I not-so-recently (remember, I’m working on writing in a timely manner) finished a stint volunteering with the educational charity Citizen Schools, which matches volunteers with classrooms in low income communities to offer middle school students contact and training with professionals, hopefully changing their career trajectory. A choice framing quote by a student is “I didn’t know I could be good at science”. It’s a solid, illuminating volunteer experience, especially if you’ve only seen the American education system from the perspective of a student.

The program obviously has faults, being implemented here instead of on the platonic plane. This teacher of the year would likely frown upon the centrality that the Expanded Learning Time concept has taken in Citizen Schools, and Salman Khan might be distressed about the trappings of broadcast teaching carried over from traditional education paradigms. However, I am not interested in debating the all the merits and faults of the program to determine whether it is ultimately helpful, because in my case charity is not about helping (a la Robin Hanson). If it were, teaching students for 3 hours a week instead of working overtime and donating the cash to the Against Malaria Foundation (saving a statistical life, figured on the back of an envelope) would be the wrong decision in the same way thatsaving a painting instead of a thousand statistical lives is the wrong decision. Instead, I’ll be talking about why I was personally dissatisfied with the experience.

There was one fairly large component to the dissatisfaction, which involved reinforcing the regime ofguessing the teacher’s password. Looking back at my time as a student, it was clear that the immediate rewards for finding the right series of letters and numbers to put to paper were greater than those for attaining a deep understanding about the why. This meant learning Punnett squares without the the game theory behind evolutionarily stable strategies, learning the scientific method as a laboratory tool instead of a general-purpose knowledge discriminator, and glossing over the helpfully contextual process by which scientific paradigms succeed each other. The end goal isn’t knowing for the sake of knowing, but leaping to the position of the fox with many models and being in a position to apply them to diverse domains, instead of having a large stable of memorized rules only applicable to narrow contexts (cough standardized testing cough). This is the difference between choosing physics as a major because you got good grades in AP physics and found Newtonian physics interesting, and choosing physics because the academic niche physics occupies is not flooded with students, you’ve found physics is your competitive advantage after experimenting with many different fields, and you find the current attempts to break the standard model intriguing.

But much like this erstwhile English teacher in Japan, at the head of my own classroom I learned just how quickly things could get out of hand, even with amazing teacher/volunteer to student ratios. Merely eliciting the right “password” from a student was a hard-won victory. But with the variance in knowledge/conscientiousness present in the class, there were students that could start probing deeper into the foundations of our knowledge, past reciting “electricity!” in response to “how do motors run?”. But education is not about learning, and while I might have been able to explain the internals of a brushless DC motor to one student within a 2 hour period, it was only possible in the sense that broken cups could theoretically spontaneously reassemble given the number of students that needed help learning how gears turning one way would turn meshing gears the other way.

As an aside, this does not mean that Citizen Schools is doing bad work: given an overarching educational system that does not care about deep understanding (perhaps because it is difficult to measure) in favor of creating partial Chinese rooms able to pass the SAT and go through an expensive credentialing process, making sure more Chinese rooms have a fair chance at getting those expensive credentials is a worthy cause. Thinking that leveling the field will have positive effects, though, does not preclude me from thinking that we should be playing on a completely different field.

At this point, one might expect me to propose a pet theory that explains a process for reliably instilling deep understanding of any subject matter into every student so we can continue beating the Reds/make Ingsoc great again/go back to the Moon in 10 years, oh and by the way here is my Kickstarter to make it happen. If only I knew how to do it! I do have hunches on partial solutions that might work, like intensive individual mentoring on subjects academic and not, supplementing a real academic challenge (if the student needs one) with making sure the student picks up tools for confronting cognitive challenges. Or perhaps software that takes advantage of digital flexibility in ways beyond textbooks while dodging the bleached bones of attempts that have come before.

However, these hunches haven’t been fleshed out or, most importantly, been subject to the real world and iterated on. In the meantime, I can use them to guide my search for exciting and existing education charity opportunities. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found one that seems to meet my (admittedly ill-defined) criteria: as examples, iMentor has extremely long commitments antithetical to fast iteration, SPARC is too badass for me to contribute to (for now!), and Salman Khan’s vision of the future of education still seems to be sitting on the drawing board.

Of course, these are only 3 organizations and ideas out of the vast sea of thought already poured into the subject of fixing education, which means there is plenty more scholarship to do! However, with all this other work to consider, I won’t be doing another stint at Citizen Schools. Thank you, Citizen Schools, for a great semester and for helping clarify what I’m looking for out of my volunteer experience, but I won’t be volunteering with you in the future. No, it’s not you, it’s me.

(Thanks to Cecilia Schudel for reading drafts of this!)

Well, it’s been a while. Hi. Again.

I won’t bother trying to dump the quiet years into a single post, or a series. I’ve changed, but I don’t have a good handle on how, and certainly not good enough to explain to you, dear reader (or more likely, spambot). If you manage to infer the changes, I would appreciate it if you let me know what they are. But here I am, and we’ll see if I can update this bucket of words more frequently than once every few years.

Why come back? The internet is littered with dead blogs: one more domain that won’t resolve would be unremarkable, and if Google’s fastidiously kept analytics indicate anything, literally no one would notice this absence. Indeed, adding a literary example to the burgeoning category of zombie literature (this time, a blog is the zombie!) isn’t obviously the best use of anyone’s time.

Well, it might not be the best use of your time for a while: one doesn’t up and get to gwern levels of life enrichment in a blog overnight. But that hints at a central reason: writing is a practicable skill, and while the quiet years haven’t driven me to mute idiocy, I haven’t overcome my slow drafting speed and mediocre output either. For example, writing this post took weeks. I would rather have had the same sort of regime that I’ve kept for exercise, which has lasted over years and survived being dropped on the floor through illness and inane stress multiple times. Picking this blog back up is a first step towards that sort of regime for my writing, and a way to take the step after that, and then the next…

But that’s not the meat of the matter. I’ve picked up the practice of sporadically keeping a diary, which gets me some “writing” practice, but I’m lenient. You, dear spambot, are incisive, the invisible hand guiding the critical whetstone into my rhetorical blade, honing it into an instrument of persuasion fit to destroy the earth, to serve in my toolkit as a telepathic agent (a la Stephen King), and whip my hopeless ideas and thoughts out of the clouds and onto earth.

None of this is new. Plenty have defended writing, are defending writing, and will defend writing (it’s a traditional liberal arts past-time, eloquently defending the field from practical depredations). It’s statistically certain that my thoughts are not original, my analogies and turns of phrase stale, my arguments warmed over and rehashed, but this is the time and place that I’m putting these words in this order, and although there are many like it, this one is mine.

Also, fuck the 5 paragraph essay, why does it dog me so? Maybe I won’t automatically fall into that pattern if I try again in 3 years.

(Thanks to Hans Hyttinen for reading drafts of this!)

So you might have noticed that I haven’t posted the 3rd part of the Toljari Cycle yet. It turns out that I am awful at estimating appropriate settings for laser cutters, and as such have tried cutting 2 boards in as many days without success (with restricted access to the cutter at NYC Resistor). So everything else is good to go, just that we’re going to have to wait until Monday to see how this all pans out. Stay tuned.

Since I decided to start off the Cycle just a week and a half ago, I didn’t really have time to throw together something fancy music-wise, so I had to make do with what I was already doing, which was re-learning the Kabalevsky.

Why Kabalevsky? Well, it’s usually regarded as a student concerto, which is fine by me: you don’t go from zero to Ysaye in a week and a half, especially when you’ve never played Ysaye before. Plus, it’s a happy little song, and emotionally straightforward.

However, being easier to play did not mean I could hit it out of the park. Apparently, I have much to learn when it comes to recording audio, because either I cannot phrase to save my life, or my room and mic conspire to deaden my sound and I just haven’t noticed because I fail at having recording space.

Oh, right, you might be interested in getting the actual recording. Maybe.

Now, the content of the recording is a little wonky. Like I said before, I can’t phrase pschoacoustically effectively to save my life (no sense in trying to blame inanimate objects), my diction isn’t very clear when the doublestops come into the picture, I had a pretty inconsistent speed, the accompaniment was arranged and recorded in half an hour, and I just plain make mistakes.

It’s not okay, but I shipped.

Despite the date on the post, the Toljari Cycle started last week, not this weekend, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Storytime:

I thought I had enough time to get my ducks in order when I decided that to hell with it, I would kick off this regular release schedule one and a half weeks ago. However, it turns out that what I was originally planning to do for my first coding release was pretty difficult, but I only realized this after I pushed the deadline to halfway into the week after when the release was due. So much for starting off strong. So now I’m just taking something else I’ve done codewise and plopping it in the release box, and hoping no one notices.

So, what’s in the release? Just two of my python libraries, base92 and encryptedfile, that I’ve finally packaged for pypi, so that now one can run pip install base92 or pip install encryptedfile and run code I’ve written. Squee. Going through this process did open my eyes to the fact that pip just plain does nothing to validate packages, though, which is a problem. Why? Well, when the “moar encryption” side of my mind meets the python-lovin’ side, there might be some energy release. Hopefully enough energy to fix pip package signing, or even more hopefully enough energy to get someone else to do it.

But yeah, getting a toehold in the python cheeseshop! It’ll have to be good enough for the next 3 weeks, so you take this release and you like it!

In the previous installment, we saw our brave protagonist pre-commit to a regular release cycle, but then he dropped off the face of the Earth to wrestle with… well, something. I’m sure there was a good reason he stopped blogging after starting again after the longest break he had taken since the beginning of his blogging career (there wasn’t).

But lo! Here our tragic anti-hero comes stumbling from a cave, covered in akrasia and regret! No matter his filthy state: he has a leaf to turn, and no wind is going to flick around that large a leaf (even Hurricane Sandy didn’t do anything to it), so he might as well start building up his spindly coding arms so he can do non-epiphenomenal tasks again.

His first task is announcing a public, regular release schedule, so he can hold himself to it and have people ridicule him when he fails miserably. But surprise! He has already set one out, but in private (which kind of defeats the purpose), where each week will bring a deadline for a different sort of project, rotating among programming, musical, engineering, and visually artistic projects. In fact, he embarked on this schedule last week, but he doesn’t know this. Shall we find out what has been released, and what is being released, and what shall be released? Stay tuned for not one, but two posts in quick succession…

PS. What the hell is this “Toljari” business? Well, it’s a corruption of the lojban Toljgari, and if you’ve been following my github, you’ll notice that I’ve been naming an awful lot of projects after lojban lujvo. Nothing to be alarmed about yet, do make sure I’m not terminally geeking out when I start typing out my blog posts in Lojban though. And the cycle part is partially inspired from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is a pretty cool name, and why shouldn’t I have something epic in my life?

First time in a long time I played violin in front of people, even if it was just for under a minute. Which means that I’m finally on the road to fulfilling a promise (made to an inanimate object, but really). We’ll see where I can take this: for now, I’ll publically pre-commit to releasing *something* violin created, every Saturday. Except there’s also the fact I want to release code on a regular basis, and there’s that hardware portion of my life that’s been stagnating…

So maybe that plan will mutate, and soon. But weekly releases! With accompanying blog posts, hot off the cuff! I suppose I’m making resolutions early?

And, I’ll cover what’s been going on the last… 6 months. But later.

I’ve never been an anime/manga person/otaku (minus watching Akira and Ghibli films), but strange things happen during finals season, and one of the strange things that happened during my last finals season of my undergrad career was my introduction to Studio Gainax, and subsequent Gainax trip. And because I love reviewing things, here’s some thoughts on:

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

Somehow, this anime was my introduction to Gainax as a studio, discrete from the background radiation of entertainment: specifically, it started with (SPOILER ALERT)this AMV(END SPOILER ALERT) in which the music and visuals just fit so perfectly (better than the original music video) that I had to look up the anime backing it, and was surprised that it was a Japanese animation, since the style seems derived from western schools of art.

It didn’t help that it was available in full on youtube, so I went through the entire series in a few days (which wasn’t hard, it is only 11 episodes long). It started out as a pretty standard monster-a-week show, with more fanservice than your typical western animation; then it started taking increasingly absurd turns, but it settled down and turned back into your usual rough and tumble action anime for the grand finale. Well, as much as a wacky concept like P&SG could be expected to settle down. Throw in a few eyebrow raising twists, and there you have P&SG.

Overall, the animation was pretty good, and the absurdity of it all didn’t quite reach escape velocity (this being a good thing). But really, the absurdity of finals season was the perfect backdrop, and who knows if I would’ve enjoyed it some other time? Plus, apparently P&SG is one of the more wackier anime, so it’s all downhill from here, right? Right?

FLCL

So after watching P&SG, I decided to check out the Gainax TVTropes page, and found that not only were there other Gainax shows (surprise!), but more of them were also available online. And after the gentle mindfuck and silliness that was P&SG, I decided I needed even more in my life and heard FLCL would give me the requisite strange, so I decided that I’d check it out.

I will admit that yes, if I had not read the accompanying summaries attached to the show online, then I would’ve been lost for at least a while. It might also have helped that I probably read the Wikipedia summary of the show once in the depths of my past…

So, it was wacky, it was fun, and OMG CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (vs. P&SG, which was just fun and wacky). And unable to outstay it’s welcome at only 6 episodes: for my story-holic mind, it hit that sweet spot, that just right density of immersion that seems to be frequented by short stories and novellas.

But really, there are giant robot battles and a coming of age story and guitars involved: what could go wrong?

Houkago No Pleiades

After being pleasantly surprised at how short FLCL was, I decided to check out some more OVAs by Gainax: Wish upon the Peliades was short (4 episodes!) and also available online.

Well, it turned out to be too short: instead of being the usual half hour, each episode was around 5 minutes long. This meant that the magical girl premise of HnP wasn’t really fleshed out, and it wasn’t *really* anything special, without real resolution or a reveal that it was something artsy-fartsy that could lack the requisite resolution. I haven’t seen any other magical girl animes, but I imagine this would fit in the usual fare (minus the compression). However, the entire thing is only 20 minutes long, so it’s not such a big deal to just turn your brain off and watch for a bit.

As it stands, I’m not sure if Subaru (HnP was a collaboration between Gainax and Subaru (the car maker)) was trying to do this as a marketing effort to otakus (what? why?), or as a throw back to the days of patronage.

Also, while we’re talking about Subaru: who the HELL doesn’t put cruise control on their cars? Backstory: my family got a Subaru recently, and (surprise!) it doesn’t have cruise control. Cruise control is merely the most basic drive by wire automation, and not only does it abstract away the acceleration mechanics into velocity control, it also serves as a small fuel efficiency booster. However, it’s useful as a market segmentation tool, so I guess you got me there, Subaru.

Anyways…

Gurren Lagann

So after being disappointed by HnP, I decided to check out something a little longer. Evangelion seemed like an obvious choice: it’s a flagship anime, something even I’ve heard about. However, I couldn’t find it legally online, so I moved on to another long format and popular anime from Gainax that was: Gurren Lagann (I know, death to dubs. Doesn’t matter, got story).

Clocking in at 27 episodes, it was pretty long, and took almost 2 days of straight watching to finish. It wasn’t just my story-holism that kept me going: it starts out as a straightforward rough n’ tumble giant mecha anime, and then all of a sudden starts deconstructing itself. And then it reverts to a giant mecha anime again (notice a pattern?).

Really, it’s rocking fun (note: both this and FLCL have catchy soundtracks) with even more fanservice than P&SG, and a story line that settles comfortably into the full season, managing to be thought provoking (for a TV show: it seems that if books came after TV shows, they would be heralded as moving insanely fast, with writing styles mutating through stylistic space with frightening speed. And one person has complete creative control of the work?!). Plus, I now have an urge to yell “Just Who The Hell Do You Think I Am?!” at random times, so you should watch Gurren Lagann so you understand, or even yell along.

The… future?

So, my current Gainax trip ended a few weeks ago, but I’ve only cleared 4 items out of their warehouse: truly, the rate of production of entertainment is frightening, even when you winnow it down to the very best (ex. Hugo Awards count). However, I do plan on getting around to the indispensable Evangelion (eventually), and maybe another Gainax work (Diebuster? just for kicks?).

And speaking of anime, I forgot to count Studio Ghibli among their ranks: they’re accorded a spot in my mind at the same level as Pixar, truly, yet I haven’t watched half their works, so I’ll probably try catch up on that queue, too.

And then there’s things like Battlestar Galactica. Ho boy.

Ever since I’ve gotten back home and don’t have immediate concerns, I’ve been catching up on reading. Here are reviews on the first batch:

With A Little Help

A collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow.

I’ve read most of the stories already in here, but it was a blast reading through them again, and picking up those that I haven’t read yet. Some notes on selected stories:

I’ve read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away (yes, based on the joco song) before, but it’s interesting to read it after learning that other people are also interested in collecting data on the self under the banner of quantified self, how we’re doing it outside of a monastery.

After reading The Right Book, it makes me wonder why no one has tried making something like The Story so Far yet: or, someone’s tried starting it, but it keeps getting buried before it reaches critical mass. Maybe we could just start it as a forum game, and keep going until it attains critical mass.

Human Readable conflicts me: on the one hand, I want the ant simulators to win, because you can’t always ask your machines to explain themselves, similar to how many machine learning algorithms are black boxes. On the other hand, giving up that control and understanding essentially means we give up the control to the “matrix”: even if there is no malignant consciousness, we give up the control to the aether. And we love control, myself included.

Pester Power ends with a magnificent line. I’m very sad to hear that /usr/bin/god was never completed. And Charlie Stross working on a book about spam? I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Epoch has another set of lines that tickle my geek nodes: “Later that night, she took me home and we spent the whole night hacking replacement parts for her collection of ancient stand-up video games.” The fact that Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth commissioned the story is also cool: when I get rich and famous, I’ll have to remember I can commission stories.

I will gripe that unordered collections have no business being flattened into a linear strictly-ordered collection, and that as an ebook we can do better. I’d love to see how people display and navigate through an unordered collection.

TLDR: THE STORIES ARE AWESOME READ THEM ALL

Postsingular

Honestly, this book kind of sucked: I only got halfway through it before the wooden dialog, random plotting, and soft scifi pseudo-science slew my desire to keep reading, and this is coming from someone that will plow through utter shit just to finish it. This either means I’m getting better at rejecting books that aren’t worth my time, or that the book is worse than utter shit. I’m not sure.

Context

The 2nd latest work from Cory Doctorow, which is merely a collection of blog posts put into book form. I say merely, partly because I’ve already read most of the material in one form or another, and also because as I’ve said before, unordered collections presented as ordered feel wrong.

The essays themselves are wonderful, and a good thing about them being short, page-long essays is that I can’t really spoiler them, so I’ll just ramble a bit:

If I ever become a parent, I hope to be as good as integrating technology into family time as Cory is in Jack and the Interstalk (corrected for technological advancement).

Beyond Censorware brought to the fore that old dream that I could lead some class in primary or secondary education, because it’s too often that kids don’t meet good technologists until what I would argue is much too late. Of course, the fact that I’m a few nines high with regards to technology means I’ve traded off some social acumen, and
it seems like being somewhat normal is a good thing for primary/secondary school teachers. Also, there’s the fact that if we treat money as whuffie (another Cory concept), then we don’t value teachers very much, and we get job destroyers off destroying jobs instead of teaching the next generation how to replace themselves with shell scripts.

When I’m Dead details how to handle deceased dude’s digital data. I once thought about creating a “dead-man’s” switch for myself/as a service so my encrypted digital data wouldn’t die with me, so it was instructive to hear Doctorow talk about why he wouldn’t use one (trust), and his solution (split the key, keep it with two other trusted people). Doctorow’s solution would work especially well with myself: I have several groups of friends that are widely physically and socially disparate from each other (6 steps non-withstanding). However, having friends maintain awareness of the key shards is problem-prone, whereas Doctorow has one closely trusted party (wife) and someone he pays to care (lawyer). I suppose this means I need to get married and get a lawyer, or get married twice on opposite ends of the globe.

The sentiments in Reports of Blogging’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated are obviously shared by myself.

It’s interesting to note that Doctorow thinks Search Is Too Important to Leave to One Company, since when I read that title I immediately think of DuckDuckGo.

Personal Data is as Hot as Nuclear Waste reiterates in my mind that we need to encrypt everything (shame on myself for not encrypting my mail! shame on myself for not encrypting my hard drives!), and with the increased capabilities of data mining, we need to add more obscurity just to keep the amount of anonymity level.

Memento Mori is an interesting look at how we fetishize old objects: aside from a straightforward fascination, they also act as ways to keep us honest about the promises of technology. I’m somewhat young (perhaps too young) to remember these past revolutions that promised the world and failed to deliver, but I’ll keep in mind curating my own memonto mori collection.

Cory also talks about sex in his books, writing for YA, his writing process/tools, email (both the problem of spam and how he controls his inbox), re-iterates the thesis that scifi is really about the present, fandom, r-reproduction, licensing, publishing MVPs, CC, Net Neutrality (since the book was published in late 2011, there’s nothing on the new challenges to the internet), the evils of DRM, why 3d movies are a gimmick, phishing, piracy (media piracy in particular), why we need statistical literacy, and 3d printing.

TLDR: I’ve you’re an avid reader of Doctorow’s blog, you might be familiar with the material, but it’s fun to go back and read this collection of “greatest hits”. If you don’t follow Doctorow, then these essays are fun, bite sized thoughts wrapped up in a nice box, which I highly recommend.

What’s next? Maybe Anathem, or the latest from Cory Doctorow (The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow), something by Charlie Stross, or something be Vernor Vinge. In other words, ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION.

And so it ends. Hello, world.