perfidy

Festung Buckethead, located deep in the mountains of exurban Washington, DC, is a place of learning and happiness. Between the racks of weapons and food stored for the apocalypse, we manage to set aside a small space for the education of our offspring.

Our oldest is now six years old, and his education is moving past the difficult initial stages of teaching him how to pay attention and not fidget, and moving into real larnin’. He reads, and ciphers; and planning for the furtherance of his education is in full swing.

Mrs. Buckethead, a public school teaching survivor, is in charge of most of this effort, while I make faces around the edges of her real work. Seeing as she is 1) an experienced teacher, 2) vastly more organized and thorough than I, and 3) not distrac… ooh, shiny! Where was I? Oh, those reasons make her stewardship of education planning eminently sensible.

Nevertheless, she condenses the results of her tireless research and analysis into small bite sized pieces that I can easily gum and swallow.

And last night, we had one of these information dumps. She is interested in purchasing the A2 curriculum, which is a more or less an improved version of the Robinson curriculum; the which to use as the basis for our ongoing pedagogical efforts. The original Robinson curriculum was developed by, you guessed it, Robinson. Who wanted to educate his boys with minimum fuss and maximum effectiveness. He was an engineer, not an education Ph.D, so he went about doing this in a way that appeals to my inner geek. By all accounts, it is a fantastic program, and you can get an entire K-12 education package with public domain resources, worksheets, etc., all on a package of discs.

The sad thing is, a lot of the material is not stored in the best formats - books as folders of .tiff files, and the like. So the A2 people rationalized it, and now it's all in .txt and PDF files, which are more suited for this modern internets age.

So anyway, we're looking to drop a C-note on this program. But there are no books, no preprinted worksheets, just ones and zeros. My wife was saying that she’d either be printing whole books out on our hp officejet 5510 - or we’d have to hunt down live books in the wild, and buy, skin, and mount them for our son to read. And it occurred to me that that kind of defeats the whole point.

Do the math: Print cartridges are expensive. Books are expensive and can stub your toe. Right now, we need new print cartridges about every six months. If we’re increasing our printing by a metric shitload, we’d be changing print cartridges at least every other month on the new plan, minimum, and likely more often. Given the way that hp rapes you on the cartridges (the first one’s always free), that’s $500 bucks a year right there. Buying books - public domain books that are available for free on Project Gutenberg, or that are already on our curriculum discs - would add hundreds more dollars - a minimum, according to list, of $250.

It will actually be cheaper to buy our son his own Kindle DX.

We can fit a year's worth of educational reading on the Kindle, and it is maximally portable. The boy won't be tied to the computer, and he won't have to lug around lots of books. And there are bonuses. The Kindle has a built in New Oxford American dictionary, just select a word, and get a definition at the bottom of the page, without having to leave the book you’re reading. That sealed it for Mrs. Buckethead right there - being able to look up words right when you hit them is key. And having the dictionary right there makes that process easy.

Free 3G wireless for the life of the device, and built in access to the Wikipedias. Annotations and notes. Plays audio files. And, since it uses the fancy E Ink technology, the battery lasts for weeks as long as you have wireless turned off. The screen is huge - like ten inches, and font size is adjustable, so the boy will have no problems reading on it. Also, it’s not like a backlit LCD screen, so you can easily read it outside, in the sun. It has 3 GB of storage, so we could put huge amounts of material onboard.

The downside, so far as I can tell without actually holding one, is that file management on the thing is a real pain in the ass. You are encouraged to email your personal documents to the Kindle’s email address, though you can use the USB. And, on the device, all your personal documents are just dropped into one folder, no sorting, sub folders or tagging allowed. We’ll have to manage the files for the boy’s studies on the computer, and move them over in chunks, so that he won’t have to wade through thousands of files to find what he needs.

I looked at some of the other ereaders, and it doesn't seem that any of them match up, on price or features, to the DX.

What I’d really like, though, would be the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But failing that, a touchscreen version would be nice - it would make navigation easier. And better file management would probably help. Amazon is marketing this (among other targets) towards college kids, for replacing expensive textbooks. The homeschool market is small but growing - one could probably make some money putting together packages designed to be used with this sort of technology.

On balance, though, one downside does not outweigh many upsides. And it tickles my fancy to think that I will be buying a $500 state of the art electronic book reader to save money. Granted, we’ll still be buying real books, and we’ll still be printing out worksheets and the like - but the volume would be manageable, and the bulk of his reading will be on the Kindle, which means that his education becomes more portable, more convenient; and that means that we can do more of it.

I can't believe it's May. Which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as I can hardly believe it's Wednesday. My confusion is heightened, this week, by two shocking discoveries.

First, while watching The Big Lebowski at 2:00 in the morning I noticed something that I never saw the first dozen times I watched the film. The Dude's bowling shirt, on the back, says "Medina Sod." Which is odd, since there is a Medina Sod in Medina, Ohio, where I grew up. Apparently, there is also a rock band in Boston named Medina Sod, and of course you can get the obligatory Medina Sod replica bowling shirt to become, body and soul, just like the Dude.

The Akron Beacon Journal, once a fine paper that had the foresight back in the early nineties to register the "ohio.com" domain, has apparently decided that no, anywhere, will ever need to see an article that's more than six months old. So, I can't read the article written back in '08 that talks about the local connection to the Big Lebowski. I did glean, from Google's search page, that Medina Sod Farms did OK the use of their name in the film.

Weird to watch a film you've seen umpty-billion times, and belatedly realize that the shirts worn by a big chunk of the cast through much of the film have your home town's name on the back. Way to be alert. Even drunk, I should've noticed this sooner.

Second, as the father of young children, I have perforce been watching a lot of children's television. Granted, I don't pay a lot of attention, all the time. But I have come to enjoy Spongebob. I particularly like Plankton, who is touchingly, gleefully, and incompetently evil. But I discovered, when I glanced at the credits, that Mr. Krabs is the Kurgan. Yes, Clancy Brown - the evil immortal swordsman from the best movie of all time, The Highlander - is the voice talent for Mr. Krabs. My mouth just dropped. Now, I keep expecting Mr. Krabs to start screaming, "It's better to burn out, than to fade away... Another time, Highlander!"

It is a strange and beautiful world we live in.

Did you hear about the new Octo Mom Breakfast Special?

14 eggs, no sausage, and the guy at the next table is going to pay for it.

Even in a down economy, it turns out. Let me set a quick stage for you:

My wife decided we were switching from Comcast cable service to the still-somewhat-new AT&T uVerse service. Her reasons, while I'm sure good and valid, are a mystery to me.

Nevertheless, after waiting two weeks for an install, she got a visit this past Tuesday morning from the AT&T guy, ready to do his thing. He said it should take no more than two hours. We were having three cable connections in the house replaced, with the attendant three new cable decoder boxes.

Several trips seem to have been required between our house and the nearest fiber drop in the neighborhood, half a mile away. Odd, but no matter, right? It then got progressively more weird - four, count 'em, four trips were made to the house by yet another AT&T installer, each time bringing a cable decoder box to replace one of the ones that Spanky, our installer, found not to be in good working order.

Five hours after he'd started his two hour job, Spanky left, happy with the job he'd done. TV was working at all three cable boxes, and the wireless access to the internet was also working. He'd personally verified it, using one of my wife's laptop computers. I'm certain he verified it, not just because wireless worked on our other laptops, but because when I checked Gmail, he'd left himself signed in on my wife's Thinkpad, to his personal Gmail account.

It goes without saying that IQ might not be one of the top ten attributes AT&T uses in choosing its installers. More on that in a minute.

In addition to flawless TV and wireless access to his personal Gmail account on my wife's computer, he also left the rest of my network (the wired part, in the office upstairs) completely horked. It appears not to have occurred to him that anyone still uses wired Ethernet connections. Dealing with all the wires he'd casually disconnected and dropped behind the desk, while reconnecting the several switches and the router in the office after I'd gotten home from work took a solid hour of my time.

But it was all made worth it when my wife told me "the rest of the story", this evening. How she'd forgotten to tell me yesterday, I don't know, but once I heard it, the delay didn't matter.

Spanky, who reportedly had AT&T support on his most worn-out cell-phone speed dial button, was upstairs near the end of our ordeal, trying to get a good picture on the device connected to the upstairs cable box. My wife walked upstairs in time to help him with his travails, however, shortening what might have been a 7 hour install (how does AT&T make any money at this?) into "only" 5 hours.

The picture he was getting was fuzzy, and it was cycling up and down the screen, for reasons he and Albert Einstein, his telephone correspondent, were unable to determine. Mrs. Patton to the rescue - she pointed out to him that he should be connecting to the 25" TV 5 feet away from him, instead of attempting to get a good signal on my daughter's fucking 7" screen karaoke machine.

[wik] True story.

[alsø wik] Seriously.

[alsø alsø wik] I shit you not.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] On further review by the replay official, my lovely wife, they only needed to replace three of the devices, not four. And karaoke machine has only a 4" screen, not 7", which casts Spanky's ineptitude in a whole 'nother light. The author regrets any inconvenience caused by these inaccuracies.

[see the løveli lakes...] Speaking of inconvenience, this morning (2/7/2009), the service went tits-up, and they're rushing one of their MENSA candidates out to resolve the matter. Tomorrow fucking night, between 4:00PM and 9:00PM.

When you're not sure you can hit a target in single-fire mode:

[wik] We'll never know now, as the video no longer exists.

Heh.

From that compendium of wonderful things, boing boing, we find this:

My current favorite metal band, Amon Amarth is not on this flowchart, but I imagine it would be under "Foriegn Sounding" under a new bubble for "Invented Languages" or "Elvish." Clicky on the pic for the flowchart in its full, uh, flowcharty glory.

This, more than anything I have ever experienced, makes me want to want to dig a hole and pull it in after me.

Watch the first minute or so, if you can, and then jump to 3:54.

Sheesh. I need more guns.

[wik] Ashton Kutcher as the face of the new order of the ages. Along with the obvious horror, a secondary horror is the staggering historical ignorance this little piece of unintentionally Orwellian theater demonstrates in its art design.

[alsø wik] Ashton Kutcher, I have always felt, represented something evil. I just wasn't sure until today what it was.

[alsø alsø wik] I for one would like to be among the first to welcome our Stepford Hollywood Elite Overlords. Non servium.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] My wife just suggested Non Servium would make a nice tshirt. So as not to implicate myself as a Satanist, we'd need to add a picture of Obama. Maybe done up Che-style, but I think the socialist realist depiction from that video would perhaps be most apropos.

[see the løveli lakes...] And really, wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? Sweden seems almost Republican now.

2008 was a shitburger sandwich with a side of fries in many respects. Financially, it was a wash, and my work in the bowels of Customs and Border Protection was quite simply the worst work environment I have ever experienced. And I worked at a place where someone tried to kill me. Long hours of boredom and sociopathic coworkers were bookended by two hour commutes.

In a word, it completely fucking sucked.

But before our three remaining readers start dialing the suicide hotlines on my behalf, not all was crap on rye. For instance, there was the birth of my daughter Claire, which alone more than outweighed working for one of the tentacles of the Department of Homeland Security.

And all that free time at work gave me a lot of time to read. And my interminable commutes gave me a lot of time to ponder.

I wasn't really able to convert much of that to prolific blogging thanks to time constraints and the prejudices of the internet filters at DHS facilities. Which I hope to rectify, somewhat, in the near future.

Some of the fruits of my year of suffering are these:

I no longer believe that the entire community of astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists have the least fucking clue what is going on in the universe past where the air gets kinda thin.

I no longer have unlimited faith that democracy is the best system of government.

I think Velikovsky may have been right. Or at least on to something.

I drifted into these things sideways, really. While I am naturally a bit of a contrarian, (Okay, a really big contrarian. Shut up.) I have not made a habit of seeking out outre heretical thoughts just to make a spectacle of myself.

Since I was a kid, I have always read with amazement and delight all the breathless stories, describing all the remarkable, implausible theories modern science has come up with. Black holes, quasars, quantum strangeness. I ate it up and went back for seconds. And if it wasn't for beer, I might have actually been a physicist myself.

But in the nineties, I started getting a little dubious. Once, a friend of mine and I were attempting to explain the concept of Ockham's razor to a particularly dim and more than slightly drunk sorority chick. Why we thought that it was important that we should do so, and whether we thought it would do any good is beside the point. But in trying to find an example, we settled on gravity. We explained that mass attracts other bits of mass. You're sitting on a particularly large bit of mass. So it pulls you down. See? Simple. Can be explained by a few lines of equations, utterly predictable and nice.

But why is this explanation better than any others, she asked. Well, shit. Uh, imagine that there isn't any mystical force of gravity. Imagine that the only thing that is holding you in that chair is gravity trolls. Their job is to hold stuff down. There's trillions of them, and they, with infinite care, go around holding shit down. That's there job.

But I don't see them! Oh, we forgot to mention, they're invisible gravity trolls. You can't see or feel them. But trust us, they're holding you down right now.

Oh. But what about airplanes? she asked. Well, while the invisible gravity trolls are diligent, the curvy shapes of wings confuse them. They forget to hold them down. Helicopters work the same way. And, before you ask, hydrogen, helium and hot air make them drunk.

Why is there no gravity in space? Well, what do you think, invisible gravity trolls can breathe vacuum? How do satellites stay in orbit, then? Well, there's a long line of IGT's holding hands, and the last one is grabbing the satellite.

And so on. We spun out a massively baroque and ridiculous IGT theory of gravity. And then, we said that given the two theories that both explain the curious phenomenon of stuff not floating away, it's probably best to take the simpler one.

Anywho. Later on in that decade, we started hearing a lot about dark matter. And then more about dark energy. The universe, it seems, wasn't behaving right. The invisible gravity trolls were acting up - and a central bit was that galaxies were spinning as if there were much more mass than could be seen. So, invisible mass was proposed. Other problems arose, and dark energy explained these discrepancies.

It got to the point where cosmologists now insist, with their faces hanging out, that 96% of the universe is undetectable by pretty much any imaginable means. I started thinking, that smells like fudge, as in fudge factor. I started suspecting IGT's. But, not being a physicist, and not having anything better to put in in its place, I let it go.

Then I ran across Plasma Cosmology. The basic thought is that electromagnetism - a force which is 41 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity (that's 41 zeros) might just have something to do with how the universe fits together. For the same reason that a child's magnet can counteract the force of the inconceivably larger earth below it when it picks up a paper clip, electric and magnetic fields in space could have an effect on how stars, nebulas, and whatnot all behave.

They say, and I have come to believe, that substituting a gravity plus electromagnetic universe explains things better than a gravity only universe, and without resort to dark matter and dark energy - which had already seemed to me to be fudge factors more concerned with preserving theory than explaining what we actually see.

And that led in to a lot more stuff, which I plan on writing more about later.

But first, to get you started, read this introduction to plasma cosmology. It explains the basic idea in a readable way, and makes a good starting point.

My youngest child seems to be somewhat concerned about her brother's intentions.