Today there is an article in the New York Times about cutbacks at NPR, including one of their best programs, Day To Day. Not a good move move, NPR.

One of the speakers at OSCon this year — I forget which one — made a point that ran something like this, heavily paraphrased:

Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn’t about having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly, the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite — those that could afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of it.

What a powerful statement, and it rings true to me. I remember in high school, when people from the local liberal arts college would come and talk. They’d talk about the value throughout a lifetime of knowledge in a broad range of disciplines: English, history, political science, religion, science, and the arts. They’d talk about how their graduates went on to lead distinguished lives, how this broad core of knowledge serves a person well through life. I guess I didn’t believe them, because due to their lack of a computer science major, I went elsewhere.

That local school may not have been the best choice for me for other reasons, but as I look back on it, I think they had a much stronger message than I realized back then. Here I am, just two math classes, one computer science class, and one biology class away from a degree. Yet I have had not one class covering the history of east Asia, not one class on different world cultures or religions, and only a very basic understanding of one foreign language (German).

This hits me in the face almost every day. Yesterday I was wondering about the history of slavery and racism in Europe. Today I’m curious about China’s history as an economic powerhouse. Last week I was curious about Roman law and daily life.

The fact is, everything from philosophy to calculus is screamingly relevant to daily, modern life. We hear talk of “an American revolution” in Washington, of a shift of power in the Senate. It seems we forget that the notion of a Senate is considerably older than the United States is — and that we have such a thing because our founders were aware of this. Macroeconomic theory is thrust in our faces on an almost daily basis these days, yet I’ve never had a class on economics at all.

We might feel fear of terrorist attacks, or see our fellow citizens lash out at “the Arabs.” Our own short memories fail to remind us of the light in which we are seen, fail to put the really quite minor terrorist threat in context of what London or Dresden endured in World War II. We demand our government to make us safer, and our government responds by making us less safe but making us *feel* safer at airports.

In my own field, I see some universities buckling to pressure from Business to turn out large numbers of mediocre programmers that know the Java or .NET standard library well, but have no sense of the theory behind computer science, and would be utterly lost if asked to, say, write a recursive QuickSort. I find myself almost completely baffled that some companies that want to hire the world’s best programmers are only looking for people that are already fluent in $LANGUAGE — not ones that are good programmers, and so well-versed in computer science that they can easily pick up any language.

I think there is a lot to the argument that a good, broad, classical education can serve a person well in any career. I wish I had realized that a little earlier.

What an interesting conversation with the vice presidential candidates here. Couric asks Biden and Palin the exact same questions. Biden gives well-thought-out answers to everything. And Palin? I’m not so sure.

Here are some words and phrases we’re hearing a lot lately. Along with a helpful translation guide.

shop baa: Shop Vac
shop baa hoesh: Shop Vac hose. We also get “see shop baa”, “shop baa on”, etc.
chain: train
chain veeoh: train video
tune vewwow: turn yellow (referring to a traffic light)
Hi Daddy!
Hi Mommy!
uhoh [item]: something bad happened to the item
wahdoh: water
spidoh: spider
spidoh buh: spider bug
cat Nash: the cat named Nash
teesh: taste (when he wants a bite of cake or something)
BIH teesh: BIG taste
tah corn: tall corn
baby
puppy
pa: grandpa
mama: grandma
mamapa: grandma and grandpa
ah housh: our house
fop: flop (onto a pillow)
ahh done: all done
fan
bubba: butterfly (he has a soft one he sleeps with). Or strawberry.
hoe: hold

Yesterday on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, one of the commentators made this point: (paraphrased)

The “bad debt” that all the banks are carrying, and that everyone talks about as the cause for this problem, is mortgage-backed securities. It’s bad because there are so many foreclosures, meaning that people aren’t paying back their loans. And that’s a problem because the banks turn out to have a much less solid investment than they thought.

Instead of spending $100 billion or more bailing out bank after bank, the government ought to spend that money to stabilize the real estate sector. Invest it in programs to help people stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure. This will help both the individuals, and simultaneously fix the problems with the banks, because the mortgage-backed securities will regain their value.

Sounds way too sensible to do, doesn’t it?

After all, we wouldn’t want to encourage risky behavior on the part of the common folk that don’t know better. No, we only want to encourage that with our large multi-national financial institutions that can wreck the entire economy.

An Eee 901 showed up here recently, and I’ve had a (little) time to play with it.

What an awesome little machine that thing is. The keyboard is better than I expected, and so is the screen.

I got annoyed at the lack of things like Emacs on the default Xandros install, so decided to zap it and install Debian. But first, I wanted to take a backup of it.

I was thinking to myself that this is a Linux environment, but I can’t just boot up a Linux rescue thingy to get stuff off it because it’s not a regular PC.

Oh wait. It IS a regular PC. It is so small that I wasn’t even thinking about it in the right terms. So a little dd, gzip, and nc later I have my backup image.

Debian went on smoothly — booted from a 16MB image on a USB drive. X, suspend/resume, etc. all worked out of the box. Compiled the wifi driver and it works.

This is, I think, the perfect laptop size. Also the price is good, it’s solid… what’s not to love?

Someone on the Haskell Cafe mailing list pointed out the Haskell humor page on the wiki. Here are a few snippets:

<shapr> In my experience, Flash is mostly used as the hi-tek replacement for <BLINK>

”sigfpe”: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely to do something useful, even if you’ve no idea what that useful thing is.

Several stories on NPR today have featured interviews with Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan. Many of them were mad about the situation, but mad at their state democratic parties. Many of them did not vote because they were told their vote would not count, so now they are upset at these efforts to count the vote from these states.

Meanwhile, there is a very interesting post about how Hillary may want these delegates to remain unavailable to her, as a way to continue pressing her case all the way to the convention. Sigh.