This is it. I'm officially in grad school hell.

Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last blog post.

So -- ha ha -- did I think that semesters like this one and this one were tough? Bugger that, this one takes the cake. The first draft of my 50-ish page Master's Report is supposed to be done in early October, so I've been focused on that for the week since my last class. Meanwhile, in my next class weekend I have one homework and two midterm exams.

I spend an entire weekend working non-stop on my thesis, then I got to enjoy going back to work fresh on Monday. My boss gave me Friday afternoon off, which was a nice gesture, except of course for the fact that I used it to do schoolwork.

I spent most of Saturday at a coffee shop on campus. Actually driving to campus was a stupid plan, because apparently there was this little football game going on that I wasn't thinking about. I was originally planning to go to the library and renew my TexShare card, but parking turned out to be impossible. So, coffee shop. Nice thing about UT is that it's so wired you can actually get wireless internet from everywhere, included some parking lots.

My work's really taking shape now. I've filled out the 14-page template for my report, which feels like I've accomplished some real work even though only two pages of actual double spaced text are written.

I meant to start working on the homework tonight; however, I've been so brain-fried that I mostly just ran the data collection program, stared at the news for a while, and did a whole lot of nothin' else. Blogging is just another form of procrastination, which I think I will continue to do until the Daily Show starts, at which point I will concede defeat for the evening. There's always tomorrow.

I was going to write more about my thesis in this post, but I'd rather keep this one strictly a post wherein I bitch about the trials of being a grad student, and cleanly separate the stuff about what kind of work I'm doing into a separate post. I think blogging will help me overcome writer's block in adding more detail to the report, so humor me, dear readers. See you in the next post.

I sure did fall for that one!

This weekend I got email from a "Paulraj JY" in India. It said:

Subject: Greetings from a New Friend fm India

Dear Sir and Mr.Russell,

Greetings from India. It was a surprise for me to read your blog and it is full of surprises. Though you addressed yourself as an athiest, you are full of human virtues and you are a nice person to befriend.
Though I'm a Christian Missionary, I'm interested in your views, thoughts and way of life.
When you consider yourself to be an athiest it may not be meaningful for me to ask you to pray for our service among children those who are left uncared. These Children are very special to us and we enjoy working with them. You, as I estimate, full of good values for human values and relationship, would be happy to hear more about our work among such children. We would be very happy to win your heart and have you as one of our wellwishers of our program.
You have a beautiful family. Please convey our greetings to them. Bye for now....
With special love and regards
Paulraj JY

Now, it's actually not all that uncommon that I get email from other countries. I am a regular contributor to two podcasts that have some small measure of notoriety, and I get people I never heard of commenting on my blog from time to time.

Nevertheless, there WAS that small voice that said to me, "Hey, this sounds a little bit like the stilted language in some of those Nigerian scam emails." But then I thought, "Nah, those guys mostly shotgun form emails when they're looking for new suckers. This guy was very specific about my blog and my atheism. Be a good atheist emissary and answer him."

So I wrote:

Dear Paul,

Part of the reason why I openly identify myself as an atheist is because theists rarely encounter people who are willing to say that they don't believe in God, and so they may have a lot of misperceptions. While I don't believe that atheists are better people than Christians, I do think that we are just as likely to care about humanity and have compassion.

In any case, thank you for your friendly email and have a good day.

Then he wrote:

Dear Friend Russell,

Thanks for your prompt response, which makes me happy. I just appreciate your openness. Please receive our special love and we really feel proud about your heart full of compassion for mankind....

Since you have a great concern for the betterment of mankind, I think it may not be improper to let you know that we are working with AIDS orphans and we've a formal inagural function our Grace Foster Home on the fifteenth of this month. Please remember us on this special day....

Kindly find an attached picture of our special children with we love to fellowship with and care for their better future.... I'm sure that you will appreciate our work... Bye for now...

lovingly yours friend from India

Paulraj JY

Well, that's a shame. So finally I wrote:

Dear Paul,

I have to give you credit for making the extra effort to personalize your scam email. However, since I now believe that you are a Nigerian con man attempting to perpetrate a 419 fraud, I would like to invite you to kindly go to hell. Of course, I don't believe in hell. But since you are in Nigeria, I reckon that's close enough.

Sincerely,
Russell Glasser

Presidential candidate or Buffy villain?

Yeah, we already know I'm a sucker for those side-by-side similarity pictures. The similarity in these pictures at AmericaBlog really is impressive.

If you're not a Buffy fan, you can look here to see who the creepy guys are.

Paradox of omniscience and free will

Lots of theological debates center around the religious idea of free will. Some varieties of theists, i.e. Calvinists, don't believe in free will at all. Some atheists (like my friend Denis Loubet) don't believe in free will either, believing that the notion is incompatible with a completely materialistic universe.

Those are all interesting topics, but one issue I find equally interesting is whether "God," as Christians define him, can have free will. I think I'm borrowing this line of reasoning from an old Raymond Smullyan book, although I can't remember exactly where.

God is supposed to be omniscient. He knows everything about the past, present, and future. In fact, his knowledge is so complete that he must know every action that he himself will take in the future.

Now, suppose you yourself were granted the power of omniscience -- not omnipotence or any of the other useful attributes, but you know everything. Suppose it comes time to make a fairly mundane decision, like what you will eat for breakfast. You can have scrambled eggs or oatmeal. So you wonder, what am I in the mood for? Scrambled eggs, or oatmeal? But this is an easy decision: you are omniscient! Simply use your unlimited knowledge to peer a few minutes into the future, and see what it is that you will have for breakfast. And when you look at your future self, you know, as a matter of absolute certainty, whether you will be eating eggs or oatmeal.

But wait a minute. What if you are in a perverse frame of mind and wish to exercise your free will? So you say to yourself "Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll check the future, but I won't do what it says. If I see myself eating oatmeal, then I'll pick scrambled eggs. If I see myself eating eggs, it'll be oatmeal."

Now what does that mean for your powers? If your vision is guaranteed to be accurate, then you don't have the free will to change your decision. But if you can change your decision, then your vision was wrong, and you are no longer omniscient.

This is one reason why I conclude that no being can be both omniscient and free.

Surprise, we have bigots for neighbors

We have a couple of agave plants decorating the sidewalk on both sides of our driveway. They're sharp spiky plants, but that's not so unusual; there are a number of neighbors around the block who have a cactus or two.

We also have a couple of very prickly neighbors. They're an old retired couple living two doors down from us. We've been living at our current residence for nearly six years, and those folks haven't spoken a word to us in about five. Ginny says she smiles and waves at them and they scowl back at her.

When we first moved in, they were friendly and invited us to church, which we politely declined. We used to host a regular gaming night with our mostly atheist friends. They started asking "Why are there so many cars here on Mondays, and what are all those bumper stickers about?" So my wife told them. And that's about the time they stopped talking to us. I never felt like it was outright hostility, but she did. In any case, we haven't had much contact.

We have a couple of our own bumper stickers. She has a Darwin fish and a "Freedom from religion" sticker. Mine is more humorous; it says "Knowledge is Power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil."

This weekend one agave was cut. I don't mean carefully trimmed, I mean completely hacked up all across the front. Ginny has some pictures on her blog. We found pieces of spiny leaves in another neighbor's trash can on trash day, but we knew that they had been away on vacation so it wasn't them. Ginny was sure it had been this unpleasant couple. She was angry about it. Since I tend to have a bit of a more diplomatic approach to people than she does, she asked me to go over there and talk to them. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I wanted to hear their side of the story without prejudging them, hoping it was perhaps a big misunderstanding.

So I rang the bell and greeted them in as friendly a manner as possible, all smiles. I reintroduced myself to the woman and asked if she perhaps knew anything about the chopped plant. Despite giving me a fairly frosty reception, she invited me in and called her husband down. I had a seat on their couch, they took positions opposite me, and the husband had his arms folded the whole time and a very sullen scowl on his face.

Yes, he cut down the agave. I received a lecture on how dangerous it is to the neighborhood kids, and all sorts of gruesome scenarios about eyes being poked out. But what struck Ginny and me as weird later was when we realized that they hadn't cut any of the spines facing the sidewalk -- only the side on the street. (Again, see the picture.)

They then went on to lecture me about the general awful nature of our yard. Now, our yard may not be the most beautiful and well-kept in the neighborhood, but it is mowed regularly and there are quite a few houses that look worse than ours. I'm not a gardener myself, and I'm really busy with school, but I think Ginny does a reasonable job with it.

I took all this politely and said I understood their concerns, and is there anything else? Then we got into the bumper stickers. The wife said several times that they "make her sick" and she is very angry that we disrespect her religion. That she could never be friends with someone who doesn't "share her values." That she is firmly set in her beliefs and would never change them.

I said I don't want or expect her to change her beliefs, I have never asked her to. I don't proselytize to people who haven't approached me about the subject. And while I sympathized with her feelings, the very fact that she is willing to announce that the bumper stickers sicken her is unfortunately one of the chief reasons why we feel the need to express ourselves in this way. That Christians -- not you, I stated -- feel that it's acceptable to go door-to-door inviting people to their religion, and that we are expected to keep quiet about our opinions because they are supposedly offensive. We are sad that you view our bumper stickers that way, but we see it as a small but legitimate exercise of our free speech.

I then went on to state that while I understand the safety concerns regarding the spikes, it would have been polite if he had come over and brought them up with my wife. Then perhaps they could discuss the appearance and come up with an effective way of trimming it, or let her handle it. His wife restated the fact that they could never be friends with us. I said "I would never refuse to be friends with somebody just because of their beliefs. Only their attitude would make it difficult." Then I said I am not asking to be their friend; I'm only asking them to be friendly as neighbors and be a little more willing to open up lines of communication with us before taking it upon themselves to redecorate our property. I nicely asked him to come over some morning and discuss his concerns with my wife so that she can understand them as well. He agreed, but I'm pretty sure he didn't liked it.

As I mentioned before, I'm the more diplomatic one in the family. Just for good measure, this morning Ginny called the local police to talk about the incident, describing it as trespassing and vandalism. Before I left for work we were visited by a very cheerful and friendly cop, who got to hear all about the history and laughed at the notion that our yard would be an eyesore to anyone.

We didn't want to file charges. He offered to go over there and talk with them, even give a warning that they could be arrested if they were on our property again. We declined that too. I said I'm still hoping that the husband will come over and work things out amicably.

But I did happen to glance over at the neighbor's house while the cop car was in our driveway, and I saw the window blinds being pulled up. It was bright outside and I didn't get to see the expression on her face as she watched us talk to the policeman, clearly discussing our plant. But I have a pretty good imagination and I have to admit, it was kind of satisfying.

Long live the laptop

I bought a new laptop computer at Fry's just over a month ago. My old one was enough to surf the web and take notes, but impossible to use for any programming work. (Or, let's be honest, games either. But I didn't focus on that. Honest.)

Anyway, I've been fairly happy with my new laptop, an HP Pavilion. But last week one of the buttons on the touchpad stopped working -- to be precise, it was the equivalent of the left mouse button. Now, this was not a huge issue, because you can click on something by tapping the touchpad itself, and also I bought a small wireless mouse that does the job better anyway. But it was annoying, especially since the button felt like it should be working just fine. I thought it might even be a software problem.

So I brought it back to Fry's and asked them take a look at it. They took a few minutes and then said "We'll get you a replacement." That's it. So I quickly wiped all my personal data (they say they wipe the hard drive immediately, but I figure you ought to be careful) and then they just walked up, pulled a replacement fresh out of the box, and slipped it in my carrying case. It took about 30 minutes of paperwork, but not too bad.

Now on the one hand, I appreciate Fry's replacement policy, and think that was extremely handy. On the other hand, this episode doesn't make me very confident in the quality of my purchase. I spent much of today reinstalling all my essential software (Eclipse, MySQL data manager, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Earth... and yeah, World of Warcraft) and that was a huge pain in the butt. I hope that I don't just need to keep returning to Fry's for replacements every month.

On the other other hand, this incident does make me appreciate the new decentralized way of managing data that I've gotten used to. I didn't have to go home and back up my work, because every document I need is in a briefcase or source control program on my desktop. My contacts are online in Plaxo; my bookmarks are in Del.icio.us; my web feeds are on reader.google.com. All the work was to get the programs running, and mostly you can quickly download the latest versions of everything straight from the web without inserting any discs. That's awfully convenient.

Beautiful sentiments about programming

Wrapped up in grad school as I am, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture, and why I got involved in this career path in the first place.

For my classes in Software Engineering and Management, I have to read The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. I know the book by reputation; as it was first published in the 70's, I presume that the material is very old news to many people who share my interest in programming. Even so, this is new to me, so I wanted to share a passage from the book that I personally found very inspiring.

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men."

Oh yeah.

Speaking of schooling...

Ben started kindergarten today. Ginny and I have very different feelings about it. Ginny has had Ben staying at home with her for the last five years, and she's undergone some separation anxiety. She's worried about whether he'll adapt to the new environment, whether he'll behave, whether he'll eat well when he's not at home, and whether he'll be homesick.

I have different feelings about it: I'm really excited. Of course that's easy for me to say: I work all day, and I'm used to not having him constantly there anyway. So I mostly only see the good side of this new milestone in his life. I mentioned most of the reasons for my positive feelings in my earlier post about homeschooling. He'll be expanding his horizons, meeting lots of kids his own age, having a teacher with a different perspective on the world than ours. He'll spend time learning to read and draw and use numbers (which he's already very good at for his age). He'll have his time divided between two very different environments, and have raised expectations about how he spends the weekdays.

I met his teacher and some classmates last week. They all seem great. Mrs. Snyder struck me as a very cheerful and sweet young lady with a lot of teaching experience. We watched him go in this morning, and she took charge of the class right away.

I talked to him on the phone when Ginny picked him up. He sounded very tired but said he had had lots of fun. He couldn't be even a little bit specific about what kind of fun, so I had to pry it out of him with leading questions. :) But overall, I think it was a positive experience.

A parable

Hapless Citizen: "DARN IT! Oooo, curse my AWFUL luck. This rotten dagnabbertiblabbit car of mine will not start. Again! I'm going to be late for work."
Masked Superhero: "Fear not, Citizen!"
Hapless: "Who are you?"
Hero: "I'm the Ayn Rand Crusader!"
Hapless: "Are you here to solve my problems?"
Ayn Rand Crusader: "No, even better! I'm here to motivate you to solve them yourself!"
Hapless: "Well that does sound useful, I guess."
ARC: "Now, what seems to be the trouble?"
Hapless: "Well, it's this stupid car of mine. It's got some years on it, it doesn't run very well, and I've had to spend a fair bit of money on a regular basis to keep it in running condition."
ARC: "Aha! This looks like a job for... the Ayn Rand Crusader! Citizen, your problems are as good as ended. Observe!"
[ARC whips out a comically large sledgehammer from the pockets of his colorful tights.]
Hapless: "You're going to solve my problems with a hammer? What are..."
[ARC brings down a mighty blow on the car, proceeding to pulverize it into a metal pancake.]
Hapless: "OH MY GOD, what the fuck??? You just totally smashed my car!"
ARC: "Yes, and now all your problems will be solved!"
Hapless: "...Oh. Really? Does that mean you're going to get me a new car?"
ARC: "Of course not! I don't do handouts! But fear not, you will have a new car soon enough."
Hapless: "I don't follow you."
ARC: "Well, now that your old car has been destroyed, I have created a market demand for a new car. Before you know it, the Amazing Free Market will surely be knocking on your door, begging to replace it with a much better car."
Hapless: "But... there aren't any decent car dealerships around here for miles. And it's going to cost me a lot more to get a new car than it did even to keep my old car in working order."
ARC: "Never fear! Thanks to the Incredible Free Market, new car dealerships will soon open up within walking distance! And not only that, they are sure to make you a car that is both excellent and affordable! And besides, even if that doesn't happen, you can easily make a new car for yourself that is just as good."
Hapless: "But I'm a software engineer. I don't know how to make a car."
ARC: "What are you, lazy? You said your old car was bad. Anyone can build a car that's better than a bad one! Get off your butt and learn how to do it properly."
Hapless: "Let me get this straight. You 'helped' me by destroying my old car, and now you're just going to leave me with nothing."
ARC: "LIAR!!! Have you not heard a word I've just said? Why do you misrepresent my position so egregiously? As I have been trying to explain to you, the Magnificent Free Market will replace your car for you."
Hapless: "But right now I don't even have the car I did before. How am I supposed to get to work?"
ARC: "Perhaps some enterprising private charity will come along and give you a lift."
Hapless: "Thanks for nothing."
ARC: "No need to thank me, citizen, I'm just doing my job. Thank the Incomparable Free Market for the generous bounties that will soon be yours. Ayn Rand Crusader, AWAY!!!!!"


...and as for the rest of Johngalt666's "points", I'll have to get back to those a bit later.

Continuing the homeschooling discussion

Some people may not be following the active discussion that was going on for a week or so in the comments section of my post about homeschooling. I've been planning to reply to johngalt666's last comment, but as I mentioned originally, it takes me a while to keep up with a long discussion while I'm also in school. Since the conversation is now buried under two months worth of posts, I thought I'd take this opportunity to start a fresh thread. Be warned, this is going to jump around a bit, as I try to organize a fairly disjointed conversation.

When I suggested that Johngalt666 was looking to replace public schools with private school vouchers, he wrote:

Here is where I get really confused. You list two issues that I am bringing up and yet I did not bring up either of the issues you name. I never said homeschooling was a superior alternative for most students. I also never said anything about vouchers. So though it LOOKS like you are responding to me, I find myself looking around for the person you are actually talking too.

I apologize for making this unwarranted assumption. I have spoken to several advocates of abolishing public schools, and most at least claim to want to put in temporary measures to fill in the gap, in the form of vouchers. Perhaps most of them do, ultimately, want to eliminate the public funding of schools entirely, but most couch the discussion in terms of private vouchers in order to mask that intention.

Johngalt666 then wrote:

But right now, where I live, there are no better alternatives to homeschooling. There are no excellent public schools near me. There are no excellent private schools near me. I know at least one school that would be an excellent choice for my children but I can not move several states over to enroll them.

Followed by:

Further, the facts remain that: (a) most parents are effectively compelled to send their children to public schools, since they are taxed to support these schools and cannot afford to pay the additional fees required to send their children to private schools; (b) the STANDARDS of education, controlling ALL schools, are prescribed by the government; (c) the growing trend in American education is for the government to exert wider and wider control over every aspect of education. Well, by now the government basically does control every aspect of education.

So now, taking all of the above into account, let me try to make sure I understand you correctly.

You don't like public schools, that much is clear. You seemed downright offended that when I presumed that you would support vouchers, which is the commonly suggested alternative. You also acknowledge that homeschooling is not the right choice for everyone. You wish that there were more and better private school options in your area, but there are not.

Essentially, your solution to the issue of public schools is to eliminate them altogether. And then you propose to replace them with...

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Your position is that "government" should be out of schools entirely: no funding, no standards, no support whatsoever. Parents who can afford private schools will send their kids to private schools. Parents who have the time, inclination, and ability to homeschool will do so. All other kids are left to fend for themselves.

Really? I want to make totally sure I'm not misstating your position, but I can't wait around for the conversation to synchronize, so let me just work with the assumption that this is what you mean.

Clearly this goes way beyond your issue with how public schools are performing. If the problem were simply the fact that kids aren't getting a good enough education, then your solution might have involved doing something to improve it. But instead, you are apparently advocating a system that eliminates many existing schools entirely, thereby ensuring that large swaths of the country have access to no education whatsoever.

By your own statement, there are no quality private schools in your area, and therefore you are forced to homeschool. So under your plan, you wish to essentially nuke funding for the public schools so that other parents who already send their kids there will now have no recourse apart from choosing from the private schools -- which by your own claims are evidently just as bad in your area -- or devoting the same amount of time that your family does to homeschooling. I suppose we'll have to assume that those people don't all have jobs or anything.

I'm just stumped about how you think this will improve the overall state of education in your area. Surely there are quite a few parents who will wind up opting not to bother with education at all -- I mean, if the oppressive government isn't to be involved in education, then there are no longer any educational standards or requirements. That doesn't worry you? Having a new generation of kids growing up who, instead of receiving below standard education, will now be completely lacking in any education whatsoever?

When you talk of public schools you seem to want to throw out studies of the nation as a whole and when you talk of homeschoolers you only seem to want studies that include the whole nation. If national studies of public schools leave you unsatisfied, why would national studies of homeschoolers be more satisfying?

I didn't throw out the studies; I accept and agree with your claim that public schools are not doing as well as they ought to be doing (and, based on the examples provided by other countries, could be doing). This is a point where you seem to think we disagree, when in fact I'm letting you know that we don't.

The problem I have is that you seem to have jumped from a premise: ("public schools are not doing well") to some kind of conclusion. Either that conclusion is: "Homeschooling and private schools are an adequate replacement for what they actually do" or: "Maybe there is no adequate universal replacement for public schools, but I'm willing to eliminate the benefit that those schools do provide so that I don't have to pay any taxes towards them." Neither of these conclusions seems to follow naturally from the premise, nor from the sparse and sketchy studies that you've provided (about which I'll say more shortly).

You said:

Look back again, Kazim. I do not state or imply that all these students would be better served by homeschooling. Later I even list four options for parents (not intending it to be an exhaustive list) and then state that ANY CHOICE can be correct.

As I read it, your four choices were:

1. Public school.
2. Private school.
3. Move somewhere where there are better public and/or private schools (how is this a different option from the first two?)
4. Home schooling.

But of those four, you've expressed a desire to sandbag one of them, so that leaves three, or perhaps two since option 3 is really just another angle on 1 and 2. Not only that, the one that you'd get rid of is the choice that most parents choose. My parents both worked, and they chose the place to live where they could get the best jobs. Roughly 3/4 of my education took place in public schools, as did the vast majority of other professional adults I have met. Why so eager to eliminate this system entirely?

Now, let me turn to your studies on homeschooling.

While I am starting to doubt seriously that any study by any source will satisfy you if it doesn’t agree with you, I will point you to some more info you may not have seen here. Though it seems you didn’t follow the link to the national studies of public schools above (based on your writing), I hope you will follow this one and read it. Google the articles sources and that sort of thing. I won’t spoon-feed it to you, as I don’t really think it matters too much. See below.

I did follow your studies on public school performance earlier, and my comment about them still stands. As I said, I simply don't disagree with you that public schools underperform their stated goals, but that it doesn't make the case for the argument you're trying to make -- i.e., it is worse than no public school at all.

I've now gone through the article you linked. At first glance, it appeared to contain a whole lot of references to independent studies. On further examination, it seems to me that it contains just two original studies, followed by numerous other articles that merely cite those studies. The first one was performed by the president of the "National Home Education Research Institute." The second one was published and underwritten by the "Home School Legal Defense Association," which is also the source of the original post you submitted gathering all these different studies in one place. Those are a useful place to start, but difficult to take seriously as an unbiased source.

Looking further into these articles was even more troubling. For instance I found that Lawrence Rudner's study was in fact published in the peer-reviewed educational journal, Education Policy Analysis Archives, which is a good sign. But it was shortly followed by a related article that neatly underlines the overall issue surrounding the way these studies are conducted.

This article, entitled "Contextualizing Homeschooling Data: A Response to Rudner", looks at article published by Lawrence Rudner and points out some serious flaws in his methodology. What they agree on is the premise of the article: among students who took a test administered by Bob Jones University, the homeschooled kids who were picked for the study performed better than the private and public schooled kids who were picked for the study. However, they then go on to highlight a number of reasons why this is not nearly as relevant as it sounds:

• Participation in the testing is voluntary. That means that the only homeschooled students who worked on the tests were those whose parents emphasized tests, while students who are "unschooled" or otherwise opposed to testing are excluded from the sample. In other words, this is a very specific and unrepresentative cross-section of all home schoolers. This point can't be understated: The author of the article admits that it wasn't a scientific sample. The response to the article highlights just how much that lack of objectivity undercuts the main point.
  
• The testing was performed by Bob Jones University. I mean, come on, those guys weren't even accredited until last year, and before that point they were well known as a weird racist fundamentalist outlier. As an atheist (I think you said?), I'd be surprised if you took anything seriously that comes out of Bob Jones University.
• As I noted before, Rudner's being paid by something called the Home School Legal Defense Association, which is a homeschooling advocacy group. That fact in itself does not make their study wrong, but it does call into question their status as a group conducting an objective, impartial study.
  

Interestingly enough, I tried to find out more information about HSLDA, and found to my somewhat distaste that they are themselves an explicitly fundamentalist group. HSLDA supports Christian Dominionist causes such as, for example, working to outlaw gay marriage, and they also advise parents on how to get away with beating their kids without getting in trouble. Again, this in no way invalidates the study, such as it is, but it still seems to me a poor choice to use as an authority on the efficacy of homeschooling.

Later, you write:

Personally, I don’t really care if homeschoolers outperform public schools or not. There are many indicators that they do but that is irrelevant to why I don’t want public schools.

Ultimately, this is exactly my point. You want to demonstrate that homeschooling is more effective than public schooling, but that is a side issue for you, because the bottom line is that you don't really care whether the end result is kids being better educated. That's the difference here: I do care about what is the most effective strategy for getting kids educated. That's my bottom line. It so happens that I also disagree with your political viewpoint that government involvement is nearly universally evil, but that's beside the original point that I was making.

My previous post was about the remarkable lack of serious, comprehensive, and unbiased data on how well homeschoolers perform as a whole. There is almost nothing in the way of regulation or standards when it comes to homeschooling. Some parents do a great job, absolutely, but there isn't any rigorous analysis on the success rates. Mostly, support for homeschooling just seems to take the form of public school bashing.

Please understand that I am not meddling in your business and telling you that you need to stop homeschooling your own kids. I have no reason to doubt that you are one of those families that teaches your kids well and holds them accountable for learning some amount of necessary material, and provides them with an enriching environment. But as for your belief that we should therefore apply your experience across the board and pull support away from those kids who do partake of the public school system -- which will include my son, beginning in about two weeks -- I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree.

Happy class day

It's here already: the first day of the last semester. I have roughly three months to finish my master's thesis -- about which I probably write more pretty soon.

I'm taking "Introduction to Software Engineering" and "System Engineering Program Management and Evaluation." This is the only semester when I've taken two classes that are both "concepty" rather than "mathy" or "programmy." However, since my thesis is both mathy and programmy, that more than fills this particular void in my life.

Anyway, here's my term paper from summer. The professor mailed me an evaluation, writing simply:

The paper describes issues in web tagging with several examples. The paper
is in the form that it can be submitted to a computer magazine with
little effort.

That sounds pretty complimentary. Anyone out there who works for a computer magazine? :)

Cargo cult comedy canned

The cargo cult comedy show, "The 1/2 Hour News Hour," has been canceled.

All together now: "Awwwwwwww."
Of course, I wouldn't even know this if it hadn't been for liberal radio, since lately it hadn't even occurred to me to wonder whether it still existed.

Two movies

I just wanted to share a couple of funny movies I ran into. Not all audiences will get them, but I think they're both brilliant.

Minesweeper: The Movie




Mementos
If you've seen the movie AND the commercials, you should get it; if you haven't then you'll probably be confused.

What's in the pipeline

This is just a "what's going on" type of post, because I'm trying to blog more often but I have this bad habit of starting big, long posts and then letting them languish for weeks, not willing to pull the trigger until they're complete.

For the last month or so I've been dividing my time between writing a twelve page term paper on the topic of Web Tagging (due by email tonight) and a program for my thesis project (which is due in November). It's a wee bit scary. My stepdaughter Caitlin has moved to Colorado to live with her aunt on a ranch and train horses for a year. I've turned her bedroom into a makeshift "office" by plugging a wireless adapter into my computer and setting it up on a card table. The main advantage of this is that the door locks and I can hide from my very demanding five year old. And if I'm pulling a most-of-the-nighter, I can go to sleep on the bed in here without disturbing Ginny in the middle of the night. It's a good arrangement, but it makes my family miss me and vice versa. This is grad school crunch time -- doubly so when the fall semester starts -- and will likely remain so until December. Wish me luck.

I'm also getting a new laptop soon, maybe this weekend. I might go work at a coffee shop more often, once I have worked out the best scheme for keeping my project synced.

I do have a few posts in the works, namely:

1. I'll post my term paper after it's turned in, and nobody can accuse me of helping anyone else cheat.
2. I've been meaning to go back and reply to johngalt666 on the homeschooling thread comments. This would be an example of me starting a long post and letting it sit for a while.
3. I've been kicking around the idea of writing something longish on the annoyance of those 9/11 Truth disciples who are always calling in to the Atheist Experience, C-Span, various Air America shows, and everything else. I have a few things in mind to say, but not much written yet. Short version: The notion that there is a massive cover-up of the U.S. government personally organizing terrorist groups or firing missiles into the World Trade Center or whatever, for me ranks pretty close to Scientology in terms of credibility. More later.

Anyway, sorry I'm not more talkative lately; stay tuned.

I loves me some Chris Dodd

Hmmm, never cared about him that much before, but I gotta give Chris Dodd props for his utter smoothness in facing down Bill "O'Really?"

If you haven't been following this wacky controversy, Bill's been looking for ways to smear the political blog Daily Kos, and hit on the brilliant strategy of highlighting a bad photoshop image posted in the one of the thousands of comments they get every day. Now he's trying to intimidate presidential candidates into staying away from the Yearly Kos convention. Dodd wasn't having any of it.

To me, the funniest part of the video is when Dodd calls O'Reilly to task for saying hateful things on his own show, like talking about al Qaeda bombing San Francisco. Bill loudly denies that he EVER SAID ANY SUCH THING: "You don't know what the hell I said! You got it from Media Matters!!!"

Well, of course, that story is on Media Matters, among other places. There's also an audio clip of him saying it. So in addition to all the other "smearing" that Media Matters does, they apparently have an incredibly convincing Bill O'Reilly impersonator on the staff!

The Daily Show blows a comic opportunity

I was waiting in eager anticipation for last night's "Daily Show," since they didn't discuss the YouTube Democratic debate on the night of the debate itself.

In one sense I wasn't disappointed, because they focused the first 2/3 of the show on the debate and it was funny. But they focused mostly on the form of the debate, and very little on the candidates' responses. For my money, easily the most mockable moment in the entire debate was when someone asked the question "How many of you arrived on a private jet?"

Several candidates (mainly Clinton, Obama) confidently put their hands up, at least being honest about the question. Bill Richardson put his hand halfway up, glanced nervously around at the others to see who else was copping to it, and then sheepishly raised his hand the rest of the way. That had my home audience busting up. Unfortunately, Team Stewart must not have seen the comedy potential in that incident.

The Motley Fool reopens its doors

Here's something I forgot to mention earlier. For years I've been a dedicated member of the Motley Fool message board community. In fact, part of the reason I created this blog was to archive some of my favorite posts that I had written there. In 2002, the boards became a paid service, so you could no longer read or post there if you did not cough up $30 per year. Admittedly, this has helped somewhat in keeping out the riff-raff and having some smart discussions, but it is also frustrating, since I can't just send non-members a link to some good discussions.

I'm happy to say that a couple of weeks ago, TMF reopened their doors. Now, anyone at all can read the boards, but you still need to be a member to post. However, memberships no longer require money; you can join if you know a current member. Since I happen to be a current member, anyone who knows me well can get a guaranteed invite. Just email me.

Here's my profile, which links to recent posts of mine. Be sure to check out my two favorite hangouts, Atheist Fools (a board I sort of helped to start, way back in the day) and Computer and Video Gamers. Great conversations with cool people.

Clarification/update:

Actually, the event does not occur until a few weeks from now, I don't know exactly when. Also, my total number of invitations is limited to 20. I don't necessarily expect to use them all anyway.

Here's yer sign!

This morning I got an email from a new reader commenting on my blog profile:

Like you, I am a self-professed overeducated liberal atheist. Imagine my surprise (and disappointment), therefore, to find you touting your astrological sign as a prime aspect of introduction on your web page. Do you think astrology makes more sense than God cults? (I don't.)

Naturally, I had to reply:

Let me set your mind at ease: I didn't tout my astrological sign at all. Blogger.com asks you to enter your birthday when you first sign up, and it automatically computes your sign and proudly displays it for you. I have no more truck with that nonsense than you do. In fact, I'm looking at the blogger options right now to see if I can find a way to turn it off, and I can't.

Let me take an opportunity to tell a funny story about astrology. It's a story I tell often when the subject comes up, but somehow it has escaped getting the blog treatment until now.

When I was but a wee nerd in college, I used to love a local San Diego morning radio show called "Dave, Shelly and Chainsaw." In fact, I loved it so much that I volunteered to do some of their web content for them, and if you poke around the site you'll still find some things I wrote (though uncredited). That experience helped me get a background in HTML, which led to harder drugs like Javascript and CGI programming, etc.

Anyway (tangent!) in addition to the three hosts, there is a guy named Chris Boyer. As far as I could tell, his main jobs were to play drum fills after jokes, make annoying comments, and get ridiculed by the primary folks.

So one day, the DSC show was graced with the presence of A Famous Astrologer. Dave, Shelly, and Chainsaw all seem to have bought into astrology hook line and sinker. Boyer was the one who was skeptical of astrology, and the others gave him no end of grief about it. They kept insisting that this lady was so good that he'd become a believer. In fact, they decided amongst themselves that the first thing they would do was make her do a reading on Boyer.

So the astrologer arrived, they explained the situation to her, and she laughed and said she would do it. She began by asking Boyer for his birthday. Then she proceeded to tell Boyer all sorts of details about his personality.

The other three were just eating it up. They were chortling and punctuating every sentence with "That's Boyer EXACTLY!" "You're getting this absolutely right!" and so on. Chris just sat there and took it like a trooper, politely accepting everything she told him.

Finally, after a few minutes, he asked, "Are you finished?" She said "That's all." Boyer calmly concluded: "That wasn't really my birthday."

Wooooo, check me out, I'm famous!

First PZ Myers starts regularly linking my posts on the The Atheist Experience, now Dilbert creator Scott Adams links an old post of mine.

FYI, that's original work -- after noticing a certain creepy aspect about Pope Benedict, I spent quite a bit of time googling up pictures that were posed just right to highlight the similarity between Benedict and Palpatine.

Thoughts on home schooling

I am writing this post partly to respond to "government school scabs", a post on Fiery Ewok's blog, and the ensuing discussion. In this post, a person named Russ showed up to eloquently express his strong support for home schooling, and was roundly cheered on by the posters. My wife and I have had a long-standing disagreement about this topic, and so she asked me to read his post. It triggered a rather unproductive argument, and I don't think that I've ever completely laid out my point of view on the subject here. So I'm writing this post to try to get my views on home schooling into a coherent structure.

First of all, let me make clear my background. This is a bit long and personal, so I've put a bold text heading down below so you can skip to the part where I lay out my views. Still, this is going to be relevant background.

I have been the beneficiary of both public and private schools, as well as parents who really cared about my education at all stages. Both my parents worked. I went to preschool as a young child, then went to early school in Auburn, Alabama until about fourth grade. After that, we moved to Santa Fe, where I was in private school until high school age -- about four years. Then I commuted from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, where I went to LAHS for all four years, taking a number of AP classes before ultimately getting accepted into the UC college system. In my family, it was never really a question of whether I would go to college or not; the only question was where. My parents are both Ph.D's, and they were really active in keeping an eye on my school performance.

Obviously, in many ways I had an atypical public school environment. Los Alamos High has a reputation as a truly excellent high school. I don't remember what my school in Auburn (Cary Woods Elementary) was like academically, but I do remember liking most of my teachers and having good memories. And of course, I got to spend the junior high years in private school, which I hear are pretty bad years for some people, including my sister.

Like many kids, I was picked on sometimes, at every stage, including private schools. At the time it seemed like I was picked on a lot. Looking back, it may have been relatively mild treatment, especially considering my status as an outspoken atheist. I remember being punched on more than one occasion, but I never got into any major fights. I particularly remember that when I was a teenager at summer camp, and during my first year of high school, a lot of people made it clear that they really didn't like me. I had to do a lot of self-reflection, centered around whether I really cared if people liked me, and I decided that I did. I made an effort to change the way I approached people.

You can see this effort gradually paying off if you read my high school yearbooks. In freshman year, I didn't even bother to get a yearbook. In sophomore year, I had a smattering of signatures on mostly lonely pages, some of the comments not particularly flattering. In junior year, I had a lot more signatures, and one senior girl even left a sloppy lipstick kiss on one page. My senior yearbook is crammed with signatures, many of them saying that they'll miss me a lot, and some younger students saying they considered me an inspiration. It was a warm feeling, because it was something I struggled to accomplish. I also remember a seminal moment, which I think occurred during the All-State chorus trip, where I made up with someone I had once considered a nemesis as a freshmen (a particularly snarky girl named Kim Coulter). Kim and I hugged, I was sorry for being such a dork to her, she was sorry for being rude to me, and we were kind-of friends right up to graduation day.

I can't say I was ever really a popular kid, even in college, and perhaps also to this day. But still, social skills ARE something that I came to grips with as a result of being in public school. I learned some things about how to talk so that people will listen, and listen so people will talk. I learned the value of getting involved in community activities, which at the time meant things like the debate team and French club. I learned how to make people laugh with me instead of at me (most of the time) and how to stand up for myself and make sure I got noticed.

Besides that, I had a number of teachers I liked. I also had a number of teachers I didn't like. But the ones I didn't like are growing dimmer in my memory, and the ones I liked are among the important people who shaped the way I am today.

And now, finally, thoughts on home schooling

I'm of two minds about home schooling. On the one hand, I don't see anything especially wrong with the concept, if it is done right. Engage your kids, get them a curriculum, work with them every day, and teach them what they need to know. I don't see why you, as a dedicated parent, should be worse at it than professional teachers. If nothing else, you've got an unusually small class size on your side. That's a huge benefit.

But education is something I take very seriously. The world is a huge, complicated place, full of scientific ideas and confusing technology that didn't exist a hundred years ago. The goal of an effective education is to get you up to speed with correct information on subjects you need to know about. That also includes understanding history and literature, how to construct a personal essay or an original argument, and how to read anything from a few paragraphs to a novel and extract meaning and value out of it.

Being a teacher is a hard job. A good teacher is someone who understands their subject, not just a little better than his or her students, but so much better that they understand both the subject and the best way to get it across. Of course not all teachers are good teachers, but I both know personally and have been the beneficiary of many good teachers, and I can say that their value in kids' lives as both mentors and role models cannot be overstated.

And of course, many parents are also potentially good teachers. And if those parents are willing to dedicate the kind of hours that teachers put in, then that's great for them. But some parents have other interests outside of their kids. There is nothing wrong with that. I didn't pick a career in teaching, and I'd much rather go to work with adults every day than spend twelve years focusing primarily on passing on knowledge to a single student. One reason is that it seems like an inefficient use of my time. I can understand a stay-at-home parent finding it enjoyable to put in the time and effort. But even stay-at-home parents don't always find it stimulating to spend three to six hours a day teaching arithmetic and simple reading. (I've guessed at that range because school lasts six hours, but home schoolers are quick to point out that not all of those hours consist of productive learning time. I've heard many argue that much less than half the time is spent learning; all I can say is that this has never remotely matched my own experience.)

Let me stress that there is nothing wrong with not wanting to put in the time. If I enjoy doing something else that helps me grow as a person, then I shouldn't be forced to spend that time on what I've already said is a difficult and sometimes tedious task. That's one important reason why I appreciate the fact that the state has thoughtfully set up a massive infrastructure, for which we all share the costs, and which provides trained professionals to do the work if I haven't got the time. Frankly, it would seem a little silly for me to feel trapped into doing something I don't want to do if I've already paid for somebody else to do that thing for me.

Public schools receive a lot of criticism, and some of it is justified. I've felt for several years that the public school system has been systematically underfunded. In addition, at least since Bush took office, a lot of ineffective programs have been put in place, such as standardized testing, which has the effect of forcing even good teachers to move towards rote memorization of concepts instead of exposing kids to the exciting parts of absorbing new materials.

Yet as a self-avowed liberal, I do not regard this as the inevitable result of state funding. People who have a more libertarian bent than I do often casually denigrate public schools as "government schools," as if invoking the big, bad boogeyman of government should automatically make it obvious what the problem is.

I reject this completely. I think I can't do much better here than to repeat a point in a post I wrote last year, entitled Why I Am Not a Libertarian:

"...libertarians argue that we should do away with our public school system because it's broken. But what are they comparing it to? Which are the countries that outperform us in math and science? Countries like Japan, Canada, and Germany. Do these countries model the libertarian ideal? Of course not. Like us, they have public schools with national standards. They do the same thing we do, but better. Are there ANY examples around the world of the voucher program being successful?"

It is worth noting that in response to that post, I received a number of examples of countries that had non-traditional school systems, but none of them were what I'd describe as a desirable role models. Instead, I heard a lot about third world countries where poor kids got a bare minimum education.

This post isn't about school vouchers and poor kids; this is about home schooling and YOUR kids. The thing is, though, it's hard for me to take seriously that "government" is what's wrong with all the schools, when I got what I consider to be a damn fine government education at several stages. I didn't get the creativity beaten out of me. I got some bad teachers, and they made me dislike certain subjects, but even in those cases I often had enough appreciation for learning that I later went on to revisit those same subjects and understand them.

Home schooling advocates argue that it's important for parents to be actively involved in their kids' education, and to keep an eye on what they're learning, and I agree. But of course, having this approach to parenting does not exclude also letting your kids learn elsewhere, even if their teachers might get paid by "the government." By all means, keep tabs on your child's homework. Engage in discussion with him or her. Find out how homework is going, and which subjects are interesting. If you're not willing to put in that much effort -- an hour in the evenings each day -- then you certainly aren't ready to be a full time teacher.

Besides the defense of traditional schools that I've just tried to lay out, I have a few more specific concerns about home schooling. I will lay these out briefly in the remainder of this post.

First, there's the issue of getting different perspectives from different people. The simple fact is that no one person knows everything. I certainly don't. Neither, of course, does any one teacher. But if your kid is going to school for twelve years, he or she will be meeting a lot of different teachers who know a lot of different subjects -- some of them (believe it or not) quite well. Now some home schoolers join communities where the kids work with many different parents, in their neighborhood or elsewhere, and that seems like a good move to me. But others do not. If you are your child's only teacher for the vast majority of the time, they'll only be getting one person's perspective throughout most of their education. If there are areas where your own knowledge is weak and you don't realize it, you risk passing on bad information throughout your child's education. If you are bad at (for example) art, your child is never going to get new perspectives from a teacher who is good at art.

For an extreme example, consider the home schooling scenes in Jesus Camp. Levi's mother is feeding her son all kinds of bad information about science, but she has no idea that this is the case because she doesn't understand science and only speaks to other people who don't understand science. She isn't trying to deliberately subvert Levi's knowledge, but she simply isn't in a position to explain something that she doesn't know.

Which brings me to my second major concern about home schooling: The tendency to put your kids in a bubble. The Jesus Camp parents do it on purpose, and of course many well-meaning parents do not. Despite this, I think that the effect can easily be the same whether you intend it or not. Being your child's main teacher is a great way to make sure that he gets your point of view almost exclusively. While this sounds like a good idea in the short term, in the long term it has the potential to be harmful.

What I said earlier about teachers also applies to people in general. People are social animals. We gain knowledge and experience by being around each other. Coming in contact with a lot of people broadens your chance of meeting more really great folks who will influence your life positively. And the ones who aren't so great... well, life is full of those anyway. If you don't learn how to deal with them when you're a kid, it will be that much harder to learn when you're an adult.

It might help to think of it like inoculation to diseases. If you are afraid of germs, then you might want to spend your life in a literal bubble, using sanitary wipes all the time and avoiding direct contact with anyone who might be carrying a disease. The problem is that if you start using that as a way to stay healthy, then you pretty much have to adopt that strategy for the rest of your life. Once you step out of that bubble, all the diseases that you never built up an immunity to will be there, just waiting to get you. On the other hand, if you get those diseases early, under safer conditions, then later on you won't have to worry about those diseases doing more serious damage.

I don't mean to say that people are diseases, of course. I just want to make the point that the more people you meet, the more you figure out how to approach them. You learn that some situations call for a friendly, diplomatic approach to gain trust, while other situations call for caution to avoid being taken advantage of. Again, you either learn this early or you learn it late.


In summary, there are several things that schools provide, and these should not be taken lightly. They provide exposure to a wide variety of people, both students and teachers, many of whom are potentially positive people who will expand your children's horizons. They provide an early chance to deal with challenges, whether they are social or academic, in an environment that is generally more forgiving of mistakes than real life. They provide years of access to dozens of paid professionals who have been doing the job of teaching for a long time and are familiar with the issues of students from all walks of life.

None of this should be taken as an indication that I am fundamentally opposed to home schooling. I believe that there are ways of doing it correctly, which can provide all of the above advantages while strengthening the parent-child relationship. But I wish to repeat, one last time, that teaching is hard work. It is easy to be an armchair quarterback and believe that "government schools" are messing up your kids, if you're not already getting involved with the school and the work yourself.

Thomas Edison is often tossed out as an example of a child who thrived in a home schooling environment. While this is true, the example is somewhat misleading. Edison's mother had been a professional teacher already, and was already especially qualified to teach her son. That doesn't mean that you need strong credentials in order to be a successful teacher, but knowledge and experience shouldn't be scoffed at as valuable tools.

Of course public schools aren't perfect. But they're not perfectly awful, either. In Fiery Ewok's thread, some people were damning school with faint praise by saying: Maybe school helps you by making your life so miserable that your scars make you a stronger person. And that may be consistent with what I've said in this post, but only in a glass-is-half-empty kind of way. There are a lot of things we do in life when we'd rather be doing something else: practice a musical instrument, work out at the gym, take proficiency exams. Sometimes those activities are not so fun, but we do them anyway. Do we do them because we are proud of our ability to withstand unpleasantness and accept scars? No, we do them because they make us better at things we want to be able to do. We do those things because we are smart people who can delay gratification in order improve our lives in the future.

School isn't just bad times for everybody. We meet new people, we learn new information. That's a big part of why I went back to graduate school. When I finished my Bachelor's degree, I felt at the time like I never wanted to go to school again. But after years of not going to school, I had nostalgic feelings about sitting in a room full of people who were discovering information that they never new before, from somebody who knows the subject and is dedicated to passing it on. I don't go to school because I love taking tests and pulling Frappucino-fueled all-nighters and having nightmares when I finally go to sleep; I go because going through the rigors of studying and taking tests and doing homework help me reach new levels of self-actualization.

That's what education means to me, and I hope that you home schoolers out there are working hard to give your kids the experiences they deserve.