On Statistics #2

This is something I think is massively important to the success of well, anything. That is, as Viggo Mortensen's character, Man, from the film The Road would have us say, carrying the fire. Every person in the world is born with the fire. We have it as children, and it's easy to see. Children are blunt, they have no concept of humility, they don't understand any form of humor other than something which is blatantly silly, and they love it. This lack of comprehension of conventions invented by adults produces a beautiful quality though. It is this literally not knowing about much of anything that makes children so fascinating. They aren't burdened by our worries, our stresses, unaware of everything we do in the name of achieving a more comfortable and meaningful existence, which sometimes produces the opposite effect. Children live for the moment, they know exactly what they want, they are stubborn, and are incredibly hard to persuade. When I was a kid I was certain anything was possible with the right attitude, though even in kindergarten I knew that some of us were on the track for success, and others, well the odds weren't in their favor. But this idea that anything was possible, that literally anything was possible, it gave me great things. I was optimistic, I was happy, I was alive, even though I knew absolutely zero about how the world around me worked. I remember I thought I could literally fly, if I could have only jumped high enough. I thought that the stars were within arm's reach, just waiting to be plucked down from the sky for us to explore. I was going places. I had plans to go to the moon, to explore the galaxies around us, foreign planets, I had plans to perform amazing feats of strength and courage as a member of the FBI or a CIA agent. I wanted to go to Africa, to see the lions and the giraffes, to run with the wildebeests, to experience the world for everything it had to offer. No place was dangerous, no person a permanent stranger, there were no enemies for me. I had unbridled imagination, and I ran with it. Since then, I have experienced more of the world for what it is. With that comes some would call wisdom, I call it depression. In experiencing things for myself, predictably I found that the world isn't everything the world is cracked up to be. I was disappointed. There were people out there to hurt me, there were animals that could eat me, that wanted to eat me, there were people sworn to be my enemy based on their national identity, their religion, their other arbitrary and indefinite characteristics. This caused me to reevaluate some of my goals. When I learned about the Cold War I didn't like the Russians anymore, and they were the first ones to go to space, and a prevalent entity there. Going to the moon just got dangerous. As for Africa I learned about cannibalism, disease, civil war, as well as the fact that that continent has been the epitome of everything that is society's worst nightmare for much of recorded history. Africa shifted from "most interesting place ever" to "no-go zone" for me. As for serving this country in the FBI or the CIA (or any other government agency); they say you are what you serve, and I do not plan on becoming an over-bearing and belligerent asshole anytime soon, so I'm not serving the cause that exemplifies such things. With wisdom comes cynicism, as in it's contemporary definition. When you see a beautiful woman in a tight red dress, heels, makeup, in low light, while you're in a social setting, drinking some fine wine, that experience is dramatically different from when you wake up the next morning next to her, makeup now gone, slimming dress gone, heels now discarded across the room, when you're wondering what you just got yourself into. Seeing her at the party you think "This is great!" When you talk to her you either think "This is even better!" or "I hate her laugh, but I can deal with it, so I'll keep talking to her." Seeing her the next morning you might think "Night well spent, sir." or "Wow, she has big gums." Not knowing anything was great, much of the fun was in the pursuit of what you thought you were chasing, less of the fun is in capturing that which you thought you were chasing, and the least amount of fun is in having captured that, and then realizing it wasn't everything you thought it was. If you do chase what you think you're chasing, capture exactly that, and then realize it was even better than you had thought, that my friend is the ultimate experience, and a wonderful thing, as well as a rare thing.

I realize I'm taking the long way around to relate statistics to education, to relate education to self-actualization. We know that school is a learning experience, both academically as well as morally, emotionally, and socially. In school we focus the overwhelming majority of our attention on academics, and with that comes focus on grades, out of that comes pressure on students from administration and adults, out of that pressure the students becomes stressed, sometimes so much so they drop out, but if they don't, they generally think something along the lines of, "I have to do well in school or I won't do well in life, no matter what it is, no matter what plans I have for myself." Nowadays we want to send everyone to college, no matter their skill set or their aspirations, and we have raised the past few generations with the notion that a college degree guarantees your success and happiness in the world. With this attitude, that of the requirement of doing well in from the moment you walk into the first grade until you graduate college, we stress ratings, scores, marks, grades, certifications, awards and other useless filibustering material one uses to pad their resume. We never stress real world experience, we don't encourage our sons and daughters to travel (not until later in life, and even then it's thought of as vacation and not something essential to the development and advancement of someone, and is this day and age parents are so anal and worrysome that they don't allow their children to go anywhere other than those places overcrowded by other tourists), we never think to teach them how to give a good handshake, how to walk with such presence that fills the room with refreshing confidence, we, in essence, are teaching them to value bubbles filled in correctly over their own character. This sounds cynical, I realize. However, when I sit in such a privileged school with resources that other schools can only hope to attain, and see that students are taking the easy route, participating reluctantly or not at all in discussion, planning to go to a state college which even someone fresh out of prison with their GED could get into, cheating on homework, lying to their teachers, laughing at how badly they did on a test, and just generally driftng lazily through their education, I can't help but wonder what these people plan to do with the rest of their lives. I feel like many people nowadays have much too modest hopes. Too many people hope to have a comfortable income, a house, a wife, a normal life in American suburbia. They seem to think have a teetering glass structure that is their hopes and dreams, and seem to believe a slip-up in their studies is the toppling of this glass structure. Not enough people have true passion. True passion for something is what advances yourself as well as though around you, not only economically, socially, and politically, but metaphysically. I look around and I don't see true passion. I see a passion to do well enough as dictated by the aristocratic oligarchy of academia, which really isn't a passion at all.

Part #9

Numero nueve de Waiting for Superman

Part #8

Number #8 of Waiting for Superman...I'll have to think of other post-occupying videos to use soon :(

On Statistics #1

The next few posts are one big post split up. This is the first entry.

Wikipedia defines statistics as the study of the collection, organization, analysis and interpretation of data. We have statistics for everything, such as the percentage of the population that is unhappy with Congress, the likelihood of a lightning strike versus a shark attack, versus a plane crash, versus all of those things happening at once. I personally don't think much of stats, first because they don't really say anything, yes they may predict the likelihood of something or express trends in a system, but stats don't say "this is absolutely true or untrue", they are that way by design, which I find frustrating. If I were to hear that I have an 85% that I will die in the next ninety years, what do I think? Am I going to die? Yes, I know that based on there has yet to be an immortal anything, and if say Jesus, save it. Will it be tomorrow? That stat gives me an 85% chance that it will be within ninety years, could be tomorrow, or the next day, or the day before today when I'm 106. It doesn't express any particular likelihood within any more specific window than ninety years. So, me, being a healthy youth, know that it's unlikely for me to die tomorrow or the next day, or even in the next ten years, based on things I know I can control. Things such as my activity level, my diet, my lack of drug abuse, etc. The statistic telling me I'm probably going to die is useless, and even when I do bother to think about it, what do I think, that I'm part of the 85% who die or the 15% who don't? Individuals don't care what the odds are, they will always put themselves on the attractive side, or focus on the scary side. You have to have surgery and I'm your surgeon. I tell you there is a 1% chance you will die and a 99% chance you will live. Which do you dwell on? Your tendency will be to focus on the 1% that you will die, because you probably value your life.

You may be wondering how stats relate to education. Well, how do we measure ourselves academically? How do we quantify a student's aptitude for learning something? In essence, how are we measuring intellect? With points, that's how. Points are what makes the world go round. Not passion, not courage, not unbridled strokes of genius, not fortunate coincidences, not intellect, but points. If you have more points than the person next to you you will make more money than him, you will drive a nicer car, you will have a hotter wife, and you will all around just be a more successful person in every endeavor ever and he will never be able to attain anything greater than what his accumulated points have determined. This is an exaggeration of what our current system is doing. We determine valedictorian by GPA, which is an average calculated by grades, grades come from points, points come from homework and tests, homework and tests are sheets of paper on which information from textbooks is transferred, bubbles are filled in, etc. This measures our intelligence. What are we thinking?!

Honestly people, this is appalling. Now, I don't mean to sound ignorant to the fact that the task of providing everyone (and that means absolutely everyone, because we live in America and all of our students must be held to same standard, which we say is a high standard, (but we're kidding ourselves) so Suzy doesn't get sued by Bill because Suzy's kid is smarter than Bill kid's, even though the administration knows it, the students know it, even those students' whose self-esteem we are suing over are aware of it) is next to impossible, because I'm not. I don't mean to sound ignorant to that behemoth task, which will probably never be attained, not to the level we're hoping anyway, because I know how hard it is to teach everyone the same thing and have them all retain it with the same severity, and make the same connections with the new information and things previously learned. I experience it every weekday. School being the predictable and fitting setting for such experiences. I go to school, I get good grades, I come home and bullshit my way through homework. I take the test, ace it. Come final time, I ace it. Do I study? Nope. I've never been a studyer. What do other kids do? They actually do their homework, probably get more points than me, study every night, actually read the book, they do the final reviews and generally just worry about tests. With all that energy used one would hope that that is reflected as something good in their grades, lots of times this is so. Why then, if these "better" students, I put better in quotes because that's based on our current systems evaluation of them, truly are smarter than say a person like me, who doesn't give a rip about points, about grades, about arbitrary awards given for things like behavior and citizenship. Nobody likes a teacher's pet, (which I am not) nobody likes a brown-noser (which is what I think of these people as) and no one likes you when you break down crying and screaming in front of everyone because you got an A-, and everyone is ready to kick you in the teeth if you walk around like your sh*t doesn't stink because you never been told any different. So, with that point/rant out of the way, what does that say about me as a person and what does it say about the pointlessness of measuring our academic achievement with numbers (but not just any numbers, pointless numbers)? First off it says that I don't care about grades I care about understanding and staying relaxed and fluid with other things in my life, such as things like work. I get enough stress from those around me, I don't need to make any more of my own. Second thing it says about me is that [I think] people who do stress about grades, who stress about getting all the points, about getting into college, make the lesser valuable contributions to discussion, have the less interesting and shallow conversations, are those who possess lesser character than others, those who are less fun, less agreeable and generally more boring. It's been proven that the three main areas valedictorians and other decathlon students go into are law, medicine or the physical sciences (and maths), they make a reasonable salary, get married at 26 years of age, have 2.4 children, use 5.6 vehicles in their lifetime, and then they die. Where's the excitement? Where's the pizazz?

Part #7

Now it let's me insert it directly, come on YouTube!

Enjoy :)

Part #6

Yay for these video posts, makes my life easier :)

For some reason it won't let me insert it directly, my apologies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di0-B7nCqss

Fingernails grow at a rate of one nanometer per second

And your toenails grow at a rate just under that, because they're thicker. Fun fact for the day. Dead people's fingernails do not grow and they do not breathe. The fingernails appear to grow because the skin of their fingers is shrinking around the bone, peeling the fleshy end of the finger away from where it was when one lived. The whole dead breathing theory is a result of chemical reactions continuing to take place inside the intestinal tract without directions from the body, so basically people's stomach still digest (without moving the stomach muscles, obviously) things, there's just nowhere for the goop to go so they get bloated, and when the pressure builds and is either expelled from the anterior or posterior orifice of the body, which one might mistake for breathing.

I want to say that Sydney is doing a fabulous job of making valid points in her blog, and I'd like to personally extend my thanks for these good discussion topics.

I once met a man who told me a story about WWII. When I think of WWII, I think of Hitler's vision of the future, I think of massive Panzer tanks, I think of Nazi scientists who were miles ahead of all the other scientists at the time, except maybe Einstein. I think about how uncomfortably close the Nazis came to something they would be able to exploit, maybe not a successful offensive, but just enough to establish an oligarchy in Europe, take a decade to regroup, and then start again where they left off. This man though, he told me of one small reason the Nazis lost. Most people look at Hitler's invasion of Russia as the straw that broke the Nazi camel's back, which is accurate, don't get me wrong. One thing people generally don't think about though is Hitler's engineers who developed all of his tanks, planes and other machines of war. These German minds, with their specialist training, designed these machines with precision measured to the femtometer (one quadrillionth of a meter), and these machines required a specialist who designed it to maintain it. Particularly infamous for this inconvenience were Hitler's elite tanks, the Tiger tanks, as well of course the Panzers, the Tiger tanks just being some BAMF Panzers. Whenever one of these rolling armies of six men stopped working, they were screwed. They couldn't fix it, not properly anyway, and they would have to relay a request for a mechanic to come to their aid. One can imagine this is impractical, a few thousand (if that) mechanics expected to move around literally in the middle of the bloodiest conflict human history has seen, to repair these broken tanks whose occupants can't repair because the engineering is beyond their knowledge. In polar contrast, American tanks were designed with ease of maintenance. Each American tank was outfitted with a welder and essentially a repairman's tool kit. When the tank broke down, they got out, fixed the track, repaired this or that, tinkered with the engine, what have you, and then went on their merry way. If you weigh one method against the other you come to the conclusion that generalist training is superior, as proven in the result of WWII. However the point in Sydney's blog, about not requiring kids to take classes they simply will not use, at least not happily, is massively logical. Honestly I already understand how the government of the US works, I don't need a class for that. Don't require people to take classes they are either bound to fail or will never, ever, ever, ever use ever. I want to learn about physics, so I take physics. If somebody doesn't want to take physics but the school says they need a science, they stick them in physics and say "Pass it or you don't graduate". I can see why exposure to such things can be advantageous for people going on the college, but generally people who are college-bound don't require arm-twisting from the school to take these types of classes. If the kid wants to fail at life and suck resources as a lethargic consumer working a dead-end job let them. It's not on your conscience, and it sheds dead weight from the system for those that want to be there, for the instructors who want to teach to those types of students, for the administration, and for everyone else in the short run. In the long run though we could be seeing a huge increase in illiterate dropouts, which makes society divided and burdens the system. This thing is huge mess and I need to stop writing about it for fear that I might be forced to cry deeply to my pillow tonight before drifting into a troubled sleep.

Part #5

Again, you should have it down.

Part #4

You know what to do...

YPOSNGLSOBICYDO

There's no way you can discern what the above acronym means, so don't worry yourself.

I have nothing to talk about. I am not going to take the easy route on this post and put a video up because I need more words to meet the requirement, but I have zero things to throw hopelessly at a blog and be even remotely happy with. Maybe I'll tell a story.

Today I was driving in my car, on my way to work, listening to the radio, and a song that I had many many many many many times was playing, though I couldn't tell you the artist nor the title of the song, you know that's how music goes anymore, the song is identified by an excruciatingly bad chorus sung over the phone from a college freshman's first party instead of a title and artist name. Anyways, I'm driving to work and this song is playing, one that I've heard a bazillion times before, and at first I wasn't really listening but I then was listening. I turned it up. The song went something like: (It's "Bullet With Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins)

     Despite all my rage
     I am still just a rat in a cage
     Then someone will say
     What is lost can never be saved


You've probably heard it a bazillion times too. I never thought of the lyrics, not as more than just words anyway. I tend to think of the lyrics in their literal meaning, which is odd because when I study foreign language I look at literal meaning once, and then the rest of time I use the implicit meaning, or what it translates to. This drive was different though, because instead of literally thinking of a rat freaking out because he's being poked with a stick by a smug, fat kid outside his cage, I applied this metaphor to people. People who aren't in a position of power are rats. Generally these people are pissed off (because the fat kid is poking them, fat kid representing the people in power). They are in a cage though, intentionally placed between the two belligerents by the more powerful of the two, the fat kid, for the lesser power's (the rat's) "safety" or other vaguely defined positive word. How often have you felt you've been pacified, lied to, persuaded, oppressed, punished, or humiliated for the sake of one's reputation, ego, success, retainment of power, or other complex? I don't mean to sound like a hippy or a conspiracy theorist, because I'm not. I'm just saying that there exists a world designed to keep people in their place, doing the same things over and over and over, and I think too often people are willing to accept this and roll over, happy enough that they didn't take a risk for something they really wanted to do but managed not to become chronically depressed.

Oh Regenald..................I DISAGREE!

^Family Guy reference^

This is great time for these lectures to come along, obviously because they deal with what I'm blogging about, at least attempting to anyway. Sir Ken Robinson, you are a wonderful speaker, and you read my mind.

What am I saying? You didn't read my mind; you turned my thoughts into clear, concise, words and sentences that flow effortlessly from your wonderfully British mandibles.

Look at the image. Look at it again. Multiply the number of dots by about 1 x 10²³². Keep that in mind. And ignore the color scheme, has nothing to do with anything.

They say that the point of language arts classes to learn how to communicate your ideas effectively, which forces you to develop your thoughts more clearly, thus, hopefully you can communicate easier and more effectively. In my short experience I find that any time I say something I do not convey my true meaning. It's a pity really, maybe I'm just self-absorbed, but I think that many people don't comprehend the true depth of what I'm saying. Even right now! My mind is an orgy of related details, but if I were to scream them at you all at once, you would call me a bad communicator because it'd be sporadic and messy, without any scrap of continuity, which is crap because I don't have trouble following sporadic thought processes, maybe most people are just really bad listeners and prefer to be spoon-fed information. But, I say that thinking in a straight line is useless, maybe if you're an accountant straight-line thinking is advantageous, but for the things I think about I do it in ridiculous shapes, which is unavoidable because knowledge doesn't travel in straight lines, doesn't follow the rules of organization, and ultimately forms a massive paradox once you reach x amount of pieces of quantified information and y amount of connections between that information, with z amount of questions you're able to answering using x and y together. If you map that, it looks like what's at the top of the paragraph, because it doesn't want to cooperate and move down here ↓
Anyways, my point is that things in general don't make any sense. You may argue that things like physics always make sense, you're wrong. Physics is an approximation of how the physical world works ultimately based in subatomic physics. Chemistry is the same way, it's an approximation of things we on our planet and in our limited view of the universe have found to be true. Everything else ever, that you've ever learned in school, is approximations of things. Many scientists now believe that the universe is held together by a strange substance called dark matter, and that galaxies and clusters and superclusters move because of a force called dark energy, but they can't see, touch, smell, hear or observe directly in any way shape or form either of those things, they can only speculate as to why certain things happen the way they do, and with certain scenarios their only explanation is dark matter/energy, which isn't really an explanation at all because one can't explain the explanation. The point I'm trying is illustrate is that things in general don't make sense and our quest for knowledge would be called by some in vain, because for every bit of knowledge you obtain you come up 100 related questions, which can't be answered by the new bit of knowledge you just obtained.

With that dizzying spiel out of the way, I think I have sufficiently explained why it's difficult for me to communicate the true depth of my thoughts. Some may say that I'm self-absorbed and think myself a facetious ass. Whatever.