Gifted Slacker

I think I could best be described as a realist with mild optimistic and weak (classical or pseudo) cynical tendencies, with occasional bouts of idealism.

Optimism can be a shield or a blinder. You can use it to protect yourself so you can continue to do good, difficult work or you can use it hide dark realities from yourself. The shield vs. blinder outcome is probably somewhat based on how strongly idealistic or realistic one is: If you’re optimistic and realistic, your optimism will likely be a strength, whereas optimistim and idealism will likely blind you to the places where ideals don’t and can’t match reality.

Also, I think these dimensions of mind-frame are influenced by context and personal proclivity. Maybe they can be thought of as two functionally related axes that color a person’s cognitive frame.

Ugly first. Campuses of note: 20, College Park Maryland; 16, RIT; 8, SUNY Albany; 2, UMass - Amherst.

Of the pretty schools, I’ve only have experience of Princeton (#2 on the list).

I’m going to start filling my Facebook quote box again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is like George Bernard Shaw; a treasure trove of great quotes.

Here are some quotes that are soon to make an appearance in my Facebook quote box:

“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.“

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.”

“It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.“

“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”

“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

This next quote is related to a recent entry:

“Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.”

I apologize in advance if any of these quotes are mis-attributed to Fitzgerald. The internet is my source, and people don’t seem to feel the need to cite their quote sources.

As a bonus, here’s my absolute favorite Fitzgeraldian quote:

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.“

What was it Shaw said about fools and their fondness of quotes?

I hate school. I love education.

In the 3rd part of Joel’s talk at Yale he describes the way I wish school worked: no true grades, heavy work load. Some will argue that if there aren’t grades, students won’t do the work. Which is true, and you can fail those people. However, the ones who apply themselves, the ones motivated by education as an end in itself, will excel.

The best thing about Algorithmic Thinking was that you had to write a lot. There were 13 papers—one every week. You didn’t get grades. Well, you did. Well, ok, there’s a story there. One of the reasons Schank hated undergrads so much was that they were obsessed with grades. He wanted to talk about whether computers could think and all undergrads wanted to talk about was why their paper got a B instead of an A. At the beginning of the term, he made a big speech about how grades are evil, and decided that the only grade you could get on a paper was a little check mark to signify that some grad student read it. Over time, he wanted to recognize the really good papers, so he added check-PLUS, and then there were some really lame papers, so he started giving out check-minuses, and I think I got a check-plus-plus once. But grades: never.

This way of instruction makes me push myself harder than I ever would for a “grade.” Give me interesting problems and give me a lot of them, or give me a paycheck.

A 12 year old boy saved his sister by taunting a raging moose. The boy then survived the attacking moose by feigning death “Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft.”

Super awesome.

(from here, via here, via TerraNova. How’s that for indirection?)

Just a short quote, because, before I say anything, I want you all to go read the whole article:

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Read the rest of this entry »

And now a quote of a quote (from here):

Our greatest effect on crows is on their survivorship, not on their reproduction…if an adult crow lives near people it is likely to survive, but if it lives more than three miles from people, it will likely die. Mortality over a two-year period was 2.3 percent near people and 38.9 percent far from people…Populations in remote wildlands are not likely to be self-sustaining…

If urban crow populations are simply self-sustaining, why are so many exploding in size? Immigration is the answer, we suggest…young crows are moving to the cities to exploit their riches.

That is from In the Company of Crows and Ravens, a fascinating book. Most of all this volume stresses how much crows have co-evolved with humankind.

Crow populations tend to thrive near cities. Young crows are moving to cities. Now, just how mind blowing is that?

It sounds like the stories that were popular one or two-hundred years ago. The stuff about how people were leaving farms for the cities in great numbers. Reality is strange enough I don’t need fiction, sometimes.

When I write, I have trouble breaking ideas up. I have the tendency to write in a complicated, highly-interconnected, spiraling manner. It takes real effort to mold my words into sentences and paragraphs.

The level of organisation I have no mastery of is breaking things into sections or chapters. This is a writing mechanic I’m going to have to try and get a handle on. I’ve got two essays and a chunk of business plan to write in the next week or so. Hopefully that’ll be enough time for me to figure it out.

Susie Bright’s guest post on Scalzi’s Whatever blog explores the ridiculousness of tagging things NSFW:

That’s the odd case though. It’s usually about the money. If you reach a critical mass, or have the imprinteur of high society, you can run ANYTHING on your site, no matter how sensational or sexually bizarre— no matter how many religions it offends, or work hours it squanders. No one will dream of calling you names and sending you to the sidelines. No longer are you NSFW— you are Safe for Bank, baby.

I’ve always refused to label things NSFW in whatever forum I was participating in. My reason has always been “it doesn’t feel right”, but now I have another stack of reasons.

Part 2 of Joel Spolsky’s Talk at Yale describes my programming career so far:

It’s this scary thing called “in house software.” It’s terrifying. You never want to do in house software. You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact kind of aluminum can processing that they need, so they have these in-house programmers, or they hire companies like Accenture and IBM to send them overpriced programmers, to write this software. And there are two reasons this is so frightening: one, because it’s not a very fulfilling career if you’re a programmer, for a list of reasons which I’ll enumerate in a moment, but two, it’s frightening because this is what probably 80% of programming jobs are like, and if you’re not very, very careful when you graduate, you might find yourself working on in-house software, by accident, and let me tell you, it can drain the life out of you.

In-house programming can pay very well. It’s not worth it. I will never go back to it, unless it’s just absolutely positively necessary.