or even whether it's a he or a she, but they sure write a funny article.

Some people, s/he says, make certain statements, and claim that because it is an opinion, it cannot be wrong.

Wrong.  Jef Rouner goes through all sorts of reasons why such statements could still be wrong, or even when they're opinions, they could still be not worthy of any sort of respects, and just a hair this side of wrong.  When reasoning with incomplete data, not-wrongness is no longer black and white; you can be not wrong, or you can be wrong in various degrees.

I have my own opinions, or rather, points of view, regarding the subject.

First of all, a conclusion from various premisses is not an opinion.  If it has been made according to logically correct rules, then it will be right, otherwise it will be wrong.  To make a statement like "It is widely accepted that Democrats raise taxes.  I don't want higher taxes, therefore, in my opinion, nobody should vote for Democrats, and anyway, that's my opinion, so you can't say I'm wrong" are so incredibly wrong that one cannot even begin to explain why to someone who is not ready to listen to a long story.  Firstly, Democrats have raised taxes, but so have Republicans.  (Check out how high Reagan raised taxes.)  Secondly, this opinion is presented in the form of an argument, signaled by the use of "therefore".  Still, such a statement should simply be altered to say that, in the opinion of this person, people should all vote the way he or she would like them to, regardless of their personal preferences.

Jef also points out that to express the opinion that "David Tennant was the best Dr. Who" is not justifiable from anyone who has not seen episodes of the TV series from before 2005 (where, presumably, David Tennant would have had stiff competition from other incarnations of Dr. Who).  We're all familiar with close acquaintances who have outrageous opinion, who either have not seen evidence contrary to their beliefs, or have deliberately closed their eyes to such evidence.  I think we can all agree that the opinions of those sorts of people can be assessed as just plain wrong, even if they are opinions.  Read the article; it is beautifully written.

Arch

The Greek Crisis

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This might not completely float your boat, but here are two articles that give a little insight into the Greek economic crisis.

The first one, titled "11 Things About the Greek Crisis you Need to Know" tries to explain what is going on from the point of view of a Eurozone Agnostic; in other words, somebody who thought the Eurozone was a bad idea from the start.  Given that, he tries to explain how various interest groups are reacting (and over-reacting) in ways that make sense to them.  This is excellent reading, because we need to know what the assumptions of these people are, before we decide on our own positions.  The Greek Crisis is important to all of us, and the article goes some distance towards explaining why.

The second article "Thomas Piketty Explains the Greek Crisis" I have not read yet, but the comments accompanying it declare that the author has strong feelings about income inequality, which in my book means that he can't be all bad.  OK, I just hopped over and read a summary of it.  It is a report of an interview of Thomas Piketty which was conducted in German, and someone who has translated it into English is still working out how to publish it without violating copyright laws.

The whole business has to do with the mechanics of modern post gold standard economics.  There are a number of things that go up and down with time: bond prices, gold prices, stock market, and exchange rates, not to mention rates of inflation and tax rates.  All these things are given symbols, such as x and y and t, and Economists have equations that say what each of these things should do: go up, go down, etc, depending on the values of the other things.

The relationships are not rigid; they are somewhat fluid.  Economists however go on the assumption that the relationships are a lot more rigid that the rest of us believe, and they have observed how, for example, a poor state such as Kentucky, manages to stay above water, while still owing tons of money to a rich state such as, for example, Massachusetts.

Within a single country, the first article explains, it can all be managed.  The debt is never paid off, but we carry on.  Between countries, there is inflation, and the currency is devalued, and we carry on.  But with a single currency, devaluation is not possible, so the country that is under-performing gets screwed into the ground.  Read the article; it helps you get your head around all this sort of thing, using classical economics.

Many countries will never be able to be the economic powerhouses that the industrial countries are.  This does not mean that agriculture should be completely abandoned and industry must be the only way.  (The industrial nations will be least happy with that eventuality; after all, everyone has to eat.)  Even in the US, agricultural states always have deficits relative to the industrial states, hence the need for government subsidies.

The second article is even more interesting.  Mr. Piketty points out that Germans, who are being hard-assed about the lending, is a country that has never paid its debts.  It was forgiven enormous proportions of its debt by international agreement, and paid of the remaining debt using a variety of methods which are not available to Greece right now, because, I suppose, we cannot tinker with the currency.  (After this, the Brits will never agree to using Euros.)

One of the available solutions is to simply and painlessly encourage Greece to leave the Common Market, and give them their own currency, and give them massive international aid.  Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece are also in trouble, and the same prescription might be necessary for them as well.  However, the writer of the first article opines, the other countries of the Eurozone will make an enormous fuss about how Greece will leave the common market, to make an example of Greece to scare Ireland and Spain and Portugal (and Italy) into better fiscal behavior.  But better fiscal behavior is really not possible.  The Common Market (a.k.a the Eurozone) is a lovely idea in the abstract, but in practice, the economies are too unequal to be able to compete in the same league.

Arch

Myths About the Confederacy

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In a recent post: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? --possibly an article in the Washington Post-- James Loewen presents a persuasive case for the view that the Confederate States have won a propaganda war after they had lost the Civil War.  This article is worth reading by every American.  Some of the pseudo-facts mentioned by Mr. Loewen are so deeply imbedded in the minds of Southerners that they have now become accepted as facts, and are even taught to middle schoolers in many states.  I'm going to summarize some of the points in that article for the busy executive (and the slow reader).

A.  Many southern states voted to secede to retain slavery, rather than to protect States' Rights.
In fact, Mr Loewen argues--and presents evidence-- that it was the Northern States that were fighting for States' Rights, to not enforce a law that required runaway slaves to be returned to their owners.  This was a Federal Law, which the Northern States opposed.  The Southern States wanted no part of individual states voting to not enforce this law.  The specific documents Mr Loewen quotes make very interesting reading, especially a paragraph in the Texas declaration of secession, which very clearly states that African Americans did not participate in the struggle for independence from the British (I'm paraphrasing), and therefore did not deserve to be given any rights other than those of slaves.

It is not our intention to aggravate the hostile feelings of the African American community at this difficult time, but such feelings can only be made even worse by the attempts of certain Southern politicians (and Southern Society, generally) to whitewash the events of the Civil War.

B.  Support for the Confederates in certain states, e.g. Maryland and Kentucky, was not as great as one may infer from the number of war monuments in those states.
Mr. Loewen points out that visitors, and even residents --and certainly children-- in those states are led to believe that those states supported the Confederate cause.  Perhaps it was that Confederate politicians and families in those states were just richer, and could afford more monuments.  That would make sense, especially if they were the ones who had the benefit of slave labor.

C.  To this date, history texts are written in such a way as to obfuscate the true reasons for the Civil War.
Children are taught by texts that subtly suggest that the Civil War was a war of independence to reject Northern Tyranny (which it might have been, in the view of some), and that the South was struggling to preserve State rights, and not fighting for the preservation of slavery as such.  To my mind, this point of view goes way beyond placing a gentler, more generous take on the motives of Southern Politicians, after their having suffered a defeat.  This goes way beyond the mental adjustments that might be necessary for healing a fractured union.  It presents the Northern Unionist forces as aggressors, and the Northern cause as unjustifiable.  It also falsely reports the extent to which there was popular support for the war even among states that formed part of the Confederacy.   Maryland, for instance, was divided on the issue, and from what I understand from the facts Mr Loewen reports, a Confederate general extorted what amounts to tribute from the residents of a certain Maryland county (or municipality), in order not to raze the town to the ground.  Well, it is war, after all.  But it shows to what extent the citizens of Maryland must have supported the Confederacy: not very much.

Arch's Summary:
The way certain politicians --notably those who support flying the Confederate Flag in State Capitols, and so forth-- understand their history might flow from a deliberate intention to deceive, and from cynical political motives.  Or it could be from having been lied to by generations of Southern elders and teachers, the victims of a massive and deliberate campaign of disinformation.  Are they the liars, or were they simply lied to?  At any rate, kids in Texas are learning lies, and since Texas determines which texts are used in schools all over the US, kids across the US are learning lies in school.

[Added later]

However, we have to face the fact that the stated reasons for the Southern leadership to go to war were numerous.  What the Confederate Flag (sometimes called the St. Andrews Flag) stands for, and stood for, is very vague, and hardly a simple thing.  Over time the meaning of any emblem can change, and in different ways for different people, and the Confederate Flag is no exception.  This article about the Confederate flag, also in the Washington Post, seems to have a good overview of the subject.

In addition, talking about fairness, specifically, certain critics point out that it was far easier for the North to abandon the historically pro-slavery stance which was common in the 18th century in American colonies than it was for the South, simply because the North had mineral and energy resources which the South did not have, and could use coal and steam to generate wealth without the use of human labor.  Nevertheless, as the article on the Flag (linked above) points out, some Southern leaders were scornful more than a century ago at the rhetoric of their fellows about the reasons for going to war.  Call a spade a spade, and an ax an ax, they said; most of us were pretty clear that we went to war in defense of preserving the institution of slavery.  But to keep harping on that fact is, in the view of the South, somewhat self-serving on the part of Yankees and their descendants.

The fact remains that history books must be written in clearer language, to include all the causes for the Civil War, distinguishing between the main causes, and more technical reasons, so that young people can draw their conclusions about which reasons were the material ones, and which ones were mere excuses (and bear in mind that often in war, some stated reasons are only excuses).  Clear documentation, in this case, is essential, and direct quotes extremely helpful, and better than explanations.

Arch

What Arch Has been Doing on his Summer Vacation

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Not a whole lot, that's what.

As you might know, I do a weekly radio show on WXPI 88.5 about classical music.  This weekend's show will be a retrospective of the past year, because I have been doing this show for just exactly 52 weeks.  I have 34 shows on my hard drive, so it must mean that I have created new material for two out of every three shows.  (The others were either repeats, or shows done automatically --from my own music, but at random, and without announcement-- by the Station computer.)

It just so happens that the Station's own Birthday Bash is going to be tonight, for which we have invited Rick Smith, whose syndicated radio show is a centerpiece of the talk show offerings of WXPI 88.5.  Rick has been interviewing everyone who has anything to do with our station, while I was away in Massachusetts, helping out with my retired Uncle and Aunt, who have trouble getting about and doing the things that have to be done even by Seniors in Massachusetts, such as recycling their plastic, hauling their own trash to the dump, doing the grocery shopping, getting back the laundry from the dry cleaners, etc.

You might not have realized that my wife and I do not have TV.  In our locality, there are practically no TV stations you can get off the air, and we don't have cable, so we do not get bombarded with the usual nonsense you get on cable TV.  But my relatives in Massachusetts do, so while I'm there, I am subjected to all the propaganda that I usually manage to evade out here:  America's Got Talent, and 700 Club, and Freedom and Faith Symposium, and Pledge Week for WGBH.  Beam me up, Scotty; there's very little intelligent life out here, especially when the Federal government cuts funding for Public Radio and TV.

I have been invited for a brief interview with Rick Smith, and I'm wondering what on earth I can talk about.  On my radio program, of course, I try to avoid talking about politics, simply because so much of the talk on our station is about local politics.  It is sad that today, very few voices on the radio talk politics with much sense.  Rick Smith is one of the few people who, with Jon Stewart (who is about to retire from The Daily Show) and Rachel Maddow, who are able to give good news analysis undistracted by media disinformation and misdirection.  For ordinary people today, who do not have a very strong background in politics or international news and information (unfiltered by US media), espousing a political position is rather a matter of faith and prejudice, very much like religious belief.  The problems with people of faith, both religious faith and political faith, is that it too often degenerates into prejudice and dogma.  Once your politics become prejudice and dogma, TV commentary, even if accurate and reasonable, only tends to confirm our political beliefs.  I'm a little less succeptible to this problem, simply because I have been politically aware for forty years, and the low-budget propaganda of modern TV and the Internet is easy to see through, though, of course, what's happening out in the world outside the US is hard to know, because all the news is filtered.  It is laughable for the US to oppose censorship in foreign countries, when there is effective censorship right here in River City.  (That's a 'The Music Man' joke.)

One fascinating thing I saw on TV was the gathering somewhere in Washington D.C. I believe, where the Republican presidential hopefuls got to talk about their religious beliefs.  Most of them talked perfect nonsense, but some of them were able to sound a little more intelligent than the rest, notably Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.  But even he did not make complete sense.  Bobby Jindal railed at Mrs Michelle Obama for her views about school lunches.  He said that he (B. Jindal) would be glad to supervise how many sweets his children eat —a dig at Michelle Obama's interest in children's nutrition— if the Obamas got behind Big Energy, and allowed them to expand their operations, to provide jobs for starving millions.

Unfortunately when Big Energy is allowed to do their thing, they provide jobs only for their own folk from Texas, Louisiana, Alaska, and other states where oil drilling has historically taken place.  The total number of sustainable jobs available for Pennsylvanians has been small; you can check out an analysis here:  Has shale drilling really created Pennsylvania Jobs?   Judging from the number of Texas, Louisiana and Alaska license plates we see, fellows from those states are certainly being hired to work on Pennsylvanian gas drilling sites.

So Brother Bobby is telling his own people what they like to hear.  It will be quite another thing to persuade swing voters, without whose votes no Republican can hope to be President, that the Democrats should be criticized for not supporting Big Energy.  Even such ostriches as Lindsey Graham have conceded that climate change is occurring, and that even if humans were not responsible for bringing it upon us, humans can certainly influence the rate at which it happens.

Why are conservatives waffling about climate change?  Because nobody pays attention in science class.  People have gotten used to only paying attention to things that they like already.  Starting from kindergarten, kids take a "OK, you may wow me now, or let me entertain myself with things I like already" attitude.  Of course, there are some young people out there who are more open to new ideas and information, and are able to assess the value of these things, but they are a minority.

Another thing that worries me is that few people are able to put themselves in the place of somebody else, to see something from the point of view of someone else.  This is a very basic kind of empathy.  It is easy to imagine the feelings of someone exactly like ourselves, in some painful circumstance, and empathize.  It is much, much harder to imagine what it feels like to be black in South Africa, or to be white in Alabama (unless you are white, in Alabama, of course).  It is almost impossible to imagine what it must feel like to be a black president in the White House.  It is education that makes this sort of empathy possible, and a thousand blessings on grade school teachers who go out of their way to encourage this kind of imagination among their pupils.

This is why education in the US is so important from so many points of view, and I mean K-12 education.  Unfortunately, K-12 education in the US suffers hugely, in turn, from the weaknesses of college education, which suffers hugely from lack of government support.  As long as the employment picture is bleak, parents will naturally cling to "Education as a means to employment", in contrast to "Education as a means to relate to society."  Society needs the latter, whereas individuals need the former.  As long as conservatives sneer at "losers who can't find work," and at liberals who "stand in the way of energy independence, which is the road to increasing employment for everyone," US society will spiral into uninformed paranoia.  Remember: making energy cheaply available is not the only way to increase employment; it is the most damaging way.  Fiscal conservatives always pursue that elusive principle of "Let's ignore the environment for just 5 years, and get the economy going; once Wall Street is up and away, we can take a look at the environment, when we can do it without raising taxes on those poor Wall Street fellows."  Observe that it has been possible to increase employment significantly without handing out free gasoline.  Of course if the GOP comes in, Big Energy will jump in to lower gas prices, to encourage the illusion that Energy = Employment, and employment will temporarily improve.  Then, with luck, the GOP will lose an election, leaving the Democrats to try to deal with the environmental and economic consequences (and any wars that the GOP decides to subscribe to).  By then, of course, some of the more feeble-minded of the Democrat rank and file congressmen will be happy to be whipped into action by Big Business lobbyists, and offer pro-energy, pro-Business legislation, which will be promptly criticized by the GOP as "too little, too late," whereas, of course, it will be too much, too soon.

Our first line of attack has to be to make our own kids open to new ideas.  Then to make the kids in all our neighborhoods open to new ideas.  Bringing up kids takes a village, truly, but most of all it takes parents who know how important it is to keep the imaginations of young people open and engaged, and to train them to resist falling into easy pessimism.  Bringing up a child who is a robust, responsible citizen is very difficult today, but it is an obligation nobody, and certainly no parent, can walk away from.

Arch