The Good News Is . . .

. . . robots can't play soccer any better than I do.

Parts

Anyone who owns a house knows they are actively trying to destroy themselves and return to the random elements from whence they came. Our house in Ammon is pretty much doing that very thing.

We do what we can to stop the carnage. This past week, for instance, we had a new water heater installed -- a gas one, replacing an electric one. Hopefully once we've paid off the heater we'll have lower electric bills, though it's hard to see how the bills could be any higher than what we're paying already.

Replacing the water heater, of course, led to other things. The water heater shares the space under the stairs with two other denizens: an ancient water softener and an equally ancient air to air exchanger. Though the plumber who installed the water heater is optimistic the softener still works, I have my doubts, as there's now a slow, unidentified water leak under the stairs and I'll be darned if I can find out where it's coming from. Right now it's just an inconvenience, though with the possibility of mold in the future, it's bound to be causing more trouble down the road.

To fix that problem, I have to deal with the air exchanger. The exchanger is effectively defunct, as the furnace guys had to remove some of its ductwork to get the furnace ducts to snake through the walls to their various locations. No tremendous loss, as our new furnace has an air circulation system which will do what the air exchanger did but actually heat the air at the same time. Since the system is dead, I want to remove it. To do so, I've had to remove a panel in the hallway to get at what's left of the machinery. I tore out some ducts tonight, and will leave the baffle box and other ducts for later in the week. Hopefully, once I've got that stuff out, I can get in there physically and find out where the leak or ooze is coming from. Maddening work, this.

This work is on top of the stuff I already have to do, namely box in the furnace ducts and dig trenches to bury the new sprinkler system. Sprinkler system takes priority at the moment as I can't be digging in the wintertime but I can do drywall as the snow flies, providing I get the drywall here before the snow flies since I'm too cheap to pay for it to be delivered.

Once I get that work done, though, we ought to be able to rest easy at least until next year, when I've got at least two exterior doors that will have to be replaced. Then there's the slanty shanty fence around the property. And the landscaping. Help.

Conversation With A Mule

Comedians today would listen to a monologue such as this and not give it a second thought. Audiences hearing a monologue such as this today might sit quietly for a minute or two, but quickly get bored and maybe even boo.

With the passing of Andy Griffith today at age 86, we’ve lost yet another link to the past.

I don’t remember much of Mr. Griffith’s TV work. I’m just a bit too young for the Andy Griffith Show, though I do remember somehow watching an occasional rerun, probably on Saturday afternoons when the three networks knew nobody was watching and could put up any fool thing hoping to attract even the smallest audience. I’m just a bit too young as well for the Matlock crowd, though I do remember a time or two passing the show as I was once again clicking futilely through the four channels we got on TV to find something to watch. I probably turned the thing off and went outside. Again.

But would I, today, in thinking of this conversation with a mule, change places with those who knew Mr. Griffith at his radio, his vinyl album prime?

You know for an ever-lovin’ fact that I wouldn’t.

But thanks to the squirrelers of memory, I can sit back a bit and listen to his old comedy bits and think of living in a time when this was all there was on the radio – when radio was much more than just squawky love songs. Radio was the internet of the day, with its infinite crackly stations filled with the oddities of humanity, flavored locally.

YouTube is kinda my radio these days, and there’s a lot more to be found out there than on those scratchy AM stations. And once in a while I sail into these old radio comics like Griffith and think, maybe I would trade places with that mule. At least for a little while.

Hey, Voyager 1, LEAVE ALREADY

As much as I admire the work the Voyage 1 space probe has done, I think it’s about time it got out of the house. Or at least about time NASA stopped sending out press releases or answering questions about the probe’s imminent departure from the solar system until it actually departs.

For the past three years, we’ve been treated to stories like this, stories that, I’m sure, are 98 percent boiler plate because the details are the same and the news really isn’t all that new.

In Space.com’s latest installation, we don’t get to the meat of the update until the seventh paragraph, aside from a typically breathless quote from a California Institute of Technology scientist in Paragraph Two.

I’m thrilled Voyager 1 is still capable of sending information – sciencey stuff – since its launch in 1977, and I’m gobsmacked that scientists on Earth can still pick up its infinitely weak signal from more than 11 billion miles away. But it’s time for Voyager to leave the solar system so we can stop getting these breathless updates. Even NASA’s own reporting on the event buries the most important news (and proves that Voyager has another reason to leave the solar system – that terrible lens flare from the sun).




I guess what grouses my cookies is the reporting here, which wastes too much time reminding readers what this is all about – what Voyager is and such – rather than getting to the real news. And the eager scientists don’t help, either – they’ve been saying we’re near the edge of the solar system since 2009. I know we’re talking cosmic distances here, but I think they should be a little less eager to get the news out and more patient for the event to actually happen.

So, how would I report it?

Like this:

Steep increases in the number of cosmic rays hitting the 35-year-old Voyager 1 space probe indicate this wanderer from Earth may be at the edge of the solar system.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have noted the number of cosmic rays --- high speed atomic and subatomic particles shot out of black holes and exploding stars at nearly the speed of light – have been hitting the probe in increasing numbers since January 2009. Spikes in the number of rays hitting the probe starting on May 7, 2012, however, indicate to scientists the probe may be at the edge of the heliosphere, the bubble of magnetism that surrounds the Sun.

Then you move on to the breathless blah-blah and the exposition that people who don't know or don't remember what Voyager 1 is need to fill in the blanks. This is called inverted pyramid writing, something they evidently don't teach or practice much at Space.com any more.

I guess I resent the blah blah since I already know this stuff. but even for folks who don't, they ought to have a quick reason to get interested in the story aside from the headline. Giving them the meat, then the boilerplate, is a lot better in my book.

Buses and Health Care

Two topics of discussion today:

First, I wish more people where I work rode the bus.

Yes, you have to get up earlier if you take the bus. Yes, it takes longer to get home if you take the bus.

But the bus is cheaper. By leaps and bounds cheaper. Or was, until people stopped riding the bus for whatever reason. And prices are going up. But still, they'll be cheaper than driving out to work unless we hit the time when gasoline once again drops to 69.9 cents a gallon.

Second, the individual healthcare mandate has been upheld as constitutional. (although CNN.com, in their commitment to solid journalism, briefly had the courts nullifying that portion of the law.)

(And, for the curious, when I decided to check in at Newsbusters to see the state of general conservative wharrrgarbl over the Supreme Court's ruling on healthcare, I got this. An amusing sign.)

It is meant, of course, to get everyone on the bus. To make health insurance more affordable because more people -- and more money -- are in the pot. We'll see if that happens. So far, the prices I'm paying for health insurance have gone in one direction only, and it ain't down.

But no one forces me to ride the bus. It is a decision I make based on the fact that the truck I drive would suck down two tanks of gasoline a week to get me to and from work, far more expensive than what I pay to ride the bus. There are also safety considerations. I like the fact that I don't have to drive. I can sleep. I don't sweat road conditions or fatigue. That's the bus driver's job. And our bus drivers are good at what they do.

But no one forces everyone to ride the bus. I'm not sure that forcing everyone to ride the bus is a good idea. Those who drive make their own decisions, maybe based on economics, maybe on other factors, such as sleeping in a bit later and getting home sooner. The cost of gasoline, obviously in their eyes, is less of a factor than whatever factor it is that persuades them to drive to work. Forcing them to ride the bus would make me happier because -- perhaps -- bus pass prices would go down, but they, in turn, would give up other tangible benefits they see in driving themselves to work or carpooling, rather than riding the bus.

If all things were equal -- if everyone were like me -- the buses would be so crowded they'd be less expensive and probably less comfortable and more likely to inspire Weird Al Yankovic parody songs.



But not everyone sees things like I do, which is too bad for me and my situation. But I don't see things like them, which maybe causes them some hardship along the way. Recently our company polled employees to see if they'd rather have a $50 a week carpooling incentive rather than bus access -- which, in addition to what we pay as employees for the bus passes, costs the company $450,000 a month. The poll I heard -- unofficially -- came out about even among people who adamantly want to continue having bus privileges, those interested in the $50 carpooling incentive and those who didn't give a fig either way.

Do I think health insurance prices will go down as more people are "forced" to buy health insurance? Not a chance. More people buying houses at the peak of the housing bubble -- which led to more houses being built and more people working in construction -- forced prices through the roof, not down. Those who look at increased demand -- whether through popular desire or governmental fiat -- to make prices go down are living in a fool's paradise. Only when the profit equation is taken out of healthcare might we see prices decrease. But that would be only a temporary dip, as costs outside of profits will still continue to rise. But that's socialism, which we will not see in this country any time soon.

PSST: CNN, you might want to remember that getting things right is far more important than getting things first.

Equal-Opportunity Asshattery

Because I think equal opportunity ought to apply to asshattery as well as getting jobs and scholarships, I anxiously awaited Slate.com’s trashing of Nora Ephron, the 71-year-old writer/director who passed away of pneumonia brought on by leukemia over the weekend.

I hold no animosity towards Ephron. I’ve watched some of her movies, and enjoyed some of her movies. But with Slate.com’s trashing of individuals such as John Christopher and Stan and Jan Berenstain, I figured that the site would have someone on staff ready to pour out some vitriol on the maker of the modern rom-com.

So far, I got nothin’.

And there’s lots of rich fodder in the Ephron canon, if I put on hats typically worn by Slate’s they’re-dead-so-let’s-trash-them crowd.

Michael, the Ephron film I probably enjoy the most, is at the foundation of it all, sexist. Every woman who falls within the circle of influence of Michael the angel – played by John Travolta – is in thrall to him, from the idiots who think he smells like cookies to the bar wenches who dance with him merely because he exudes some angelic quality that only they (and that weenie who has the dog) can determine.





Any male who tried to foist such a storyline upon the cynical feminist public would have his harbls handed to him in a jar. But not a whisper of condemnation for Ephron’s mawkishness on Slate. Maybe they’ve learned their lesson. Then again, probably not.

And that’s not the end of it. You’ve Got Mail brings us not only dated product placement with AOL’s signature line but also a tale of a successful businesswoman – played by Meg Ryan – who falls head over heels for her competitor even after all the disgust in knowing that he’s mercilessly putting her out of business – leaving the fate of her business unresolved at the end, concentrating more on the relationship. I don’t see either caving in, but I do see one caving in to the realities of business – and a relationship borne of anonymous email snogging falling to pieces as the male business model triumphs once again over that of the inept, weepy female.

Probably there are feminists who could put this in better light at Slate.com, but since this was a woman writing it all, perhaps my faith in their cynicism is misplaced. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, etc., etc.

Then there’s Sleepless in Seattle. Here we have the weepy, inept female basically unable to run her life because she’s lost in this magical, puffy world of finding her soul mate and traveling all the way to Seattle so she can find this one guy whose ten=-year-old son called in to a national weep-fest radio show about.

Okay, so the male character, played by Tom Hanks, is just as emasculated and weepy as Ryan’s character is (if a female can be emasculated; I suppose I should say efeminated), so I guess Ephron can get a bye on this one.





Then there’s this scene (my favorite) from the film, in which Ephron basically says it’s okay for men to run roughshod over female feelings as long as it’s done in a comical way:

From a man, this kind of thing would be sniffed at by Slate.com’s feminists. But there’s nothing but praise for Ephron there.

Maybe they’ve learned their Jan Berenstain lesson: Detreat as you might, but there are those in the internet universe who will come to the defense of their cherished idols. Or they could just be saying, “Hey, everyone loves Nora Ephron, despite what we have to gloss over when it comes to how she portrays women as weepy and men-dependent. Besides, she wrote about New York City! The Big Wahoonie! We have to give her a pass.”

Given these are hard-bitten journalists (well, as hard-bitten as you can be writing feminism online) I guess I know which direction they were heading.

DOG!

A photo our oldest took of our dog. I imagine it's the last view that stink bug on the porch had of the world before the dog got to it earlier today.

Moron Information Literacy

So, you may remember this post from last week. Boy, I sure do. Just one of the many examples where doing the pre-reading helped me avoid making a complete ass of myself.

But a thought struck me this morning -- why not do what Barr and Tagg pseudo-recommend in "From Teaching to Learning" -- that is, offer an interdisciplinary course on information literacy in which students get minimal lecture but lots of time to practice what ails them?

Let me go back to what they say, then see if my idea passes muster or just squirts more mustard into the diaper of my ignorance.

They say:

We now see that our mission is not instruction but rather that of producing learning with every student by whatever means works best.

And this:

For example, if students are not learning to solve problems or think critically, the old logic says we must teach a class in thinking -- and make it a general education requirement. Thie logic is all to circular: What students are learning in the classroom doesn'ta ddrss their needs or ours; therefore, we must bring them back into another clasroom and instruct them some more. The result is never what we hope for because, as Richard Paul, director of the Center for Critical Thinking observes glumly, "critical thinking is taught in the same way that other courses have traditionally been taught, with an excess of lecture and insufficient time for practice.

And this:

Students, the co-producers of learning, can and must, of course, take responsibility for their own learning. Hence, responsibility is a win-win game wherein two agents take responsibility for the same outcome even through neither is in complete control of all the variables. When two agents take such responsibility, the resulting synergy produces powerful results.

And this:

In the Learning Paradigm, on the other hand, a college's purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students member of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems.

So far, so good. But, before I introduce my idea, I'll give a little more background.

The classes I enjoyed the most from my masters work at Utah State were those taught by David Hailey and Ron Shook, who took on two different perspectives.

Hailey's classes were open-ended. We did not have a text but rather were reading a text he was in the process of writing. We didn't have a set syllabus but instead took voyages through knowledge meant to help us first see the problems with, say, writing for the web, the divine ways to fix the problems. His classes were frustrating in that we didn't know from week to week what we were going to do. But they were fun for the same reason.

Shook's classes were more structured, but he prefaced every class with the following, liberating sentence: If you've got a project or paper you're working on for your full-time job that you think will work as an assignment in this class, let me know. Hailey also used this approach -- and I found as a student that taking this approahc allowed me to work on something I knew I had to work on "for real," rather than just inside the classroom -- so what I was learning in the classroom had immediate real-world application.

So I got to wondering this morning as I sat on the bus, unable to sleep. And I pounded the following out on my Kindle:

Cross-curriculum information literacy

Concern by Barr et al that glasses on informational literacy aren't across the curriculum and that students aren't able to apply what they learn in an information literacy course to other subjects. So we bring other subjects into the curriculum. We look at projects they may fe working on in, say, other English ir communication or nursing of automotive or botany or whatever and we let them use assignments they're working on in other clases in this information literacy course. Tjod leaves the curriculum for the info lit course wide open.

How

Students have to submit a significant assignment from other course to he taken seriously. Will want it to be assignment due in other course far later in semester so they ave time yo work on it in both courses.

would have to work with profs on other course to fill in teacher's info gap

Call it an experiment in cross-curricular information literacy

Yes, typos included. I was more tired than I think. But too tired to see where Barr and Tagg might be okay with this? Let me check.

Learning by whatever means work best? Maybe. This might be the means to help some students, but not all students.

Excess of lecture with little time for practice? Maybe not. Keep the lecture light and encourage them, week to week, to check in with questions, bounce ideas off instructor and peers, who might suggest through converastion rather than lecture ways to improve upon the writing and research and such.

Responsibility with neither fully in control of variables? Yes. Responsibility on students to find appropriate assignments. Responsibility on instructor to expand horizons and guide and communicate outside of one field of expertise. Lots of variables with no one person in complete control.

Community where students become learners and problem-solvers? I'd like to think so.

More from Barr and Tagg:

[Fixing the learning] reward skilled and advanced students with speedy progress while enabling less-prepared students the time they needed to actually master the material. By "testing out," students could also avoid wasting their time being "taught" what they already know. Students would be given credit for degree-relevant knowledge and skills regardless of how or where or when they learned them.

Maybe portions of this course -- but certainly BYU-Idaho should consider letting some students "test out" of FDENG 101 and ENG 201 so they're not bored in the classes and weary of jumping through the hoops.

Failure of Petrichor

A woman wrote me from San Bernardino, California – how she found me I’ll never fathom; it was before the profiles of me in the popular press – and asked what I missed, “isolated as you are, millions of miles from Earth,” she said. To extend her letter, she included long lists of what she imagined I missed, from the sound of the breeze blowing through the leafy treetops to the weight of lose change in my pockets.

I banished her letter to the BLARGO BLOO where the scarecrow stands.

But long I pondered the question, even before it arrived.

What did I miss, marooned and alone on a dusty, walnut-shaped hunk of rock and ice circling the ringed planet in the solar system’s middle nethers?

Not the crowds, the cawing of crows, the rush of water either in stream or toilet; nor birdsong at dawn. Nor dawn itself.

Finally, I went back out to BLARGO BLOO, retrieved her letter, and responded:

C₁₂H₂₂O

She wrote back, said she would send me some beets.

No, I said, in response. Not beets.

Simple geosmin, C₁₂H₂₂O, mixed with the oils released by Artemisia tridentata.

The smell of rain blown in over the sagebrush steppe not far from the town where I was born.

Australains coined a name for it: petrichor, Greek for the stone and blood of the gods. Writers use the word, smugly, sending their readers to their dictionaries to say, “indeed, this writer is more clever than I.”

The word is wrong.

There are many smells after a rain, and I have catalogued many of them: That of cold concrete wet by summer rain and that of hot concrete wet by summer rain might both be called petrichor, but to the discerning nose, they are utterly different. Different still, the smell of rain bearing with it the resin of the sagebrush.

The smell of wet, warm concrete enters the nose as soft round balls, gently bouncing off the olfactory nerves, conveying the blackness of the sand grains in the concrete, they grey of the cement, the solidness of artificial stone to step on.

The smell of distant sagebrush wet by the rain bears with it the jagged lightning of summer, the wind-blown dust though the air is clear, the black tear of clouds on the horizon that never arrive yet push the odor eastward like a pleasant plague of Egypt. With it the nose is stripped of the mundane smells of the roses and the violets and is varnished and cleansed, like the palate of a Frenchman eating a delicate sorbet between courses. After the petrichor of the desert, that of sagebrush and lava rock and lichen and prickly pear and coyote scat and marmot holes and the cawing of crows that imitate ducks when they see humans about, you see the need for yet another word to describe the smell in the air after a rain.

I tried artesmichor.

But it cannot conjure the smell smelled sitting on that front porch with Dad there in his wooden shoes, staring out at the black clouds in the desert as the sun set behind them, the whirr of traffic on the highway, the hum from the overhead electrical wires, the bark of a dog, the scent of a cat marking its territory and that certain whiff of methane from the vent pipe on the septic tank.

Marcel Proust would fail to name it, fiddling as he does with his madelines.

Lewis Carroll would fail to name it, outgrabed mome raths notwithstanding.

I cannot name it. But in a letter far longer than the original from the woman from San Bernardino, I described it.

She wrote back. She did not know the smell.

But her father-in-law, who grew up on the sagebrush steppe of Sicily, knows it. And he knows no effort to bottle its essence should ever be undertaken.

“I smell it, once and a while, when I am out past Bakersfield, wandering,” he wrote in a shaky post-script to her last letter. “It makes me weep for home. I weep like a small baby. You are a cruel man to remind me of what it is I miss the most.”

PLEASE Buy Last Week's News!

TIME, what is this malarkey?

Specifically, this malarkey. And in case you miss it, it's this:

When the Queen imports three unsuitable suitors as prospective husbands, Merida causes havoc in the realm by declaring she’ll marry no one but herself. “I hope you die!” she screams at the woman who gave her life. In a rage, Merida visits a witch (Julie Walters), hoping for a magic spell that will change her mother. It does. Reviewers’ etiquette requires that we speak no more of it. If you want to know what happens in the movie’s Act Two, buy a subscription to TIME and read the review in last week’s issue.

The part in italics I can buy. Richard Corliss, from whose review of Pixar's Brave this paragraph comes from, doesn't want to spoil  the show by, well, spoiling the show. but given that it blends in so well with the bit of anti-Internet malarkey in bold, I have to wonder if Corliss' wording is more a plea from a dead-tree magazine to keep it alive than movie reviewer ettiquette.

I'm willing to give Corliss the benefit of the latter, but TIME is guilty of the former.

Yes, yes, I know the media is struggling trying to find a balance of free offerings for the internet versus offerings we have to pay for. Corliss, as the other writers at TIME and at, say, your local newspaper deserve to be paid. But the inserted plea for a subscription or single-issue sale comes at a poor time, rhetorically, in this instance.

And really, TIME, you think telling me I have to buy last week's issue -- old news even by dead tree standards -- to get the rest of the review is going to make me rush out and do so? I trust Richard Corliss for film reviews, but given that there are plenty of other reviewers on the internet who won't make me go out and buy a copy of last week's stuff to read what they have to say, the trust in Corliss is outweighed by the sheer inconvenience of finding that old news dead tree edition in the first place. Good thing my local library subscribes to TIME, so I can go read it for free.

But here's the deal -- I'd almost rather have a paywall to deal with here, because at least that way I'd have a reasonable chance of finding what I wanted to read, even if I only paid to read that article and not the whole of the magazine. I don't happen to have a local branch of Last Week's News around where I can buy a copy of last week's TIME magazine. The library is my only option.