Finals day Fall 2008 Day I part II

Workout notes I took advantage of warm temperatures (36 F, or 2 C) to get out for a run in the sunshine. Yes, 36 feels “warm”. I had notions of “doing quality” but frankly my first mile really sucked; my muscles simply didn’t work. The second mile was marginally better (19:55); the third mile was slightly less pathetic (though I bucked a head wind) and I actually felt good in the 4′th mile (39:42). The footing was very good for this time of year.

But I relearned the lessons of building back up; I am not used to running 3 days in a row yet. Also, my body seems to “go south” this time of year; so I suppose that what I thought were the effects of blood donation was confounded by my not performing so well during the winter months.

Humor: Check out the “fail blog”; they have a couple of doozies:

1. This guy was perhaps too literal when he responded to the question: “what do you like most in a woman“.

2. This “safety fail” is work safe but funny nonetheless.

Right Wing Watch
(those fundies say the darndest things!)

Richard Land weighs in on the controversial sign placed in the Washington state capitol by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, saying that he has always believed that governments should “maximally accommodate” religious groups seeking to place messages on public grounds, but complains that the FFRF sign is an “improper attack on religion” because it is “denigrating and disrespectful to the Christian faith”:

One does not honor pluralism by disrespecting other people’s faiths in such hostile ways … The current display is hostile and disrespectful. In accommodating peoples’ wish to have their faith acknowledged in the public square, one must understand that such displays must not attack other faiths.

Apparently, Land’s concerns are limited to messages that he personally considers disrespectful, because he certainly doesn’t seem to have any qualms about unleashing his own hostile and disrespectful attacks against other faiths::

“There is not a country in the world where Muslims are in the majority that they don’t severely restrict the freedom of religion of every other faith. They seek to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun. They kill people who disagree with them or who dare to convert to another faith.

“I’ll take Islam as a peaceful religion seriously when I see followers of Islam in America protesting and condemning suicide bombers, anti-Semitic hate speech and genocide in the Sudan,” Land said.[...]
“Was it just happenstance that every person who flew one of those planes into a building and every person that was part of the planning was an Islamic fanatic?” Land asked.

In short, when these dips criticize others, the are merely “being honest”. But when you criticize them, then you are “unfairly attacking”.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just limited to fundies. In a recent conversation with a member of a UU church, I was asked what I thought about a famous “mystic”. I told her that I didn’t believe in mysticism; in the course of our conversation I told her that humanity had progressed when we became more rational and less superstitious. She said that she didn’t view mysticism as “superstition”.

I then asked her about astrology and she was happy to dismiss that form of wooism.

Speaking of atheism in general, some bloggers are asking about “atheist lifestyles”. Interestingly enough, my atheism is more of a consequence of my lifestyle than something that drives my lifestyle.

Part of that is that I hang with the math/science crowd where atheism is common; in fact it is often the norm. Part of it is that I tend to read science/skeptic blogs; the issue here isn’t “ok, let’s deny the existence of this god or that deity” but rather: “this group of people claims X, Y, or Z. Do you believe that? Should we run our lives/government/country based on claims X, Y, or Z being true?”

If it seems that I spend lots of time talking about Christian claims, it is because those are the claims that others are attempting to straight jacket science/society/public policy with. True, I don’t find Christian claims to be any more absurd than Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, neo Pagan or other wooish claims (e. g., homeopathy, healing crystals, etc.). But the folks from those other “whatevers” aren’t attempting to influence my life with their beliefs.

On this vein, take up the first 1:20 of this video!

The rest of it is funny; this guy rants and then decides to go “door to door” to “convert” Mormons. They don’t take it that well.

Hey Obama: WTF???

Workout notes 2000 yard swim then yoga class; 500 warm up, 6 x 50 (drill/swim with zoomers), 5 x 200 free on the 3:30 (3:21, :18, :16, :17, :17), 100 back (fins), 100 fly (fins).

When I have less than a 1000 yard warm up, my first 100 or 200 is always extra slow for some reason.

I hope to get in a short (3-4 mile) run on the treadmill over lunch.

Barack Obama’s Transition Team
Look at who Obama picked to head the Department of Energy:

Nobel laureate Steve Chu is Barack Obama’s choice to head the Department of Energy as the president-elect rounds out his energy and environmental team, a person close to the transition said.

The president-elect will name Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as the country’s 12th energy secretary. The announcement, along with other key energy and environmental posts, will be made next week, Democratic aides said.

What the f*ck? Obama picked a genius who has had experience running a national laboratory who is, in fact, an expert on energy to run the Department of Energy?????

Right now, I am positively giddy over his picks. The contrast between this administration and the previous one couldn’t be any more stark.

Higher Education: today is the first day of final exams. My first one starts in about 55 minutes. I know what will come next….

This all reminds me of an essay written by a Georgia Tech physics professor; I had it up on the door of my old office and I might put it up there again. I found it on the internet:

IT WAS A ROOKIE ERROR. AFTER 10 YEARS I SHOULD HAVE known better, but I went to my office the day after final grades were posted. There was a tentative knock on the door. “Professor Wiesenfeld? I took your Physics 2121 class? I flunked it? I was wonder if there’s anything I can do to improve my grade?” I thought, “Why are you asking me? Isn’t it too late to worry about it? Do you dislike making declarative statements”

After the student gave his tale of woe and left, the phone rang. “I got a D in your class. Is there any way you can change it to ‘Incomplete’?” Then the e-mail assault began: “I’m shy about coming in to talk to you, but I’m not shy about asking for a better grade. Anyway, it’s worth a try.” The next day I had three phone messages from students asking me to call them. I didn’t.

Time was, when you received a grade, that was it. You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof (and, yes, sometimes a tough grader). In the last few years, however, some students have developed a disgruntled-consumer approach. If they don’t like their grade, they go to the “return” counter to trade it in for something better.

What alarms me is their indifference towards grades as an indication of personal effort and performance. Many, when pressed about why they think they deserve a better grade, admit they don’t deserve one, but would like one anyway. Having been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem, they’ve learned that they can get by without hard work and real talent if they can talk the professor into giving them a break. This attitude is beyond cynicism. There’s a weird innocence to the assumption that one expects (even deserves) a better grade simply by begging for it. With that outlook, I guess I shouldn’t be as flabbergasted as I was that 12 students asked me to change their grades after final grades were posted.
[...]

I admit that I’ve never had it this bad; I usually have 2-3 per semester from all of my classes combined:

Their arguments for wheedling better grades often ignore academic performance. Perhaps they feel it’s not relevant. “If my grade isn’t raised to a D I’ll lose my scholarship.” “If you don’t give me a C, I’ll flunk out.” One sincerely overwrought student pleaded, “If I don’t pass, my life is over.” This is tough stuff to deal with. Apparently, I’m responsible for someone’s losing a scholarship, flunking out or deciding whether life has meaning. Perhaps these students see me as a commodities broker with something they want – a grade. Though intrinsically worthless, grades, if properly manipulated, can be traded for what has value: a degree, which means a job, which means money. The one thing college actually offers – a chance to learn – is considered irrelevant, even less than worthless, because of the long hours and hard work required.

In a society saturated with surface values, love of knowledge for its own sake does sound eccentric. The benefits of fame and wealth are more obvious. So is it right to blame students for reflecting the superficial values saturating our society?

And, I am sorry to say, but there are some faculty on campus whose attitude is every bit as bad. If you hold students to standards (and end up flunking a few of them), they think that it is YOUR fault; even more alarming is that some of the worst faculty in this regard are engineers.

That really reminds me of the bridge collapse incident in Minnesota:

Federal regulators said support plates that were about half as thick as they should have been were the likely cause of the August 1, 2007, bridge collapse in Minnesota that killed 13 people and injured 145.

The gusset plates — metal plates that are meant to strengthen joists — are believed to have failed on the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, causing the collapse, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

There were 111 vehicles on the portion of the bridge that collapsed, dropping them 108 feet into the 15-foot-deep river.

An NTSB report released Friday said the board’s investigation found that 24 “under-designed” gusset plates were not discovered in reviews during the bridge’s design and construction. The bridge opened in 1967.

Substantial increases in the weight of the bridge because of modifications through the years, along with increased weight on the bridge due to construction equipment and rush-hour traffic the day of the collapse, likely contributed to the faulty plates’ collapse, the board said.

The board’s investigation determined that other possible reasons for the collapse, including corrosion found on the plates and preexisting cracks in the bridge, did not play a role in the collapse.

Hmmm, did the folks that made this error get to absolve themselves of responsibility by some “extra credit” project?

That leads us back to the professor’s essay:

One colleague noted that a physics major could obtain a degree without ever answering a written exam question completely. How? By pulling in enough partial credit and extra credit. And by getting breaks on grades.
But what happens once she or he graduates and gets a job? That’s when the misfortunes of eroding academic standards multiply. We lament that schoolchildren get “kicked upstairs” until they graduate from high school despite being illiterate and mathematically inept, but we seem unconcerned with college graduates whose less blatant deficiencies are far more harmful if their accreditation exceeds their qualifications.

Most of my students are science and engineering majors. If they’re good at getting partial credit but not at getting the answer right, then the new bridge breaks or the new drug doesn’t work. One finds examples here in Atlanta. Last year a light tower in the Olympic Stadium collapsed, killing a worker. It collapsed because an engineer miscalculated how much weight it could hold. A new 12-story dormitory could develop dangerous cracks due to a foundation that’s uneven by more than six inches. The error resulted from incorrect data being fed into a computer. I drive past that dorm daily on my way to work, wondering if a foundation crushed under kilotons of weight is repairable, or if this structure will have to be demolished. Two 10,000-pound steel beams at the new natatorium collapsed in March, crashing into the student athletic complex. (Should we give partial credit since no one was hurt?) Those are real-world consequences of errors and lack of expertise.

But the lesson is lost on the grade-grousing 10 percent. [...]

And I am sorry to say that this lesson is lost on some faculty members too.