Year: 2011 Page 7 of 11

Day 35 of 1000

I am not one of those guys who hates birthdays and/or their age.  I turned 56 on Saturday, a bunch of which I spent driving across the beautiful North Carolina countryside between Raleigh and Charlotte.  It rained hard for about forty minutes of a four hour trip in that way that North Carolina’s understand and can handle, but that is completely foreign to us immigrants from the Willamette Valley in Oregon.  Still, it was a great trip, especially with my new birthday travel mug (Thank you, Andrew!  It really does keep coffee hot for six hours!).  Still the rest of the trip was just perfect for driving.  The kids worked on homework, slept some, and we talked a lot on both legs of the trip.  It was very, very nice.

We went to a church convention.  We meet lots of new people at those kinds of events and when people find out that Kelly is a statistics major, they invariably ask here what she will do with a statistics degree.  It is a very good question.  There are lots of opportunities for statisticians in lots of different fields (bioinformatics, economics, manufacturing, internet data mining, marketing, etc.).  The problem is that, in Kelly’s case, this is the wrong question to ask.  Kelly studies statistics as a base for a graduate degree.  She has no plans to work as a statistician, but views statistics as a hard science degree that provides tools that are useful in whatever other field she might study whether it be marketing, political science, journalism, history, sociology, or any of a myriad of other fields that require statistics for their research.

Our buddy Andrew knows where Kelly wants to go with her degree, so he sent us this link.  It is a book about statistics.  More specifically, it is a book about how to use statistics in real-world situations.  This is exactly what we talked about on our trip.  Kelly’s desire is not to be a statistical guru, but to be a guru in some other field that interests here with a profound understanding of the use of statistics in that field.  This book shows how to use a set of Python libraries to perform statistical analysis and present statistical data graphically.  I downloaded the book, the data sets, and the example programs because it looked so interesting.  I think Kelly will continue to work in R as that is a tool more commonly used in her world, but if this book is good enough, I will maybe walk through it with her during the summer.

Day 32 of 1000

This blog is well over seven years old now.  This is 1740th post.  The only thing I wanted to do with this blog is keep a record of our homeschool.  It has served its purpose quite well in that regard.  I quit blogging for several months after the kids started college, but old habits die hard.  The blog helps me focus my thoughts and efforts, I have a very small, but fairly active following, and I enjoy writing, so I thought I would refocus it on something new.  I am writing 5-6 times per week again and enjoying myself, but the blog is a little unfocused.

Reasonable Faith, the William Lane Craig book I read while I walk in the evenings is heavy reading so I though I would take a break and read something a little lighter.  I have never really read anything about blogs and blogging although I follow a good number of blogs every day.  I thought I might do some reading to help me find some focus.  There is a list of books (click on the “Required Reading” tab here) for the Convergence Journalism program at the World Journalism Institute Kelly wants to join, some required, some optional.  One of the optional books is Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing the World by Hugh Hewitt.  That is the book I decided to read, so I downloaded it to my Nook Color Wednesday evening and have read about ninety pages so far.

I used to be a pretty big Hugh Hewitt fan.  I enjoy his interview style more than just about any radio interviewer with the exception of Bill Bennett.   I like the book OK and used to read his blog daily, but he has the same problem as his buddies at the Power Line Blog.  He is a lawyer and has that lawyerly affection that permeates his interviews, writing, and radio commentary.  Intellectual rigor in legal analysis is the domain of lawyers.  There are two things in the book that reinforced my reasons for having deleted the bookmark to his blog from my browser.  First, he is a hard-core establishment Republican, establishment Christian, establishment lawyer, and knee jerk Mitt Romney fan-boy.  Second, he appears to believe the intellectual rigor required to be a lawyer somehow provides lawyers with analytical skills suited for interviewing skills, commentary, and research on topics for which lawyers are not trained.  What he might not understand is that some of his commentary on non-lawyerly topics, in its naivete and establishment smugness, can probably only be appreciated by other lawyers while those with skills and training in those topics cringe.  This is frustrating because my worldview is almost exactly the same as his on virtually everything else.

All that being said, I think he is a sincere and thoughtful man.  I am enjoying the book and recommend, if for nothing else, as a historical record of some very cool events that mark the rise of the blog and the demise of the Main Stream Media.

Day 31 of 1000

Kelly needs to write and publish as many blog, newspaper, and magazine articles as possible to refine her skills:  interviewing, writing, editing etc.  She needs to build a portfolio to help her win future opportunities.  Last week, she signed up with an organization whose charter is to help young journalists of a certain political bent (pretty much in line with Kelly’s bent) to hone their skills and prepare for careers in journalism.  We were very surprised that a couple of days after she signed up, she got a call from one of the editors with an assignment.  Actually, it was a very interesting assignment.  Kelly and I will write more about this after we see if it comes to fruition, but both of us have been scrambling.

Kelly has to contact and interview high mucky mucks and mucky muck wannabes in Washington D.C. by telephone.  She needs to get some quotes so she wants to record the calls.  The first thing we had to do was find out whether it is legal to record phone calls.  It turns out that there are generally two kinds of laws that cover this sort of thing in the U.S.  More than half the states have what is called “one-party consent” laws.  That is, only one of the parties in a phone call has to consent for the call to be recorded.  The rest of the states require that both parties to a call must give their consent for it to be legal to record.  For interstate calls, it is best to err on the side of maximum disclosure.  Fortunately, I found a website that shows that both Washington D.C. and North Carolina are both one-party consent states, so she does not have to declare that she is recording for this article.

Next we had to find a recording device.  We have the great “professional journalist” recorder on its way.  Unfortunately, the recorder is not scheduled to arrive for a few more days, so Kelly will use her laptop as a recorder until then.  I had to find a device that would get the stuff going into and out of the phone into the recording device.  We found the EXACT right device down at Radio Shack.  It is the Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device pictured at the left.  Lorena and I ran down to pick it up while the kids studied after dinner, but Christian and I could not figure out how the silly thing worked.  It seems like a device like this would require at least two plugs:  one for the recording device and one for the phone.  As you can see, it only has one.

After about fifteen minutes we gave up and read the instructions.  All you do is plug the jack into the recording device and put the ear plug in your ear.  If you look closely, you can see that there is a little microphone on the opposite side of the ear plug from the end that goes into your ear.  When you hold your phone up to your ear, both ends of the conversation go into the microphone where the signal is sent down the cable to the recording device and through the earplug speaker into your ear.  It works AWESOME.

We will keep you posted on how Kelly’s new writing gig works out if and when it comes to fruition.

Radio station note:  The person who called Kelly into the interview at the radio station got laid off so Kelly is in limbo with respect to her radio station internship.  She already jumped through all the required hoops at her school–they will give her credit for the internship spring semester, but now she has to figure out whether they still want her.  She sent an email to one of the hosts.  We will keep you posted on that, too.

Day 30 of 1000

Kelly’s education plan has started to solidify.  The end goal is to get into the best Journalism Masters Degree program possible.  Her planned undergraduate degree is Statistics, so that means she will have to work pretty hard to get some Journalism experience if she wants to make the jump from hard science/math to a social science.  She wants to go to the World Journalism Institute as part of that plan.  The program is called Convergence Course:  Backpack Journalism in a Digital Age.  The thing that is cool about it is that it covers a bunch of different types of media that requires a bunch of different types of technology.  There is a whole web page that describes what is required. 

You can see the required list of equipment and software if you click on the “Required hardware/software” tab of the course webpage.  I do not want to steal her thunder so I will let her describe what she is doing over on her blog when she gets to it.

The reason I brought all this up is that have been forced into buying some cool new technology that I could in no other way justify.  We decided to purchase some of the stuff now, so she could start practicing.  There is a bunch of software, a lot of which we already have, but there are two fairly big hardware items other than the computer that we felt like she could use to help her prepare some of the materials required to get accepted into the class.  They turned out to be way neater than I expected.  The first is a professional reporters portable voice recorder.  We got one of the ones they recommended which is shown to the left.  It is called a Zoom H2 and has more features than I would have thought possible for a simple voice recorder.

The other item is a portable video camera that is just as cool.  It is the Aiptek A-HD+ 1080P Digital Camcorder pictured at the right.  We have enough software to get her going with these two devices, but she will need to buy more if she gets into the course.  All of these devices require SD cards so I bought one additional 8GB card, but I think I am going to buy one or two more after that.  We thought it would be a great idea for her to have them now so she could practice with them for a few months and generate the blog posts she needs to even be able to apply for the program.

I think I am more excited than Kelly.  I hope she lets me play with this stuff a little.

Day 29 of 1000

I walk around my neighborhood most nights for forty minutes or so.  There is a loop that is almost exactly one mile, so I go at least two laps.  I need to kick it up a notch to 3-5 laps like I did most of the summer.  I listened to podcasts and audio books on my Zen Stone Plus (awesome product, but we think the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ is even better) as I walked, but wanted a change, so I decided to try to read my Nook Color Android Tablet instead.  It is a quiet neighborhood with not too much traffic, so it has worked at pretty well.  I have met a lot more of my neighbors because of my walks than in the previous three years.  I like it a lot.

I am currently reading William Lane Craig‘s Reasonable Faith while I walk.  I am a little over a quarter of the way through the book.  Up until last night, the book covered Christian philosophers (Augustine, Aquinas, through Barth, Bultmann, Plantinga, etc.) and their proofs for the existence of God.  It is an area where I had not previously done a lot of reading, so it was very interesting.  It is not light reading and I am sure I would have been completely lost if it were not for Craig’s clear prose.  It is impressive that there is such an ancient, clear defense for the existence of God.  While you cannot do justice to such a large topic in a single book chapter, Craig does an admirable job of hitting the high points and laying out the big picture.

Last night, I got to the section that covers the Kalam Cosmological Argument and other arguments that engage with empirical cosmological work performed by Einstein, Hawking, Guth, and other physicists and mathematicians.  It was a pretty heavy read, too, but Craig made it tractable.  It was dark and the stars were out during the second half of my walk.  He covers the life of the universe from the Big Bang and Planck time to heat death.  He explains why neither an actual infinite nor an infinite regress of events is possible.  He talks about the fact that one can not really talk about what happened before the Big Bang in a temporal sense because time and space did not exist until the Big Bang.  He explained that the expansion of the universe is not expansion of material into new areas of space, but the expansion of space itself.  All these topics and much more provide a foundation for Craig’s vigorous and rigorous defense of a couple arguments for the existence of God.

Walking in the dark with the stars overhead, this all made me feel very small and insignificant.  Maybe it gave me a little more appreciation for the greatness of God.

Day 28 of 1000

Steven Brill is a liberal guy who wrote a book about government schools in a America.  Bill Bennett had him on his morning talk show this morning.  Both Bennett and Brill agreed that (very roughly), about one third of the teachers in a school are great, about one third are adequate, and about one third are mediocre with one fourth of the last category that should be replaced because they are pretty much worthless.  Then Brill made the point that every fourth grade teacher in an elementary school knows which third grade teacher is not doing her job.  That is a very astute observation that might be worth some research.  I am trying to think about this kind of thing in terms of how to improve the education system and is not just as another reason to homeschool.  I do not believe any more than five percent of the population will ever homeschool, so we need to figure out how to make our education system work.

He also made the point that a lot of money gets sucked up by duplication of administration.  His point was that when there are many small school districts, money unnecessarily goes to Superintendents, sub-superintendents, transportation system duplication, etc.  While this is true, it completely misses the point.  This Heritage Foundation report shows money is not the problem.  For me, the only take-away from the comments made by Brill is that the system is not just broken, but very broken.  The answer to this problem requires more than just shuffling money and control around within the government school system.  It requires something like the bold experiment currently under way in Indiana.  But that is a discussion for another day.

I love Otis Redding.  I listen to him quite a lot these days on Pandora.  Pandora (the subscription my niece gave me was my best Christmas present, ever) selects songs that are similar to the songs you have already identified that you like and then plays them to give you an opportunity.  This morning, they played a cover of an old Otis Redding song titled These Arms of Mine by Tab Benoit and Jimmy Thackery.  If you like Otis Redding and blues ballads, it does not get much better than this.  Tab Benoit is amazing.

Tab Benoit & Jimmy Thackery LRBC 06 ” These Arms Of Mine “

Day 26 of 1000

We made a pretty big break-through in our thousand day plan yesterday.  For the kids that plan entails, not only getting an undergraduate degree in something hard, but doing other stuff that will help them get a job in something they love when they are out of school.  The kids both know what they want to do.  I believe that is a gift; I certainly did not know what I wanted to do when I was their age.  Christian has had some amazing opportunities along that should help lead him where he wants to go–acceptance into college at age 14, an amazing engineering internship, volunteer research at the NCSU BAE lab among other things.

Kelly, even though she knows what she wants to do and has pushed hard to get there, has really not had as many breakthrough opportunities.  I have not known what to tell her, so when she gets a little discouraged, I tell her to keep pushing and things will happen.  I tell them that at the end of every semester when there is not enough time for all the tests, reports, speeches, and homework.  Just keep pushing to the end and it will end well.  All of us have to do that.  Four people pushing is better than one.

Kelly has kept pushing and we have had our little breakthroughs–work as a reporter on the school paper, an opportunity to write some articles for her hometown paper, her comic strip.  We have hope now that something bigger is happening.  She sent in a resume on Thursday and had a great interview on Friday for an internship that will take place either through this semester or fall semester if we can get all the paperwork and approvals worked out at the school.  If we keep working hard to make it work, more opportunities will present themselves.  I will talk more about this great opportunity when I can.

It surely feels like we are returning to a more normal life.  Kelly, Christian, and I sit here at the NCSU Hill Library (need I rave anymore about what a great place it is to sit, drink coffee, work, and watch people on a Saturday morning), the kids hard at work on research for papers they have to write while I work on a side machine vision programming project for which I hope to receive payment in the form of a computer for Christian.  Lorena is off at CostCo, buying food for the week.  This kind of work is really a joy to me.  Actually, it is a joy to all of us.  Writing code to the sound of Jerry Garcia singing Ripple on Pandora.  Good stuff.

Garcia/Grisman – Ripple – Warfield Theater – 12/08/91

Day 25 of 1000

My daughter, Kelly, wants to work as a journalist.  We both agree a that a journalism (or any other liberal arts) undergraduate degree is not the best way to learn anything of value, especially in a government run school.  So she wants to get as much journalism experience as possible as she works her way through a math and/or statistics degree^*.  She works as a reporter on the staff of the community college newspaper, writes in her blog 3-4 days per week, practices her cartoons and caricatures, and plans to apply for some summer programs like the World Journalism Institute to get need experience for entry into a Journalism Masters Degree.  She needs to get as much media experience as possible so when she heard about a job as an intern at a local radio station, she applied for the job.  The show producer wrote an email back to her about 15 minutes after she sent in her resume and cover letter.  She just texted me that she is walking into the interview right now and will call me back as soon as it is over.

^*She and I think that statistics might be a good base for a lot of things journalists need to understand.  Things like political polling, consumer confidence, internet popularity, and all different kinds of research (sociology, psychology, economics, climate, education) require a good understanding of statistics.  She will be able to study sample survey methodology, experimental design, trend analysis and a bunch of other topics important to a lot of things she might report.

Day 24 of 1000

I get into work a little earlier than everyone else at the place where I work.  A couple of the other early risers usually stop by my desk after they get their coffee to talk for a few minutes.  One of the guys who stops by is a PhD chemist from Moscow State University in Russia.  This is his first job in the private sector after he did a couple of post-docs at University of Texas and University of Houston.  We have very interesting discussions about a wide range of topics.  He often speaks about life in Russia compared to life here in the United States.  There are some great things about life in Russia, but there are big challenges, too.

Stepan currently lives in an apartment with his wife and little girls.  I asked him why he does not buy a house.  Of course there are economic reasons, but those are balanced with the consideration that he and the vast bulk of people in Moscow have never lived in anything other than a small apartment.  His plan is to stay in a small apartment long enough to get a HUGE down payment together for a house.  Stepan views his apartment as wildly opulent relative to the apartments where he lived as he grew up.  He said he would be very happy to live there for the rest of his life, but will get a house when the time is right.

I asked him where his kids play.  He said they never stay in the apartment.  They do not even have a television.  On weekends they go to parks, museums, libraries, and a host of other public places where the kids can plan and run to their hearts content.  I met his wife and kids at this years company picnic.  What wonderful little family.  I think I have had the wrong attitude about houses for my entire house.  As soon as I can downsize, I want to do that.  Then Lorena and I will start getting out more–maybe even in time for my second childhood.

Day 23 of 1000

Kelly’s blog is getting very, very interesting and will attract a following as soon as people figure out that she is writing AND illustrating here very other worldly experience at the community college.  The writing is great, but she is getting to be quite a good caricaturist, too.  There is a summer journalism program she wants to attend that requires her to, among other things, keep a topical blog and write some newspaper articles.  She submitted her first article to the school newspaper and has an opportunity lined up with the Albany Democrat Herald where we used to live in Oregon.  She is engaged and definitely working hard on all this.

The article that goes with the drawing at the left is titled Science Fiction and is quite good.  I definitely need to show her how to use the new scanner so that we can get better images of the things she draws.  I think I will try to do that tonight.  She continues to draw and definitely wants to get her Betty Blonde comic going again even if it is only one day per week.  The problem is that with 17 credit hours that include Calculus III and a bunch of classes that require lots of writing and reading, she does no have a whole lot of time.  She really needs to continue her caricaturing because it makes her blog so much more attractive.  And, of course, she has an active social life, too, so that is distracting and time consuming, too.

We had a super talk about her career path last night.  She knows where she is going and has headed up the path–a hard degree first (math and statistics) followed by a journalism or political science graduate degree at the best school that will accept her interspersed with whatever internships and special summer programs she can find and where they will accept her.  I mentioned that she does not have to do it this way.  It would be fine to do something completely different.  She confirmed that this is, in fact, exactly what she wants to do–create a career path that allows her to engage in public discourse about “big” topics, cartoon, caricature, and write.

Day 23 of 1000

Kelly’s blog is getting very, very interesting and will attract a following as soon as people figure out that she is writing AND illustrating here very other worldly experience at the community college.  The writing is great, but she is getting to be quite a good caricaturist, too.  There is a summer journalism program she wants to attend that requires her to, among other things, keep a topical blog and write some newspaper articles.  She submitted her first article to the school newspaper and has an opportunity lined up with the Albany Democrat Herald where we used to live in Oregon.  She is engaged and definitely working hard on all this.

The article that goes with the drawing at the left is titled Science Fiction and is quite good.  I definitely need to show her how to use the new scanner so that we can get better images of the things she draws.  I think I will try to do that tonight.  She continues to draw and definitely wants to get her Betty Blonde comic going again even if it is only one day per week.  The problem is that with 17 credit hours that include Calculus III and a bunch of classes that require lots of writing and reading, she does no have a whole lot of time.  She really needs to continue her caricaturing because it makes her blog so much more attractive.  And, of course, she has an active social life, too, so that is distracting and time consuming, too.

We had a super talk about her career path last night.  She knows where she is going and has headed up the path–a hard degree first (math and statistics) followed by a journalism or political science graduate degree at the best school that will accept her interspersed with whatever internships and special summer programs she can find and where they will accept her.  I mentioned that she does not have to do it this way.  It would be fine to do something completely different.  She confirmed that this is, in fact, exactly what she wants to do–create a career path that allows her to engage in public discourse about “big” topics, cartoon, caricature, and write.

Day 22 of 1000

GaugeCam is a project that positions cameras in remote locations to measure things.  It is really pretty easy to put cameras in locations where power and internet connectivity is available, but when a camera is needed to measure something 24/7 in a location that requires cell or satellite connectivity, the problem is much more difficult and/or expensive.  The problem is that it requires power to transmit images via a cell phone connection.  It also requires power to drive lighting at night.  It is possible to couple batteries with expensive gas powered generators or relatively large solar power generators, but that is very expensive.

GaugeCam’s first remote system placed in a tidal marsh in North Carolina is a complete standalone setup with a cell phone connection and a quite small solar panel that provides all the necessary power for camera operation, image transmissions, and nighttime infrared lighting.  The first camera got placed in the marsh a couple of weeks before Hurricane Irene hit.  The mechanical setup survived pretty well, but the camera casing had a few problems, so was sent back to the manufacturer with whom we work very closely, for modifications to handle that kind of abuse.  Our leader, Andrew Brown has just started hooking the marsh camera up to the internet.  There are graphs there, but it is not yet a live feed.  It should go live within the next week or so.

Note:  My buddy Lyle over at RWDub’s Reviews is going to start working on building BleAx for Linux.  I am looking forward to seeing how he does.

Day 21 of 1000

Our family went away this weekend to a church convention.  I had a very interesting discussion with a friend this weekend about school, mostly in regard to where our daughter Kelly will go for her undergraduate degree that will give her a good likelihood to get into a great graduate school.  My friend commented that many who start at a big name school such as Stanford, Dartmouth, or Harvard as Christians, are not longer Christians by the time they graduate.  That has certainly been true with respect to our family.

Then, when I got home Sunday evening, I read a blog post on National Review by Victor Davis Hanson about some very foolish and immoral remarks made by Paul Krugman.  You need to read the whole thing to get the full impact of Krugman’s bigotry.  This is from VDH’s column:

In this regard, most unfortunate was the blog posting (replete with all the tired formulaic slurs about “fake heroes,” “hijacking of the atrocity,” “neocons,” etc.) by Paul Krugman today that reprehensibly scoffed, “The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame.” It most surely has not. Such an unhinged view would imply that we would have escaped comparable serial attacks without the provisions we took, and that Krugman’s view was widely shared by liberal politicians who at least since 2009 were invested with the ultimate responsibility of governance. Untrue on both accounts, as we just saw in Vice President Biden’s moving speeches about the act of war once declared on us by these “stateless actors” and his thanks to a previous administration for crafting a successful response. 

Next, I got out Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals because I noticed it said the book talked about Noam Chomsky.  I read the book a long time ago, but did not remember that he talked about Chomsky, so I wanted to find that part of the book and reread it.  Johnson exposed, Chomsky’s full buffoonery, in context in the 3-4 pages dedicated to how he believes his knowledge of linguistics qualified him to talk about the morality of the Vietnam war.  Wow.

All of these guys (including VDH, the one good guy) studied or taught at elite schools like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.  It gives me great pause about whether I would want my children under the tutelage of these men or their ilk.  We have to make these decisions sooner rather than later.

Day 18 of 1000

I downloaded a talk by Os Guinness to my Zen Stone Plus MP3 player from the Veritas website.  I listened to it during my walk last night.  He told a story about Guinness Beer at the beginning of his talk.  I looked him up later and found out he is the great-great-great-grandson of the guy that started the Guinness brewing company in Dublin, Ireland.  He said some stuff that I thought was very good and that I needed to hear.  The main thing he talked about was truth.  He drew a sharp contrast between those who believe in absolute truth and those who believe truth is relative.

One particular point, struck me as something I want to do not only because it will help me in my own life, but because it is the right thing to do.  He said that some people shape truth to fit their desires.  He referred to Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals, a book that describes the miserable and morally bankrupt lives of people such as Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Rousseau, and others who devoted their lives to the shaping of “truth” to conform to their desires.  I read that book about fifteen years and was so impressed with it that I had both Kelly and Christian as part of their homeschool.

The idea that truth is malleable is the defacto position of the bulk of society and is actively and aggressively taught in the bulk of the government schools in the country.  Guinness did a great job in establishing that a life lived with such a worldview leads to misery and pain.  Johnson did it in more exhaustively in his book.  Os Guinness recommends that absolute truth demands that people shape their desires to fit the truth.  He was quite convincing that people who live that way lead better and happier lives.  He said life dedicated to truth can be much more difficult in the short term, but pays off even in this life, but especially in eternity.

Note:  I am really, really glad I went for a walk and did not listen to the Obama speech last night.  It appears to have been another non-proposal with nothing written down.  Half of a trillion dollars in new spending with a promise that it would be paid for with tax increases.  Lots of spoken, not written down specifics about how to spend the money and only a promise for specifics on how it would be paid at a later date.

Day 17 of 1000

Kelly and I stayed up late to listen to the Republican debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.  The biggest losers in the debate were Politico, MSNBC, and the debate moderators.  There was not even a pretense of balance in the questions they asked.  Newt Gingrich made great use of that fact.  It would be great to be able to vote for a guy like that:  smart, experienced, able to make and complete a solid plan.  The problem is that the choices he has made in his personal life and even some of his associations (the ad he made with Nancy Pelosi on climate change) make him untrustworthy in the eyes of too many people, including me.  The Ricks, Santorum and Perry were solid but not stellar.  I think Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann  are done.  I love them both, but they just do not come off as presidential.  Ron Paul, as usual, said crazy things mixed with a couple of nuggets worth keeping–mostly having to do with getting the government out of our lives.  He should not be there.

The legacy media favorites, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman continue to look like snake oil salesmen.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out why any conservative would vote for either of them.  Romney has held positions that are for abortion, special rights for homosexuals, and individual mandates for health insurance.  Many believe he gets way more credit than he should for the Salt Lake City Olympics having arrived after all the heavy lifting was done.  Huntsman’s record is actually more solid than Romney’s, but he worked for Obama and is absolutely looney-tunes on climate change and evolution.  I do not trust either of them.

Right now, I am a Rick Perry guy.  I might switch to Palin if she jumps in, but even if she does, it would take something special to get me to switch from Perry.

This post is why I like Victor Davis Hanson WAY better than John Derbyshire.  I get the satisfaction of good writing about the evils of our education system (something on which Derbyshire is not so bad) without the pretensions strawman arguments and pseudo-math-geek posts for which Derbyshire is so infamous.

Day 16 of 1000

Anyone who has read this blog knows I am a big fan of higher education.  John Miller of National Review Online pointed to an article about Rick Perry’s record on higher education in such a way to make me believe it held some valid arguments about. Rick Perry’s record on higher education.  It was written by a Jessica Huseman, a Journalism student.  The article was filled with quotes about the apocalyptic changes Rick Perry is making to the Texas higher education system. This was the money quote for me:

“Running a university like a business is ridiculous,” Wintz said. “Since
social sciences or arts research doesn’t generate a lot of money,
should that just go away? Should we just focus on research that will
make money for universities? I think that is a mistake.”

No one is talking about making the social sciences and arts research “go away”, but the amount of funding should be tied to their contribution in terms of dollars.  One huge problem with higher education is that such a heavy focus is put on social sciences and the arts that there is not enough time to focus on math, chemistry, and physics.  I am a big fan of true liberal arts education where students get a well rounded education that includes the arts, literature, government, philosophy, etc.  The problem is that the arts and social sciences often crowd out math, chemistry, and physics in many of the liberal arts degrees offered in America today.

To her credit, Huseman started quoting a more reasoned voice or two toward the end of the article.  I am liking Rick Perry more and more all the time.  Especially when he is talking about that $10K thing.

How cool is that??!?  She took second place in the Women’s 40-49 age group in a race that took place on Sunday at Storm Lake, Iowa under the name of Sarah Heath from Des Moines, Iowa.

Day 15 of 1000

Even though I wish I had something a little more exciting about which to write, I should not complain.  We had a great weekend, the central element being Christian’s sixteenth birthday.  Kelly worked pretty hard on most of her projects–math homework, caricature drawing, and college applications.  I really have nothing much to say in terms of commentary about Rick Perry.  I put up the drawing because I think Kelly did a good job on it.

Kelly worked hard on her college application essay(s).  She completed everything she needs for NCSU except for the principle “why am I applying her” essay.  She should finish that in the next couple of days.  She needs to put her writing into high gear because she has her first newspaper article to write for the school newspaper, a bunch of reports for several classes, and her blog which will be evaluated for possible acceptance in a Journalism summer program in New York City either this coming summer or the one after that.