Ever notice that seemingly normal people transform into bitter, hate-filled dumbasses as soon as they post on an internet forum or chat room? Well, Penny Arcade has an elegant formula for this phenomena:.

I’ve been reading the comments section below youtube videos, slashdot forums and digg posts and I can’t think of a better explanation than that. A subject like, say, video game design, that over lunch comes out as a reasoned debate over pro’s and con’s of style becomes a brutal four-letter word mudfest between combating comment threads. God help you should you bring up a subject with actual consequences like politics or free speech or religion in an internet arena- you will hear more unreasoning hatred of and by both sides than you could have ever imagined. The urge to strike back, to make your own wittily caustic reply about the original poster’s clear lack of intelligence and patent evidence of inbreeding will only serve to worsen the situation.

Back in the day I used to read Warcraft 3 gaming forums (don’t even start with me), and there was a particular poster whose gameplay seemed to echo my own desires for a smaller, quick paced game. His name was Mr.FunSocks. One day he was in one of his comment wars with another regular named zz33t and I chimed in my support for Mr.FunSocks with what I thought was a well reasoned analysis of both sides- I was promptly mocked by Mr.FunSocks as a n00b (I had only been a member of the forum for months, not years) and by zz33t as totally misunderstanding everything you-idiot-fuckface-why-don’t-you-shut-up-now.

Sigh. My fellow man. Why must you suck? Why can’t we all just get along?

I have found that education is one of the most passionate subjects that you can bring up in day to day conversation.  Why?  Because everyone’s experienced it, you had to go, and what happens in education seems to dictate your life path.  There are more opinions on education than there are people, but some opinions are more valuable than others.

Ken Robinson- do schools kill creativity?

Official spiel- Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online. A typical review: “If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, please stop whatever you’re doing and watch it now.”

My spiel- He gives a quote from Picasso half way through, “All children are born artists.  The problem is to remain an artist when we grow up.”  Above and beyond the (noble) desire to have artists in our society it is the ability to do something that is the purpose of education.  Creativity, the soul of an artist, is being able to put one’s own work, one’s own idea, out there in contest with the world to survive or fail.  A school does not need to make a musician or a dancer out of a pupil to have that pupil benefit from creativity and the teaching of creativity.

If you look at the true geniuses of our day in any subject- medicine, science or business- you will find that the titans of their field are not only passionate about their own subject but have an artistic talent that they pursue or a creative hobby that while not typically labeled ‘art’ is nonetheless an expression of their mind and not merely ‘work’.  The entire linux revolution I credit to the joy and excitement that comes with being able to change the code yourself and not merely tred where others have gone.

Do not confuse Creativity and Art.  Art is a beautiful Creation.  Creation itself is necessary to be effective in any field, artistic or not.

For other educational success stories I also recommend “Teach like your Hair’s on Fire” or “There are no shortcuts” by Rafe Esquith, who is an educator down in Los Angeles who teaches his underprivileged inner city 5th graders to perform Shakespeare while getting them to score in the top five percent in the country academically.  I’ve been talking with him by e-mail and he’s asked me to help him find donations to purchase XO laptops (from the One Laptop Per Child program) for his students.  If you want to help him, leave a comment here or visit his site.

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US, and it reminded me of a book I’ve been wanting to write.

I was reading Joseph Stalin’s biography (because I’ll read anything) when it struck me that even through all the damage he caused his own country the historians say that ‘it is unclear if Russia would have enjoyed the same economic growth without him’.  He killed the heads of business, science and religion, imprisoned hundreds of thousands without cause, created starvation during years of plenty, and they wonder if things would have been worse without him?  Ugh.

It made me realize that historians and thus history books are unwilling to clearly label rulers of the past as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  They will hedge.  Now, in some cases there is quite a bit of gray, particularly the farther back you go, but there are some really clear cases of good vs evil in history that we should be able to point to in order to help future generations avoid really, really bad rulers and tend towards the moderately saner ones.

So I wanted to write a book, ‘Good Guys and Bad Guys’, that takes 5 leaders who had incontestible “good” records and 5 leaders who were simply bad people.  Now, you could pick a whole lot more than 5 good and 5 bad guys in the course of history, but I wanted to write something short and to the point.  Most historians can’t name even one of each.

Here’s my list of Good Guys: Martin Luther King Jr, Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammed Yunus (of the Grameen Bank), Nelson Mandela, George Marshall (of the famed Marshall plan to rebuild Germany after WWII).  These were more than good men, they were great men.  Even when they bested their foes they turned victory for themselves into victory for all, bringing peace from war and justice from inequality. 

The Bad Guys: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, and Frank Lucas (american drug smuggler).  The first four are well known- they came to power on a message of hatred and violence and brought it to their neighbors and to themselves.  The last figure is representative of an entire class of evil, the criminal leaders who bring destruction to their own neighborhoods under the guise of ‘opportunity’.  Lucas, along with other criminal leaders such as Danilo Blandon ended the trend of freedom for their minority communities and did them more harm than the Jim Crow laws a century before.

The cast was chosen not because they are novel choices, but because they are so obvious.  They offer a quick and obvious set of characteristics by which to choose for and against your leaders.  The lesson here is that the bad leaders are not merely “tough” (and thus somehow better to have on your side than working with the opposition), but “evil”, and thus the most damaging (as proven by history) to their own people and those people who are closest to them.

(1) Do they act for or against the Declaration of Human Rights? (2) Do they advocate peace and a better future or demand hatred and war?

There may be shades of grey, but some men are so dark that the light cannot be seen.  Distrust them.  And other men shine so brightly they could make white look dull.  Follow them.  By their hatreds or their dreams you will know them.

This is a combination of two talks, Hans Rosling’s second talk and Bjorn Lomborg’s talk.

There is a correlation that doesn’t get much press coverage- given the current technology in use in the world today, CO2 emissions rise as GDP rises. This is across the entire globe, over the last decade. This says that CO2 emissions become more of an issue the more wealthy and successful the world becomes unless we radically change the way we produce energy. This is shown in Hans Rosling’s data using the Gapminder tool.

This is a factor in Bjorn Lomborg’s talk, (posted previously). His economists placed global warming at the bottom of the list of problems we should solve first. This is based in part off the data showing that a small reduction in CO2 emissions would only postpone the day that most of Bangladesh and India goes under water- it won’t prevent it. The economists thus concluded that the solutions to date (such as the Kyoto treaty) would only delay the inevitable trend by a few years and are thus of little value.

His economists ignore the fact that most of the other solutions to global problems would tend to improve GDP and thus speed up global warming because CO2 emissions (with current technology) go up with GDP. So if we absolutely must solve global warming by limiting CO2 emissions then we should focus all our energy on technology to make the production of cheap, CO2 free energy a commonplace standard across the globe, because we are going to need only more energy as time goes on.

American news tends to portray global warming as a problem created by the developing world using dirty energy sources like coal. Not really. The USA creates more CO2 emissions per person than any other nation, not because we’re bad people but because we’re filthy rich. As the poor nations become less poor (China, India, I’m looking at you) they will consume more energy, driving up CO2 emissions to approach US levels.

CO2 emission is a problem of the rich nations. It is exacerbated by more people becoming rich, which is a problem worth having.

Here’s the premise- there are many problems in the world, and only so much money and effort with which to solve them. Given that, what should you solve first?

I like this approach because it breaks down solving global problems into separate pieces: (1) how much of a problem is it? (2) What specifically can you do to solve that problem and (3) with a fixed amount of money, how much good could you do towards solving that problem?

Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world.

Official spiel: Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg put this question to economists and students around the world, and the answers they came up with may surprise you. Ranking our toughest problems not on any moral scale but simply by how effectively they can be solved, Lomborg and his colleagues demand we take a fresh look at doing good.

My spiel: Bjorn Lomborg made a list of the big problems that people are nervous about and got 3 ideas on how to solve them from the most influential people he could get his hands on. Then he handed those solutions to a team of economists and had them rate the solutions, not the problems, for their benefit to society. This is basically saying that instead of taking a problem you are passionate about and pushing for funding, take the viewpoint of a government or a huge charity and look at all the solutions out there and see where you can do the most good.

Before we go too far though, I should warn you that Bjorn Lomborg first got his fame for claiming that the environment isn’t nearly as bad as scientists would like to claim via his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. His opinions on Global Warming are thus quite controversial.

Now, assuming that he didn’t mess with the economic panel that he put together (and with 4 Nobel laureates on the panel it doesn’t look like he did) and that he let them come to their own conclusions, the Cophenhagen consensus came up with the following fascinating results:

(1) Global warming solutions are not very good. They cost a ton and do little good as compared to other efforts. He summarizes it in better in the talk, but keep in mind that it is not that Global warming is not a terrible problem, but that our solutions to date do less good than other known solutions.

(2) Preventative efforts get you more bang for the buck than cures. Obvious, no? But this would indicate that malaria nets and HIV prevention should far outrank HIV cures or medical treatments.

If global warming is a touchy subject for you, ignore that part. The rest of the talk is fascinating and honest.

It is true, occasionally rain does fall in the fine, dusty city of Los Angeles.   Not ‘drizzle’,’sprinkle’ or the laughable ‘falling mist’, but true rain does fall about 3-4 times a year.

At which point the drivers go insane.

LA drivers do one of two things in the rain: ignore it completely and pretend that nothing is happening or freak out and drive with whitened knuckles at a third the speed limit.  People, work with me here.

Last night I was driving home on the 2 freeway and I see a guy in a big black suburban barrel in from the on ramp.  He’s pushing 75, engine rumbling like it’s proof of his virility,  straight into a huge pool of water that (of course) tends to fill up by the side of the freeway when it rains.  So he hits this huge pool and waterplanes, skimming his steel behemoth over the water, his wheels turning back and forth helplessly as he tries to push his steroid fueled muscles through the steering wheel to the asphalt somewhere below.   Ok, so I can’t prove he was juiced- stay with me.  Soon enough his wheels touch ground again and his suburban jack-knifes briefly before coming in to a roughly straight line with the freeway.  Dumbass then guns it (because he lost some speed while he was skimming) and climbs back up to 75 while I give him lots, and lots of room.

sigh.

One more thing- earlier that day my soccer game was canceled (canceled!) because of the rain.  Have you pansies ever heard of England?  What do you think they do when it rains!?!   grrrr. sigh.

‘nuf said.

I’ve started a philosophical tangent from my last post. If my random walk does not interest you, a blog called “Random Stuff” should have warned you off.

Here goes: Society has within it two constantly warring camps- the camps of Agree and Disagree.

The Agree camp wants everyone to get along, do the “right thing”, obey moral codes, etc. This is championed by the corporations (get a job, work 9-5, be stable), the religions (go to church, be faithful, don’t sin), and the family life (settle down, raise kids, be a good parent).

The Disagree camp wants to throw the bird to all the people that are keeping them down. This camp is best represented by artists and rebels of all flavors, the rockers, the actors, the start-up programmer in his garage, the writers typing furiously on lonely hilltops, national geographic photographers spending 5 years tracking down that elusive parrot, etc. They are going to do what they love and damn the man, damn the money, damn the consequences. This camp (sadly) is also represented by the criminals, the drug addicts, the promiscuous, who also say damn the man and damn the consequences but don’t do much useful with all that spare time they’ve freed up.

Both camps have something to say for them. They also have something going against them. The conflict comes about because single decisions (get a job, go on safari, raise kids, join a rock band) have good aspects as well as bad aspects. You can either agree with the decision, or disagree, but there is good and bad in any single decision.

This is what makes life so interesting. “What shall I do today? Shall I go to work and be a good husband? Or am I going to stay home and do what I think I should do, what I want?”

I think this post coming in at 10:35am on a workday should answer that question, but then again, I do work for “The Man”…