Hackety Hack
Speaking of kids, I set the older boy up with Hackety Hack. Why not -
I'm working my way through a 'grown up' Ruby tutorial at the same
time.
- What's that?
You said you wanted to learn HTML - try this.
- Ok.
Ten minutes later he's further ahead than I am and he's a) enjoying
himself* and b) he's learning. Oh and c) he may have found out that
computers do more than just toss content at you - you can create with
them.
Hacking trumps playing Neopets any day.
*How do I know? I hear clicking followed by sotto voice 'cool's and
'wow's.
# posted by Brian Dunbar : 6:47 PM
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Fight the tide
The local schools have a good reputation and, by all accounts, are not
so bad at the education biz. Why home school? Well ..
Inside the school, I felt the same cold grim feelings I had the
last time I'd come here - even empty, the place bristles, somehow.
A couple of students walked past, and I silently counted to see how
long it would be take before someone deployed the Effenheimer, or
the dreaded Mother Effenheimer. Three seconds. I'm not in favor of
having nuns patrol with nail-studded two-by-fours, but on the other
hand, I am. Or least some authority figure around which the Youts
would feel compelled to display a civil tongue. I was talking with
one of the neighbors at the bus stop; she'd been to the school last
week, and one of the stuecadents hit on her.
My child is not going there.
This is why: because a school that excels academically, where the
students are polite and well-mannered is becoming not, perhaps, a
rarity but certainly a cause to pause and say "Will you look at that".
The way it should be is becoming an exception. I can't fight the tide
but I can take my kids to high ground.
Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.
# posted by Brian Dunbar : 6:33 PM
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Constant Conflict
Constant Conflict
Ralph Peters
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry
"American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in
complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking
relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as
Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful
politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular
appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary
American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most
destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such
as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the
onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the
secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites
despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses
comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the
masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the
identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the
faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the
Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather
"Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at
operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder
even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer
competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural
empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for
more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.
American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its
"disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous
cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure
in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but
the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates
anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest
even life itself. American culture is alive.
Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.
# posted by Brian Dunbar : 5:42 PM
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Early morning ramble
Ilkka is taking Disney movies way too seriously.
After the flashy start, the underbelly of this society of cars
slowly revealed itself as the cars, apparently with no free will or
choice of their own, obsessively kept simulating many aspects of
human society that simply make no sense for sentient automobiles.
Their physically very mobile society is very rigid with no real
social mobility, since everyone is pretty much born (how?) to his
place in society and cannot really aspire to become anything else.
As the young hotshot racecar is stranded to the small town that was
bypassed by the Interstate highway and therefore no longer gets to
extract monopoly prices and quality of service from the
cross-country travellers, we kept making hypotheses and asking
questions such as "Why did the train like bubblegum so much?"
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