Inverted Values

Flipping channels tonight, I ran across PBS and a local interview show with a doctor from the Children's Hospital.  The topic of the show is pretty simply and direct: In America today, we are facing the first generation of children who's life expectancy will be shorter than their parents.

That's pretty easy to grasp.  Difficult to believe, but easy to grasp.

It's true.  But most people are watching America's Funniest Home Videos.  Because they just don't care.

Obesity is increasing due to fucked up diets. Obesity overwhelmingly leads to Diabetes.  The rates of Diabetes are increasing at an increasing rate. That's bad.  Anytime something "bad" is increasing at an increasing rate, that's worse than bad.  That's criminal.  Parents that shove fried shit in their kids' mouths should be fined.  Parents that stuff the cabinets with Twinkees, Pop Tarts, and sugar-bloated colored water drinks, should be chained to a wheel that powers a generator.  Parents that fill the refrigerator with Hot Pockets and Marie Calendar's fat-filled meals should be beaten in public.

Was I a bit over the top?  Sorry.  No, actually I'm not sorry.  It's time for parents to do their job and stop blaming everyone else.  If you're fat, that's one thing.  But don't pass your failed self-control disaster onto your poor kids.  That's no different than holding them down and blowing cigarette smoke in their face.  It's a slow death sentence.  But it doesn't just impact them, or their families, it impacts society.  The more people who require medical help for issues that are caused by obesity drive up health care costs and that drives up insurance rates for all of the rest of us who eat right, get out and walk and at least TRY to keep our bodies healthy.

Shoving crap into their mouths is killing them.  It's breaking our society.  It's putting us behind other countries.  It's wasting all of the hard work our great grandparents suffered through to make this a better place for their grandchildren's grandchildren.  Shoving six hot pockets in your mouth isn't cute and it isn't macho.  It's stupid as shit.

Nobody is asking you or anyone to live in a monestary or become a Vegan.  Just use some common sense.  Cut down the fat calories.  Increase the better foods and drink better liquids.  Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Monster, and Four Loco aren't worth a shit.  If you need that you have more serious problems to look into.  Same with 5 hour energy bullshit.  If you need that you have an addiction and you need help.  Eat right.  Drink right.  Exercise.  And get more sleep.  It's not rocket science.  It's dirt simple.  If you can't do that you're a fucking idiot.  Maybe that's the real problem: too many fucking idiots.

Wake up. Look around.  Look at what your kids are eating.  Look at what they're surrounded by at school, at shopping centers, at parks, at friends houses, at the Laser tag place, and in your own home.  It's as simple as this: If you really love your children, you'll do this.  If you don't bother, you don't love your children.  Period.  End of story.

2010 Virginia Regional Cheer Competition

Princess Anne High School (Virginia Beach).  Placed in the final six out of sixteen high school teams.  I have two daughters on the PAHS team this year.  Unfortunately, they didn't make the final four cut, but they did very well as you can see.

Edukashun

I’ve been thinking about what “education” means today.  To me, anyway. In most instances, I, like probably most people, take it to describe “school” or “schooling” of some form.  Someone imparting information in a one-to-many dispersal paradigm.  But we all know that education occurs all the time, from all sources, not just in a classroom or within a formal instruction medium.  To “impart” is one thing.  To “receive” is another.  A form of “imparting” is broadcasting, which is technically what a classroom or online lecture is.

The difference between broadcasting and education is the reception part.  Information that it is transmitted is only useful if it is received and processed.  Otherwise we call it noise.  Noise is simply a term for the information or data which we have no use for and turn off our receptivity and processing for it.  Noise as in static on the radio or TV.  But also noise as in music or commercials or voices we don’t like.  It’s also the subjects and topics we are not interested in (or just outright loath). We hear the music, but we don’t like it, so we tune it out by becoming distracted with other things (when possible).

But one common misperception about education I see repeated constantly is that it’s a future tense.  Information is bestowed upon us.  We are requested to perform analysis upon it, usually through exercises designed to demonstrate our understanding and ability to put it to measured use.  Then we take a test to prove we retained that analytical and cognitive understanding, and we move on to the next subject.  We often refer to the approach of the “next subject” as education.  Being educated.  But this is only half of it.

Once you’ve absorbed a baseline, done the proofs, and left it behind, is that really “learning”?  Learning is supposed to be a dynamic, evolutionary process.  Not just going forward, but generative refinement as well.  Right?  So shouldn’t that mean we should revisit what we’ve learned and apply our newer arsenal of absorbed intellect to the information we stored previously?

As developers, do we not revise our work over time?  Do we not learn new techniques for our chosen languages and platforms?  Do we not learn newer versions of our tools?  Do we not apply that to improve our work and produce revision-incremented products?

So ask yourself these questions:

• When was the last time you evaluated an algebraic expression by hand?
• When was the last time you looked at a sentence and identified the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and conjugations?
• When was the last time you gave thought to F=MA when looking at the scene of an accident (rather than just the carnage)?
• When was the last time you re-read a book you last read years ago?  Not just your favorite book, but a standard classic that you were asked to read in school?

I don’t know about you, but my current situation is such that I still owe an enormous sum towards paying back my student loans.  I managed to graduate with a BS in Information Systems though, which was the good part.  But due to a series of career setbacks, family issues, and a few general misfortunes, I will never be able to repay them before I kick the bucket (statistically that’s 75, the last time I checked, but then again, most of my ancestors barely reached 70, with few exceptions).  That said, in all practicality, I will not be able to attend a school of higher education again, unless one of the following occurs:

• Win the lottery
• Receive an unexpected inheritance
• Trip over a bag filled with cash
• Bump into someone insanely generous enough to cover it for me

I’m not holding my breath for any of those at this point.  So, I’ve decided to educate myself in a little more structured and methodical approach than I had been considering.  Each week, I’m going to pick a subject that I’ve been educated on in the past, and revisit it to review what I’ve learned and try to apply my current abilities to help me better understand it holistically.  No, I’m not planning on doing a page of Multivariable Calculus problems, but I do want to review Limits, Integration, and Axioms and so forth at the very least. 

Most of us know these terms and can provide a Cliff Notes explanation to our kids.  But how many times have your kids come to you about something and you’re just dumbfounded?  Usually over some very specific aspect, rather than the topic as a whole.  Sure, you can rattle off an overview of Algebra all day, but do you really remember the Quadratic Formula?  Can you demonstrate what it was used for (in tangible terms, not just theoretical terms)?  If you can: I hate you.  Just kidding.

Even within programming terms, things like refactoring, sorting algorithms, rationalized heuristics, and self-healing theory.  Big words, sure.  But not really complicated to describe in a short sentence.  I just want to wring at least that much from my spongy brain.  Re-dunking my tea bags to get more from them.

So, as of today, I’m going to be pushing myself harder to learn again.  It’s not going to be easy for me, since I’m a person that prefers a classroom with limited distraction, and my home is one giant distraction most of the time.  I will put on the headphones and do my best.  Some of the tools I plan to use are textbooks, online resources like MIT Open Courseware, and so on.  This week: Linguisitics and Philosophy (good stuff!).  I can’t wait to get started.

And at the very end of my endeavors, I hope to be able to find the answer to what I consider to be the most important question of all physical existence: Why do we have two nostrils instead of one?

Another Milestone

My oldest of four kids graduated high school today. Next one in two years, so I have a little time to prepare again (physically and mentally). The graduation was for Princess Anne High School (aka PAHS) class of 2009, which included 420 seniors. %49 graduated with honors or advanced honors. $4 million in scholarships were awarded also. Not to us though. My daughter will be attending a local community college in August to get on her way to a degree of some kind. Right now she's thinking of education, but who knows. My sister and one of her sons drove down from Richmond, and my mother-in-law and sister-in-law flew in from Michigan as well. It's been a hectic but fun week and a fantastic weekend. My daughter's class left on an overnight cruise and return at 5 AM tomorrow morning.

School Systems Suck Scholastically

My trip to Richmond last weekend was interesting in itself, but I learned that my nephews enjoy a relatively modernized school system compared to our so-called state-of-the-art program here in Virginia Beach. VB schools are actually pretty good compared to most other school systems, but that's a subjective thing obviously. However, objectively speaking, VB schools could really use a dose of technology in the space between the schools and homes. Richmond schools employ email and web portals for everything. Homework, grades, progress reports, report cards, upcoming events, parent/teacher conferences, absentee check-in, you name it. Not here in VB. They do some of these things electronically, but most of it is still paper. I've been asking for years. YEARS. Why they don't make it easier for kids to get their homework online from home, and for parents to be able to see what's going and to review grades and assignments, etc. The future is taking too damn long to get here.

PAHS Cheerleading 2008

Here's a clip from the district finals my daughter Sarah was a part of.  They got ripped off by a crappy time-keeping screw-up that bumped them out of third place.  The timekeeper should be fired or sent to work in another role in another state.  Everyone that timed their routine came up roughly around 2 minutes 34 seconds, which is well within the required limits.  No drops.  No steps outside the matts, good synchronization.  The other teams sucked (except for Ocean Lakes, who was pretty good).  The officials on site refused to reconsider even though the evidence is undeniable.  Politics is always the same everywhere.

EPILOGUE/UPDATE:  I just received word that the official board reviewed the tapes and timings and revised the decision.  Kempsville got bumped out and replaced by Princess Anne Hight School!!!  Holy crap.  The word last night was that there was little, if any, hope of a correction.  Great news and it gives hope that people will do the right thing.

The Joys of American Bureaucratic Stupidity

This will be the last post I make for a while, so I thought I'd vent a little...

I live in the city of Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Population: 437,000*.  Located on the mid-atlantic coast, cornering the Atlantic Ocean, and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  Indeed, anything that goes in and out of the Bay passes by us, good or bad.  It's a nice place to live, unless you work in the IT field, which offers up next to zero career opportunities.  But that's not what I'm hear to vent about, no.  Actually, it has to do with irony and stupidity.  Two things that are uniquely entwined when it comes to the City of Virginia Beach Public School Busing system.

I have four children in public schools here.  One in elementary, one in middle school, and two in high school.  They all ride a bus to school.  They all have to walk to the end of our cul de sac, turn and walk another few blocks and wait for the bus, rain or shine.

Across the cul de sac from our house is a family with two young boys.  These two boys shall remain nameless, since, after all, this is America, and in America we protect the stupid - at all costs.  At the tender age of eight, the oldest of the two called in a bomb threat to the local YMCA, forcing an evacuation, and they were eventually traced and caught.  At nine, he and his younger brother tried to burn down their next-door neighbor's house in the night.  They have run away from home multiple times and had search teams track them down, once using a helicopter.

I guess you could say it's been a real treat living in such close proximity, but they have mellowed in the past four years, so things lately aren't so unpredictably uneasy.  However... yes, this involves a "however" --

By committing these "incidents" as the police have coined them, they have been labeled as "special needs" children.  They are not physically disabled in any sense of the meaning.  They aren't mentally disabled in the sense of discerning "right" from "wrong" or knowing the basics of the world around us (the date, country, president's name, etc.) and can carry on a rather normal conversation.  However, they are now "special needs".  So, what does this mean?  It means they get a bus that stops directly in front of their house, every morning, to take them to school, and it drops them off directly in front of their house, after school, every day.

A side effect of this, is that the bus driver finds it difficult to turn the bus around in our tiny cul de sac, and is terrified of doing a two-point turn-around.  So she calls the police to have them knock at each door at 7:00 am and warn us to no longer park on the street in front of our houses unless we can park "parallel" to the curb.

Our cul de sac is smaller in diameter than most of the others in our subdivision.  Even with NO vehicles parked at all inside, the bus driver still has to perform a two-point turn-around.  The oddest thing is that if you watch her do this, her maneuvering is identical to when there are (or were) cars parked within it.  No difference at all.

Even better, according to the city laws, we are not permitted to park on our lawn, or anywhere off of a designated "driveway", nor are we allowed to park "perpendicular" to the curb unless it is designated with a sign.  How you can park "parallel" or "perpendicular" to a curve is beyond me anyway, I'm a CAD guy and those terms are mutually exclusive.  Congruent or Normal would be more appropriate, but whatever.

The moral of the story here is that if you want your own personal school bus to pick you up and drop you off, directly in front of your house, whilst other kids have to walk in the rain several blocks away, all you need to do is call in a bomb threat, burn down a house, or run away from home several times.  Not only do you get to have such fantastic preferential treatment, but your neighbors get to be threatened by the police about parking in front of their own homes!  How cool is that!?