Farewell to March, 2009 (part I)

Workout notes I’ll be disciplined and only do yoga and a medium run/walk, though I am in the mood to do more.

From across the internet:

Senator Jim Webb: he is a conservative Democrat and is to the right of me on many issues. But I fully support his proposed project to study crime and punishment:

Support for the proposal has come in from the right, too. The Lynchburg News and Advance a conservative paper that publishes in the hometown of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, weighed in favorably.

“America’s prisons — both federal and state — are overflowing with prisoners. The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population; we have about 25 percent of the world’s known prison population, Webb estimates,” offered the editorial board. “Something, somewhere is seriously wrong.”

Libertarian support for reform of the criminal justice system is a given, but some traditional conservatives back the plan, too, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is the ranking Republican on the subcommittee that will weigh in on the legislation, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), who is ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. [...]

Webb couches the effort in fairly straightforward terms. “Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have five percent of the world’s population; we have 25 percent of the world’s known prison population,” Webb said on the Senate floor when introducing the bill.

“There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.”

Over the weekend, the family-friendly Parade magazine featured a cover story by Webb titled “Why We Must Fix Our Prisons.”

Having moved mountains to pass an historic expansion of the GI Bill in his first two years last session, Webb has an unusual amount of credibility for a senator of such short tenure. “I believe we established a legislative prototype with the GI Bill which brought people from across the aisle together to build broad support for the bill,” says Webb. “I plan to continue to apply the GI Bill prototype as we move forward in this newest legislative endeavor.”

By the way, I backed the extension of the GI bill and would love to see a civilian counterpart (something in return for community service)

Education I teach mathematics and this year have some interesting courses and some good students. But I’ve never encountered this situation during my career:

The self-inflated, “never say I’m less than amazing,” narcissism of the contemporary undergrad extends from their papers to their poon. I’ve seen a crop of little girls in my husband’s office flashing him their panties, begging for a grade, sweating their plagiarism charges. [...]

I love my husband, I trust my husband, but I hold my breath during his office hours, terrified to knock or push open the door the full way, fearing that I’ll find some grade-grubbing 18 year old whose IQ qualifies her only to be the bouncer at a strip joint, doing… something.

Now I’ve had my yoga teacher flash her panties at me, but that was because her too-loose yoga pants fell down during an upward stretch. Besides, she was wearing conservative granny underpants anyway.

I am glad that I teach mathematics. When I grade an exam, I don’t have to put up with: “you should score my answer as being correct because my culture/religion teaches me that” . Others have it harder. A student wrote about complaining about getting a low grade on a paper. The professor’s crime: demanding that the student present evidence to back up his claims:

Oh, really? That sounds reasonable to me. What does Mr Friend want?

I think we have been accustomed to perceive intelligence as a product of one’s ability to present concrete evidence, especially scientifically. Not to say this is completely wrong or ineffective, but I think we must consider the possibility of metaphysical realities. And maybe, just maybe, we live in world that can’t always be explained rationally.

I see. He wants to write an irrational paper that lacks empirical evidence and is built on intangible claims, and he wants to get an A for it.

More academia

Though I am not working on anything as intense as the stuff used to develop the atomic bomb, I sometimes like to divert myself with unpublishable mini-projects just to sharpen my mind while keeping it from wasting away:

One excellent way to start honing such skills is with a few so-called Fermi problems, named for Enrico Fermi, the physicist who delighted in tossing out the little mental teasers to his colleagues whenever they needed a break from building the atomic bomb.

Here is how it works. You take a monster of a ponder like, What is the total volume of human blood in the world? or, If you put all the miles that Americans drive every year end to end, how far into space could you travel? and you try to estimate what the answer might be. You resist your impulse to run away or imprecate. Instead, you look for a wedge into the problem, and then you calmly, systematically, break it down into edible bits. Importantly, you are not looking for an exact figure but rather a ballpark approximation, something that would be within an order of magnitude, or a factor of 10, of the correct answer. If you got the answer 900, for example, and the real answer is 200, you’re good; if you got 9,000, or 20, you go back and try to find where you went astray.

“It’s really just critical thinking, breaking down seemingly complicated problems into simpler problems,” said John A. Adam, a professor of mathematics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “Once you get over the hurdle and realize that, good grief, any question can be answered to this level of precision, to the nearest power of 10, it’s quite exciting, and you start looking for things to apply it to.”

Science and Religion Yes, religion and science do conflict; sometimes the result is a disaster:

Before you raise the “separate magisteria” and “different-ways-of-knowing-about-the-world” arguments for the inherent compatibility of faith and science, have a gander at this article from the Telegraph. The Taliban are preventing children in Pakistan from getting polio vaccine. If this isn’t a direct confrontation between science and faith, I don’t know what is. o.k., Drs. Polkinghorne and Haught, deal with this. Polio vaccine is proven to work: it’s one of the most effective vaccines around. Scientific research has shown this. The faithful reject it on religious grounds. Children will die or become paralyzed in the name of Islam.

Miliants in northern Pakistan have triggered a medical emergency by refusing to allow health officials to conduct a polio vaccination campaign.

Taliban militants in the former tourist destination of Swat Valley have obstructed officials from vaccinating over 300,000 children.

Militants have seized control of most of Swat and its capital, Mingora, and have extended their rule since striking a peace deal with the government and army earlier this year.

Don’t think for a second that our fundies wouldn’t be just as bad, if we weren’t there to enforce some moderation.