Year: 2015 Page 9 of 13

Bring Your Kids to Work Day presentation

By Dad

On Monday, April 27, 2015

In Education, Work

My company held the very best “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” program of any company at which I have worked. Several of the guys gave talks, the kids were fed lunch and snacks and there were great activities. What really impressed me is that the kids were well behaved and very engaged with the talks we gave them. That is me above talking to the kids about machine vision. I talked to one kid, a senior in high school, after my talk for quite awhile. He was into Python programming and robotics–sharp and engaged kid. This has inspired me to do another section or two of Our Homeschool Story. The next section is on what we did during the elementary school years and I will be diving into the mechanics of it all. I searched through my stuff and found some of our old weekly work spreadsheets that put me into pretty nostalgic mood. I am looking forward to writing about it.

Betty Blonde #309 – 09/23/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

The faux happiness of the Danes

By Dad

On Sunday, April 26, 2015

Who would have thought I would be writing so much about the social situation of the Nordic countries? Maybe it is because they are heading for tragedy and tragedies are fascinating. This latest was inspired by a comment Kelly made that pointed to an article in the Atlantic about how the Danes are always at or very close to the very top of the self-identified happiness list. This interesting article says it ain’t so:

A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: They also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture: “It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.”

Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: “In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.”

I suppose there is nothing wrong with such a monolithic culture. I certainly grew up in such a culture here in Oregon. This really reminds me of the current zeitgeist of the establishment educational mono-culture in the west. I do not think anything is improved with the very specific kinds of acceptable “diversity” of race, artificial gender boundaries and political thought enforced in so many draconian ways in so many of the universities in the western world today. That kind of diversity is not really diverse. It creates a false knowledge about what is “right” coupled with a grating smugness that will be the death of western culture unless something is done to change it.

I believe in absolute truth. There is a right way to think and be. When a culture, whether it be that of the Danes or an entire educational system is monolithically wrong about what is right and demand that others conform to their sense of it all, unhappiness well ensue. It might not be in the short term, but it will happen.

There is a quote from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle that pretty much captures these ideas, “No! Alike and equal are not the same thing at all!”

Betty Blonde #308 – 09/22/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Education in Finland: Homeschool is embraced, but government school is not so bad

By Dad

On Saturday, April 25, 2015

In Education, Homeschool

Finland (a Nordic country, but arguably not a Scandinavian one), does a pretty good job at education. I was reminded of that when I found this article that provides a wonderful description of the educational philosophy in Finland. The article explains the Finn’s belief that less is more and how that manifests itself in terms of educational excellence. The whole culture seems to be permeated with the idea that less is more and in some cases I am sure that is true. The article suggests that philosophy is applied to everything. Whether that is good or bad is a point of contention, sometimes more really is more and better such as in faith, grace, love and Texas. Nevertheless, I certainly believe the less is more philosophy really is better when it comes to education–especially when compared to how government and other traditional schools do it here in the United States.

The funny deal is that with far and away the best educational system in the Nordic countries, Finland embraces and facilitates homeschooling while the other countries have much worse educational systems coupled with backward and draconian, bordering on barbaric, homeschool laws. The Asian/Tiger Mom model gets great test results but it has been argued that it drains the creativity out of its students after ten or so years of rote memorization and formulaic learning while the minimalistic, homeschooling Finnish model does not.

In reading this, I like to think, maybe, my Finnish roots animated some of our educational decisions. At least that is going to be my story.

Betty Blonde #307 – 09/21/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Happiness vs. Suicide

By Dad

On Friday, April 24, 2015

The World Happiness Report for 2015 just came out. That report always seemed a little bogus to me, kind of whistling as you walk past the graveyard. It is interesting that a lot of the countries that rate very highly in happiness also rate very highly in suicide rate. There were 111 countries in the suicide list, so not one of the “happy” places was in the bottom half of the suicide rate list. Here are the top 10 happiest countries with their suicide rate ranking:

Switzerland: 44
Iceland: 42
Denmark: 41
Norway: 37
Canada: 40
Finland: 21
Netherlands: 53
Sweden: 35
New Zealand: 39
Australia: 49

Conversely a lot of the “unhappy” countries had very low suicide rates. For instance Syria was ranked 3rd from worst in terms of happiness and 8th from best in terms of suicide.

Betty Blonde #306 – 09/18/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

New microscope for “Bring Your Kids to Work Day”

By Dad

On Thursday, April 23, 2015

Desk microscope It is “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” at my new job and I am giving a presentation on Machine Vision to the kids. The range of ages is 7-17, so it is a little hard to target something that will keep everyone interested. I decided to hook up a cheap ~$50 USB microscope to my computer and show them some image processing tools we use. I have been having a blast with the little microscope. I am trying to think of a reason to buy one for home.

I have been programming it for most of the day and believe I will actually be able to use it frequently for my work doing demonstrations and feasibility studies. It hooked right into my software, so now I can run edge filters, blob analysis, morphology and other stuff that I normally do. The camera has a zoom lens (a little bit of a cheesy one) that works really well to look at a fairly broad range of items.

Betty Blonde #305 – 09/17/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Dunning Kruger Effect

By Dad

On Wednesday, April 22, 2015

In culture, Work

Wikipedia has the following definition for the Dunning Kruger Effect paraphrased from a scholarly article by the people who first described it:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

A good friend of mine sent me a quote about this and pointed to a great article in the New York Times that describes it all. We have done some consulting work together with a group of people who are floundering in their effort to solve a hard engineering problem. The main engineer who works on the problem seems to suffer from this phenomena so we feel helpless and do not hold out a lot of hope that the problem will be solved.

This all got me to thinking that I have lived on both sides of that divide–unrecognized incompetence and underrated competence. It is horrifying and, frankly, embarrassing when I think on past projects. In the case of our current project, it was not really the unrecognized incompetence that motivated us to leave the project, it was the arrogance with which it was coupled.

That needs to be a lesson to me. I need to really work on suppressing my inner Ted Baxter.

Betty Blonde #304 – 09/16/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Weekend learning (and setting up to learn)

By Dad

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015

In Education, Software, Technology

This last weekend, I spent most of the weekend taking Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah around and working on the learning/development stuff I have described here over the last few weeks. It has felt like I have been trying to drink through the proverbial fire hose in an effort to learn too much stuff at once, so I have started to break it up into bite-size chunks. When I did that, I realized I needed to do some infrastructure work before I even started. So this weekend, I decided to spend most of my time getting set up to work rather than invest a lot of time in learning. I held to that for the most part; the exception being that I started in on a set of tutorials on how to use GIT.

So, here is what I did:

Decided to use DropBox as a way to back up and share a bunch of stuff (bought a tera-byte for a year).
Set up a web server with WAMP on the new (cheap) desktop computer we had Fry’s make for us (on a special).
Made it available from other places with the help of Duck DNS (awesome free service).
Added an ftp server to that.
Installed Ubuntu LAMP server on the old desktop (32-bit x386)
Set up a GIT repository on that.
Made it available in other places with Duck DNS
Installed R and RStudio on all the computers
Went through the first third of a GIT tutorial because I am so pathetic at that. It was great and I am up and going now.
Added Qt, Qt Creator and OpenCV to the Linux server
Added XMing to my laptop
Learned how to SSH to the Linux box to perform code testing remotely

Next, I am going to start working up the learning curve on Machine Learning with R and continue to code on my previous projects. All-in-all, it was a great weekend. Lorena and I even went out to eat a couple of times. Now, all I have to do is start working in a few walks and my life might arrive at a sense of normalcy again.

Betty Blonde #303 – 09/15/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

The difference between conservatives and liberals

By Dad

On Monday, April 20, 2015

In culture, Politics

A book by a guy named Jonathan Haidt just came out that describes what a lot of data says about the difference between conservatives and liberals. I tend to be pretty skeptical about liberal social research, but the conclusions of this work resonated with me. The premise is summed up in a quote from this article:

According to Haidt’s research, there are five things people care about:

avoidance of harm

fairness

loyalty

authority

sanctity

Conservatives care about all five in equal measure and liberals care about only the first two. Here is a quote from the book, as transcribed by The American Conservative:

“It’s as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning.”

There is a sixth thing which the book claims people care about, but for which liberals have a fundamentally different definition than conservatives. That is liberty. That was particularly enlightening. Here is another quote from this first article I saw on the new book (I read three. The other two are here and here.).

Conservatives tend to view liberty as the notion of being left alone to pursue happiness in whatever way they choose. Liberals tend to view it as the act of creating a level playing field for society’s most vulnerable individuals.

This very much rings true. I need to think about whether this gives me any additional insight about why liberals act they way they act. At first blush, I think it is something that thoughtful people, maybe even some liberals, have intuitively known all along.

Betty Blonde #302 – 09/14/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

War

By Dad

On Sunday, April 19, 2015

In Christianity, Family

I am one of those people who has not had to deal with much suffering in this life. Last night we, Lorena, Grandma Sarah, Grandpa Milo and I, were at the home of some old dear friends, Gary and Dru. Grandpa Milo and his generation fought in the Korean War. Gary, just a few years older than I, fought in the Vietnam War. They were both drafted into the army and had no choice about whether or not they would go to war. My generation, on the other hand, never went to war and, arguably, has done more to foul up our country and turn our culture into an entitlement culture than any previous generation.

We talked about this last night. Gary has been reading in the book of Judges in the bible and pointed out something I had never before noticed. Enemies were left in the land to teach war to the children of Israel who had never faced it.

Judges 2:21-Judges 3:2 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel; and he said, Because that this people hath transgressed my covenant which I commanded their fathers, and have not hearkened unto my voice; I also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died: That through them I may prove Israel, whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk therein, as their fathers did keep it, or not. Therefore the LORD left those nations, without driving them out hastily; neither delivered he them into the hand of Joshua. Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to prove Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan; Only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to teach them war, at the least such as before knew nothing thereof;

We lived just North of Ft. Bragg when we lived in North Carolina and daily rubbed shoulders with many people who had seen war. There is a world of difference between the culture there and the culture in where we find ourselves now in Portland. The only observation I have about this is that for people who have not known or been touched by war, there are many “unknown unknowns” and an unrealistic sense of entitlement that seem to add coarseness to our culture. I count myself among those who have never seen war and want to be wary of thinking I deserve something I do not.

Betty Blonde #301 – 09/11/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Lorena starts planting her garden

By Dad

On Saturday, April 18, 2015

Lorena's first planting session April 2015 She bought a shovel, a few plants and a few other things. She is VERY excited to get started. She planted three tomato plants (1 cherry, 2 regular), radishes, some flowers, basil, rosemary, basil, beets, cucumbers and cilantro. She still has chiles, strawberries, lemon peppers and maybe a few other things. She is quite pleased with herself and much happier when she has a garden.

Betty Blonde #300 – 09/10/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Gardening from an apartment

By Dad

On Friday, April 17, 2015

In House and home

Lorena's community garden To my way of thinking, one of the great benefits of living in a studio apartment in the city is to NOT have a garden or any gardening duties. I should have known Lorena would find a work-around. The first thing she did was put up a flower box on what passes for a balcony in our apartment. When she went down to the city offices for some moving in thing, she found that the City of Wilsonville Parks department rented garden plots for $22 per season that included tilling and water. She signed up on the spot and they called her day before yesterday. She will start planting early next week. I have this eerie feeling I am going to get sucked into the weeding/watering vortex sometime very soon.

Update: Amazing–This is the 299th Betty Blonde comic strip from 9/9/09.

Betty Blonde #299 – 09/09/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Vicks Vapor Rub–the über-cure

By Dad

On Thursday, April 16, 2015

I have a friend and fellow vision engineer, Ann, with whom we have discussed children, pets and pop culture for years. Her kids are a little younger than ours, but incredibly precocious. One of them has become a big fan of all things that have to do with speaking Spanish including, it appears, Mexican culture. I got a HUGE kick out of our chat session yesterday that dealt with a very, very important staple of Mexican life and health:

Ann
So my daughter is obsessed with speaking spanish and all things that go with it. She saw this instagram post about you know you are mexican if you think Vicks Vaporub cures everything. And I started laughing, because I remembered you explaining this to me. She didn’t get it, and she didn’t believe me. Her friends with Mexican Moms confirmed it!!! Thanks for helping me to know more than my teen!! Hope you are having a good week.

Kenneth Chapman
JAJAJAJA!!!! Lorena and the kids are going to LOVE this. In fact, I am going to blog about it!!!
JAJAJAJAJA is the spanish texting version of HAHAHAHAHA!

She also sent me this picture that truly captures the curative powers of Vicks Vapor Rub:

Vicks Vapor Rub cures virtually anything!

Betty Blonde #298 – 09/08/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Intuition at work

By Dad

On Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Christian talks on a semi-regular basis about intuition with respect to the work he does in Mathematics. He started talking like that shortly after he entered his junior year in his Applied Math degree at North Carolina State when he moved from solely applied math to more theoretical stuff, first in an introductory class titled Foundations of Advanced Mathematics and then on to Mathematical Analysis (I think that was an introduction to Real Analysis) and other more theoretical work in Abstract Algebra, etc., etc.

Yesterday the subject of mathematical intuition came up at work. A fellow who did his PhD in the same intensely mathematical area of engineering as Christian talked with me a little bit about what Christian was up against. He said something to the effect that the math of Information Theory (Christian’s area) is very complex, but no more so than other areas of higher math. The problem, he said was that intuitions, for him, in that area of math were much more difficult than the other areas he had studied. We did not have time to get to the underlying reasons for that but now it has me curious. That idea was intimated in the book I read on Information Theory, some of it having to do with the way entropy is defined differently in Information Theory than in Physics. It will be interesting to understand the why of that a little more.

Betty Blonde #297 – 09/07/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

A tutorial on machine learning

By Dad

On Tuesday, April 14, 2015

In Software, Technology

I just found a book, available free online, about machine learning. It has a lot of great recommendations and is in an area where I have yet to advance my skills beyond a beginner level. It is a book Kelly might be able to use if she is not already too advanced. I thought I would start to try to work my way through it. It might finally get me kick-started in this area.

Betty Blonde #296 – 09/04/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Humility is a good thing

By Dad

On Monday, April 13, 2015

In Christianity, Work

Proverbs 18:12 – Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honour is humility.

A couple of events over the last couple of days reminded me of the fact that humility is a marvelous thing. The first was a pair of comments (here and here) made on this blog. A young lady (rightly) castigated me for something I wrote about tuition costs, but she did it in such a humble, complimentary manner, there was no way I could do anything other than appreciate her kindness in giving me the correction. I responded to her and she responded back with an additional comment that just left me very impressed.

In this day and age, when the pride in self is the accepted, even expected, perspective for young people to embrace, she said, “Thank you. I know I’m not the smartest college student out there but I know a lot about the school systems.”

She then goes on to explain that, with hard work (she did not call that out, but that was the crux of the thing), she got a great educational start at a great price. She did all this with an endearing sense of humility leaving me to believe that she must be, at least on some very important levels, one of the smartest college students out there. Intelligence is not immutable, hard work helps and humility is a great quality in any context.

The second event was an engagement, a series of meetings, with a team of engineers working on a hard, very technical image processing problem. Everyone is wracking their brain to figure out a way to solve a problem for which there might be no good solution. The engineer who has worked longest on the problem spends all his time in the meetings explaining how his approach is the scientific approach and that if the other engineers do not cite articles from academia that describe how to do even the most mundane task, there is no reason to try them, well-known, well-tested algorithms in the field. His contribution mostly consists of aggrandizement of his own contributions that have yet to work after six months.

The sadness is that I often find myself adopting the second attitude. It will take humility to over come that.

Betty Blonde #295 – 09/03/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Tuition is getting crazy

By Dad

On Friday, April 10, 2015

In Education, Money

I found an interesting article on the tuition costs for degrees at the different public colleges and universities in Michigan. I was amazed. The cheapest were around $62K while the two most expensive were $85K and 108K with the rest ranging pretty evenly between $62K and $84K. It that is true, we got a screaming good deal. We paid around $2.5K per year per kid for tuition and fees at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh and around $7.5K per year per kid for them to finish up at NCSU. That means, we paid about $10K for community college and $30K for university for a total of $40K. So our kids graduated from what we would argue is the best school in North Carolina (including UNC, Duke, Davidson and Wake Forest, but we are biased) for $20K per kid.

The two lessons I got from that are:

Community college is an amazingly great bargain
North Carolina is a great place to go to college

Oregon is 45th out of 50 in latest measure of economic outlook

By Dad

On Wednesday, April 8, 2015

In culture, Money

The 2015 Alec-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index, Rich States, Poor States report just came out and Oregon is now 45th out of 50. After a seven year absence the state has a feel to us that is rough around the edges prosperity-wise. There is a fairly stark contrast between what it felt like for us to live in Oregon and the upbeat feel of North Carolina and, especially, Arizona.

Betty Blonde #294 – 09/02/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

A few moments to work on GaugeCam (GRIME in Linux)

By Dad

On Tuesday, April 7, 2015

I had a few extra minutes tonight so I got the GaugeCam GRIME program up and running under Linux. Now I have to do the same for the webserver which should take a little more work but not too much. I am looking forward to working on this more.

GaugeCam GRIME running under Linux

Betty Blonde #293 – 09/01/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Driving Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah to church

By Dad

On Monday, April 6, 2015

Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah, my father and mother, currently live in a memory care unit in the Portland area. We live just a little south of Portland and have been meeting with a different church than them. They have declined to the point where they now need us to come and get them to go to our meetings on Sundays and Wednesdays. We got permission from our ministers and will look forward to having more time with them. It is the reason we are in Oregon so we are thankful for the opportunity.

Betty Blonde #292 – 08/31/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Lorena’s Easter eggs

By Dad

On Sunday, April 5, 2015

In Cooking, culture

Lorena's Easter eggs 2015
Lorena has always loved to dye and paint easter eggs. It is no different now that the kids are gone. I know if they were here, the both of them would participate. This is WAY better than Halloween! We even had some deviled eggs for dinner. Come to think of it, Christian made a bunch of them for the game night he had at his apartment last night. Maybe something subliminal was going on for him to think of it.

Betty Blonde #291 – 08/28/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén