For posterity, I thought it would be nice to put up a picture of all of Kelly’s and Christian’s girl cousins in Mexico with Grandma Conchita on her 70th birthday.
Betty Blonde #480 – 06/08/2010
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Year: 2016 Page 12 of 13
Late last night, Christian sent Lorena a Snapchat that reminded me my mind is not as able as it used to be, In some ways, I think that is a good thing–there are lots of good things I can still learn without hurting my brain. He was genuinely excited about it and, having seen this before, I know he will actually read the thing and to the bulk of the exercises. What a great thing. It inspires me to dive back into a learning project or two. In that regard, I found a new Predictive Analytics tool this weekend called RapidMiner that I want to learn how to use. It really looks like the learning curve is not too steep and it is something I could use every day in my job.
So, thanks for the inspiration Christian. I a looking forward to this.
Betty Blonde #479 – 06/07/2010
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This is a photo of Grandma Conchita after church with her two oldest grandchildren the last time she visited Raleigh before we moved to Oregon. She turns 70 today. It is hard for me to express what an incredible gift it is to have her as a mother-in-law. Both Conchita and Grandpa Lauro treated me as one of their own before Lorena and I considered getting married. I know of no one who knows her who is not grateful that Grandma Conchita is in their life, too. Everything bad you have heard about how mothers-in-law treat their sons-in-law is the exact opposite of how I have ever been treated by Grandma Conchita. Thank you for everything Conchita and Happy, Happy Birthday to a great and kind lady.
Betty Blonde #478 – 06/06/2010
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I have been disabused of the notion that “journalists” at the New York Times are anything other than doctrinaire race-baiters for a long time, but it is nice to be reminded now and again why I quit reading them a couple of decades ago. As a member of a Hispanic majority family we have experienced, up close an personal the whole “your not really a Mexican unless you are a liberal value, anglo-male hating victim” (see here and here for a couple of examples). The abjectly racist article in the Times is described in an article by RedState titled New York Times Says Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Are Not Latino. Enjoy.
Betty Blonde #477 – 06/04/2010
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Lorena is off to Seattle again to give Kelly a hand while she is in the race up to the delivery of an oral presentation of a big paper based on her research. I am stuck here by myself to steam over the election. I am glad I have too much stuff to do to pay much attention to the politics. All the news people who made unequivocal statements about what would happen at the Iowa Caucuses are now making just as unequivocal statements about what will happen at the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina. They were completely wrong about Iowa and continue to double down by making a bigger deal out of the third place finisher than the winner who got the greatest amount of votes in Republican history of the event. We will see what happens next, but I am pretty happy I am so busy I cannot pay a whole lot of attention.
Betty Blonde #476 – 06/02/2010
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Red State has an excellent article up on the Iowa Caucuses in particular and politics in general. This article resonates with me very, very much. It is titled Everything that you read today on Iowa is going to be nonsense. Including this. It has a list of truths about this and most other elections. I am going to try to remind myself to return to this article throughout this current election season. Maybe it will help me not to go (completely) insane over the doings of it all. Here are a couple of points I really liked, but all of them are very good:
- Do not fall in love with politicians. Ever. You can like them, you can give them money, you can stump for them, you can even buy one a beer if you’re feeling generous – but never, ever, ever fall in love with one, because you will either end up regretting it, or you will end up being one of those sad, lonely people who everyone selectively avoids.
- Political activism is no substitute for a genuine feeling of self-worth.
My buddy, Mark the Physicist sent me an article about NCSU the other day that made me sad. It seems NCSU wants to ram a hard left wing environmental agenda down the throats of their students. NCSU has its challenges with political correctness that I have documented in a limited way on this blog, but by and large, our kids got an excellent education there. If this kind of nonsense continues to be adopted the kind of education our kids received will disappear quickly. Here is a quote from the article:
Currently, incoming NC State freshmen are required to attend sustainability “orientation.” The university offers a B.S. in environmental sciences, which has a strong sustainability emphasis and teaches students to “recognize the economic and sociopolitical ramifications of the environment.” Numerous courses, as well as workshops and continuing education programs, incorporate sustainability themes. And student support appears to be strong; recently, under the aegis of the administration, student groups were able to ban the use of plastic bags at campus stores. If last week’s town hall meeting was any indication, however, there is a contingent of university leaders, professors, administrators, and students that wants to ratchet up sustainability even more.
There were calls to: create a first-year general education course based solely on sustainability; “train” faculty, staff, and students to be more aware of social and environmental justice issues; and require incoming freshmen to read sustainability books (that’s already happening; last year, incoming students read Jay Erskine Leutze’s environmental justice-themed Stand Up That Mountain). There also was a suggestion to add a sustainability statement to all course syllabi to indicate NCSU’s commitment to the cause. Other proposals were more radical: one person wants to “re-brand NC State as a less conservative and more activist-minded school” and another wants to have sustainability advocates visit local K-12 schools to “plant the seed” of sustainability.
There is hope in North Carolina in spite of this kind of nonsense. A recent article over at Town Hall written by Mike Adams explains how some of the shameful behavior practiced by one North Carolina University has started to be rolled back by the new, more enlightened leadership. Maybe they could now turn their attention to North Carolina State University before it is too late. If they are not careful, they could go the way of the State of Oregon.
Betty Blonde #476 – 06/02/2010
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There is a great article about which I have been meaning to write titled What I’m never going to tell you about homeschooling. Really, it is not about homeschooling. It is about life and parenting. No one has any idea about what will happen to their kids. I think most people have good intentions when it comes to their kids. You might ask why I do not think ALL people have good intentions for their kids and would have to say it is a long conversation, but some of it has to do with the idea that if you are too much about yourself, you probably do not have good intentions for your kids.
We heard all those things people hear about the different stages kids pass through. And our kids have passed through most of them. Now, I am just as apt to be the one telling even though our kids are arguably still going through the last of those “kid” level stages right now. Other “young adult,” “young married,” “middle-aged” and other stages are on the way. The thing I liked about the article was that it addressed the fact that there is not much you can do about how your kids think and live their lives because free will gets in the way. Just because they did good at one stage along the way does not mean they will do well at the next.
My goal in all this is to quit trying to analyze what people do and try to start being more of an encouragement. There is lots of pain we cause ourselves, but sometimes it is really not our fault.
Betty Blonde #475 – 06/01/2010
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I work with a very skilled guy who builds rocket engines for very large “hobby” rocketry projects. It is kind of hard to call them hobby projects because they will often work for a year on a rocket that will reach 100,000 ft. He runs off to Nevada once or twice per year to join other groups of rocketeers to fire off their rockets together. I thought of him when I ran into this very, very interesting article titled In Search of the First Rocket Man. The title says it all. It talks about early rocket inventors in China, the US and Italy. It is crazy stuff, a great read and it really inspires the imagination. It probably goes a long way in explaining why the percentage of the people in the world who are engineers is so small–they keep killing themselves off.
Betty Blonde #474 – 05/27/2010
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This article titled Eichmann begged for mercy before hanging was very, very interesting, but very, very sad, too. It speaks for itself. May we never forget.
Betty Blonde #473 – 05/24/2010
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I have a new friend at work who does some very cool hobby projects. He is a homeschool dad with four girls and an amazing ability to teach. He created an Instructable with a video on how to control a disk drive stepper motor with a Raspberry Pi connected to a motor drive. You can find the instructable here. The video and descriptive material (complete with links to materials and ancillary information) speak for themselves.
Betty Blonde #472 – 05/05/2010
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Lorena heard a conversation between a group of middle aged women talking about their kids college choices on her train ride home last Saturday. It seems one of their priorities was for the kids to go to universities with really good football teams. The entire sports culture in America these days seems a little bit crazy. One of my biggest regrets about my high school and college days is how much my studies suffered because I spent so much time focused on sports. I think the problem is that like any other area that, in moderation, can be great, but as a vocation, even at the highest levels, is a waste of time. It is not like art or music with things created that take on lives of their own long after the artist or musician is gone. Sports is irrelevant the minute the game ends.
The sad part is so many kids get caught up in what really amounts to very small time, worthless endeavors. I am talking about the kid that plays college basketball, football, track wrestling or baseball whether the school is big or small. The commitment is so great it is not possible to get a good education while doing it. Of course there are exceptions–I work with a Stanford football player who is a great engineer, but most kids do their stint as a player then spend the rest of their lives mourning for their glory years, doing a job they hate because they got a weak education and pushing their own kids into the same hamster wheel existence. Worse, for all the talk about sports building character, there is little to no evidence of that character anywhere but when young kids are involved and even that fails much of the time. Again, there are exceptions, but you see displays of exceptional character so rarely in college and professional sports these days that people make a big deal out of it when it happens.
Betty Blonde #471 – 04/30/2010
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Our friend Francois, a professor at NCSU told us that if Kelly got a degree in Statistics then went on to something in the Humanities or Business, she would be the “queen of the department” wherever she went. We thought that was pretty cool at the time, but had not thought about it much since then. Kelly got accepted into a great PhD program and then struggled. On average, everyone else in the program was eight years older than her, the youngest being three years older than her when they started. Almost all of them had an MBA and three to five years of experience before they entered the PhD program. There were a couple who went straight from their undergraduate degree to the PhD program, but had a fairly extensive undergraduate research experience. Kelly, on the other hand, was literally, just two years out of high school, or at least that was how old she was when she started.
She has struggled because she was in the habit of taking hard classes that would help her in her understanding of Statistics and not the general Business leveling classes. She has done great in her TA’ing duties and her classes. She knew (knows) how to deal with hard technical material and with people. She started slowly on her RA’ing tasks, but know that she knows what is expected, she excels. The challenge was the research. She had no background at all in formal, technical research. She has struggled. She has her first formal, publication quality paper due in the second week of February. Her work habits were really pretty good by the end of her undergraduate degree at NCSU, but no where near the level she needed to operate at the PhD level. She has hammered away at it though, and today she is performing at a higher level than she ever might have thought she was capable.
So the payback is that her roommate who is in precisely the same program as Kelly, but seven years older with a PhD professor (Dean, actually) father, is coming to Kelly for help on the truly hard stuff. It is a sweet thing, when you have done the truly hard stuff, to enjoy the benefits and security of having it behind you. Congratulations to Kelly. You can not beat a hard STEM degree, no matter what you go on to do after.
Betty Blonde #470 – 04/29/2010
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Lorena just came back from Seattle. She was up there for about five days to help Kelly because she has time for nothing but studying. In her PhD program she has to do two formal papers in addition to her dissertation. They are full-blown research projects with experiments and formal write-ups good enough they are often published in scholarly journals. Since first year students generally have never done such formal research, they have to learn everything from scratch. That was certainly true for Kelly. Kelly’s presentation of her first year paper takes place the second week of February and she is working every waking hour on the paper, her TA responsibilities, research for her advisor and the classes she has to take.
Lorena went up to help her get caught up on shopping, house cleaning, laundry, etc., etc. We have decide Lorena will go up for a few days every other week until Kelly finishes her paper. Her qualifying exams are scheduled for July so she will only get a short reprieve before she gets slammed with work again. Then another short reprieve and another push to her second year paper. After that, the work will be tough but not so time sensitive. Having Lorena there for a week helped a ton. We need to do the same thing for Christian, too, but he has already passed his quals, so his next big thing is his dissertation.
Betty Blonde #469 – 04/28/2010
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Brendan Eich got thrown out as CEO of Firefox because he gave $1000 to the Proposition 8 campaign to protect marriage in California. Rather than complain about it and under the radar (at least under my radar), he started his own browser company. Brave is the name of the browser and the company. The underlying goals of the browser are impressive. I just finished reading their About page which is titled How to Fix the Web and their FAQ. Their concept, if implemented in a compelling way, could change the way ad money changes hands on the internet. User data is protected and the user has more control over what gets displayed. It apparently runs much more rapidly than any of the current popular browser. It could absolutely make ad block software obsolete. The browser is available for testing right now, but I plan to wait until it is closer to full release to give it a spin. The browser is based on Chromium.
The thing that is most impressive about this whole project is that I heard almost nothing from Brendan Eich when he was treated so shabbily by Firefox. I quit using Firefox when he was fired and they have been headed down hill ever since Eich left. This is the very best kind of response he could have given. I wish him well in this new enterprise and am looking forward to giving Brave a try.
Betty Blonde #468 – 04/27/2010
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A lot of the rest of the world thinks the Nordic countries are a monolithic thing. Kelly sent me a couple of articles titled Norwegians & Swedes — What’s the Difference? and Norwegians & Swedes — What’s the Difference? Part II. My kudos go out to the blog author. They were very fascinating posts. I considered my own knowledge of the Swedes and Norwegians of my personal acquaintance, but I don’t know enough to confirm or deny any of this. I do know the Finns are a culturally very different from either group. It makes one think how easy it might be to talk past someone of even greater cultural distance than Norwegians and Swedes.
Betty Blonde #467 – 04/26/2010
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This is one of the best television interviews I have ever seen. I am putting it up here for the benefit of Trisha and her extended family and friends as they will have greater context than others to understand its brilliance. Please note the interviewees are typical university students from West Texas. Take special note of the class the second student vacated to go aid the community in their time of need.
Betty Blonde #465 – 04/22/2010
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The arrogance of the main stream media is only matched by its ignorance. Pulitzer Prize winning main stream media (Washington Post) writer Kathleen Parker on CNN made the following statement:
One observation. I don’t know… this seems to have slipped through the cracks a little bit but Ted Cruz said something that I found rather astonishing. He said, you know, “It’s time for the body of Christ to rise up and support me.” I don’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who would think that Jesus should rise from the grave and resurrect himself to serve Ted Cruz. I know so many people who were offended by that comment. And you know if you want to talk about grandiosity and messianic self-imagery I think he makes Ted Cruz makes Donald Trump look rather sort of like a gentle little lamb.
It is hard to imagine a college graduate in America today who does not understand why this is so profoundly obtuse. Nevertheless, if you do not understand why this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard from a CNN newser, then you need to pop on over to the Right Scoop and read the article titled The Dumbest Thing You’ve Ever Heard from a CNN Newser.
Betty Blonde #464 – 04/21/2010
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I have not taken a sick day from work for many, many years so today is a first. The crazy thing is that I am not sure whether I have a cold or it is just allergies. I hope to find out at the doctor this afternoon. In the mean time Lorena is trying out every Mexican “cure” that enters her mind, some of which have nothing to do with the symptoms. I have to admit, some of them are pretty tasty, but most of the require suspension of disbelief.
Update: I have to admit these cures might have made me somewhat more flatulent.
Betty Blonde #463 – 04/20/2010
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Rejecting a comment
By Dad
On Wednesday, January 20, 2016
In Blogging
I rarely have cause to reject comments on this blog for anything other than span which Askimet pretty much handles on its own. Our content is not really very controversial in the whole scheme of things so inappropriate comments are not too much of a problem. I got a comment today that was aggressive and snarky with claims about qualifications that were impossible (and not worth the time) to check. The author of the comment took objection to something I said about getting a STEM degree (I think it was about this post) that completely missed the point of the post in a very snarky and unhelpful way. I enjoy a vigorous discussion and have been known to admit I am wrong and try to change my ways, but the purpose of this blog is to discuss topics of interest to me and my readership in a thoughtful and even vigorous and argumentative way. Anything that detracts from that needs to be rejected.
I was helped in this by a comment Tom Gilson made over at the Thinking Christian blog on how he manages his blog comments. He basically says any comments helpful to the mission of the blog that meet certain rules of decorum are OK. I will base my comment moderation on that model.
Betty Blonde #466 – 04/23/2010
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