Mostly Safe For Work

The Internet is Over

This is surely the most something video in the history of the Internet.  I just don't know what that something is:

P.S. I'm fascinated by the keyboardist. 

Slumdog Millionaire

Believe the hype.  Slumdog Millionaire is easily the best movie of the year.  Wow, what a great way to spend two hours which thankfully seems like much longer as you enter the film's universe.  The movie opens as an 18-year-old Indian orphan from the slums has almost made it to the final question on his country's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  How did he get there?  The kid's life story is shown in flashbacks between questions.  It's riveting and at times horrifying, the dire third world poverty and abuse.  Yet it's a joyous thing to watch.  I can't avoid cheesy territory here because I love this movie so much.

Farewell, Night Shift

Last September I began a crazy-ass ordeal.  Finish all the pre-med prerequisites as a full-time student while working full-time at night in 11 months.  I did it and with only one B, in Orgo II.  Slept four or five rough hours a day fighting through sunlight and day heat.  Was tired all the time.  Had to pull over to sleep in parking lots.  Somedays I'd be completely exhausted yet not able to sleep for another 16-20 hours.   This fall I signed up for easier classes at better times, but I was still running out of steam.  Switched to the 3-11p shfit.  It's bliss.  I've been tired once in the three weeks since versus all the time previously.  Of course, I've still worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday 55 of the last 58 weeks and nine of the 10 last holidays.  And I'll be donning that uniform today.  

Strong Journalism

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, lays it down:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

 At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

I'm all for capitalism, but the problem is we've been sending a good portion of our smartest kids from our best schools into an industry that added very little value to the economy.  Hedge funds have been luring a good portion of Cal Tech physics PhD grads from actually innovating industries.  It's bullshit.  

True Stories, One Sentence

A new site.  Favorite so far:

"The hardest part was explaining why my black eye just so happened to look like a chicken's foot."

The Cold Fallacy

Myth: Going outside without proper clothing in cold weather causes can make you sick.

Fact: People get sick more when its cold outside because they're inside more in closer contact.  Also, this is not as true nowadays or in Texas, but kids used to start school in late September, right around when it starts to cool down.  Kids packed together in classrooms, rubbing snot all over the hands = incubators of sick.  Correlation is not causation, bitches. 

Best Recent Movies

Like most great character actors, Richard Jenkins was overdue for a lead role.  His understated performance in The Visitor makes the film one of the best of the year.  Jenkins plays a widowed professor who stopped living after his wife died.  He owns an apartment in NYC that he has not visited in years.  On a trip to a conference in the city, he finds an illegal immigrant couple (he Syrian, she African) squatting there.  The relationships that develop are really interesting, and it's a great movie.

I don't like cartoons.  They have some of the cleverest writing staffs, with genius constructions.  But I'm just not that interested in drawn characters, which is why I've probably seen three total episodes of The Simpsons and only minutes of The Family Guy or King of the Hill.  Persepolis, though, a French-language cartoon about a little girl growing up alongside the Iranian revolution, got such great reviews that it crawled up my Netflix queue.  The black-and-white cartoon images are wonderful - especially on Blu-Ray on my new HDTV.  Using the perspective of the little girl to show the shifting ideologies of the revolution is perfect. 

Idle American Minds

Two Teaching Firsts

Now in my fourth year of teaching, I certainly haven't seen it all, but there isn't a great deal that surprises me anymore. Last week, however, provided two such instances. 

The first involved cheating, a subject at which I consider myself an expert. I was a virtuoso at cheating throughout high school. I cheated on nearly everything and never got caught. The scheme I'm most proud of is the time I removed the wrapper from my bottle of water, put a cheat sheet on the inside of it, then carefully taped it back into place. I had my translation of The Aeneid right in front of me all test with virtually no chance of getting caught. It wasn't that I couldn't do the work, I just didn't want to. And I never associated academic integrity with regular integrity, which ensured I never felt any guilt over cheating. Anyway, having put so much time and effort into cheating, I'm able to recognize in a heartbeat when my students are up to something. I feel a little conflicted about busting them considering my history, but I figure that by hammering them now, it could save them the trouble of getting caught later when it really matters.

But to get to the point, one thing kids try to pull from time to time is re-marking their test after I've returned it, and then telling me I graded it wrong. It's a horrible idea that rarely works, but one thing fifth graders are not long on is common sense. Last week I had a student try this with me, only he had rewritten his answers in pen after having done the test in pencil. It was one of those cheap black rollerball pens, so the ink was grayish and sort of looked like pencil, but still, it was clearly pen. I was dumbstruck. How could anyone be so foolish as to think that might work?

The second incident involved an advisee of mine who has had some trouble throughout the year with speaking to teachers in a respectful manner. He is only joking when he crosses the line, but he doesn't seem to get the picture that we are his teachers, not his friends. Last Wednesday, as we were getting settled in for advisory at the start of the day, I asked some of the girls to be seated. The boy in question looked over his shoulder at me and, loud and clear, said, "Screw you."

Again, I was dumbstruck. What on Earth had made him say that? Later, when we were in the office talking to the the Asst. Head of Middle School, she asked him why he had said that, and he told her that I had called him a girl. At this I was baffled. I thought for a moment, then turned to the boy and asked, "D------, when did I call you a girl?"

He replied, "You said, 'Ladies, have a seat'."

I almost burst out laughing before composing myself and answering, "D------, I was talking to the ladies."

Like I said, fifth graders are not long on common sense.

-T

Ratemyprofessors.com Review of my MIS Prof for Next Semester

This class was an intro to VB without prior programming experience needed so it's not a hard class at all. If you're new to programming it may be a little more work for you. Pelin is very easy on the eyes and was the only reason I attended class. Take her in the Winter if possible...SWEATER TIME!!!

So weird.