Contra Mozilla

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Coach Mack Brown and His Replacement

It's been a few days since Mack Brown resigned as head coach. He was apparently offered the opportunity to remain as head coach, so I guess that vindicates my predictions from an earlier set of posts: namely, that he would only be brought back if he went at least 9-4 with a win over OU or 10-3 without one (this was the day before and the Monday after the Red River Rivalry game), and that even at 9-4 with the win over OU he might not return. And of course, DeLoss Dodds did step down, though it's not Mack Brown who has replaced him.

Before going into the "who will be the new coach" speculation, it's worth reading this letter of support written by one of his former players:
But I’m writing this to tell you that what happened on the field that night is not what made an impact on an 18-year-old Chris Hall. It wasn’t the last-second touchdown Vince Young scored or the celebration in the stadium afterward. What has stayed with me these eight years were the words Coach Brown spoke to us in the the locker room: “Don’t let this be the greatest thing that ever happened to you.”

Coach Brown could have told us many things. Of course he congratulated us. Of course he was proud of us. He told us we were champions and that nobody could ever take that away from us. All those things were true. But he emphasized what was important. He knew the men in that locker room wouldn’t always be football players. So he told us to not let this be the best thing that ever happened to us, but to go on to be great fathers, great husbands, and great citizens.
We do need more coaches who are class acts of this sort. No, Texas has not been free of its student-athlete-related problems. Yes, a few of the football players have even run afoul of the law at times: there is, unfortunately, some of that at most major university football programs. Even Oregon State has had some off-field issues, and that's with Mr Class Act himself as head coach. The players from the team who have come through the classes I've taught have been reasonably good student-citizens (though many would not exactly count as good scholars), certainly better than the basketball players I've had (both men and women: I haven't yet had one who's come through and been a genuine pleasure to have in class, or really even a very good citizen).

As to who will replace him: I would hope for somebody who cares about being a leader for the team both on and off the field, but I don't know much about the latter for most coaches. I've seen a variety of lists (it seems that with Saban out of the way, there are something like 30 possible replacements, some more serious than others, not counting some of the names on this amusing UT Coaching Bracket). Most of the names I mentioned in my earlier post are still viable or sem-viable candidates. I mentioned Chip Kelly as one good one to hold out for--this before he was on any lists--and lo and behold we find him as a potential replacement (though now an unlikely one, since he's actually doing pretty well in the NFL). I also like Jim Harbaugh if they can get him, though I suspect he would be relatively short-term (as Saban would have been).

There is one name which is conspicuously absent from every single list I've seen so far: David Cutcliffe. I'd call his achievement at Duke to be at least comparable to James Franklin's at Vanderbilt, even if it took him a few more years to get there. Then again, Art Briles didn't exactly become a big coaching commodity by building up Baylor overnight. Whoever the new coach is, he might consider hiring Gene Chizik as (co?) defensive coordinator, or alternatively waiting another year for Will Muschamp to get canned from Florida before bringing him back. Greg Robinson has done ok, but he's not been quite as good either time around as either of those guys were.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

On Winning the Lottery

My wife and I were talking about winning the lottery (we didn't actually win it, of course, unless you count winning $4 for a $1 ticket)--and joking about it, too--and it seems that we aren't the only ones. In the last year or so, it seems the Mega Million and Pwerball lotteries (but I repeat myself) have frequently boasted jackpots in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Several times the jackpot has exceeded half a billion bucks. Yikes!

We are apparently not alone in these musings, as Rebecca Hamilton shares her own thoughts on this on her blog. I mostly concur with her, and actually would put the money to a very similar use (exchange Austin for Oklahoma city, and I would probably build up some nice chapels etc around the state and/or country and staff them with Dominicans; donate a bunch to the Sister of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist (they've set up shop nearby), and I would probably try to set up some sort of small trust for my children (current and future). Oh, and eliminate that student loan debt.

One of the more thought-provoking points brought up by Mrs. Hamilton is this:

The amount of money that was on the line in the lottery yesterday — hundreds of millions of dollars — was beyond my comprehension. My husband told me that if we won it, we’d have to move and go incognito for our own safety.
My reaction to that was thank you, but no. That doesn’t sound like a gift. It sounds like a sentence.
My home/family/community give my life structure. This is my place, my spot in the world. What could money possibly give me to compensate for losing that?

She concludes by asking if winning the lottery would be a blessing, or a sentence.

Something similar crossed my own mind in thinking about this: would it be a blessing, or a curse to suddenly acquire that much wealth? For some, it would surely be a blessing, and many more would echo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis:
Ask the rich man he'll confess
Money can't buy happiness
Ask the poor man he don't doubt
But he'd rather be miserable with than without
For me, I think that winning that much money suddenly would be a curse. It would be another "talent" to steward, and I don't think I would do that. It's not something I want to be answerable for some day--have I used this vast fortune wisely? Some men would be able to, and some certainly do. There's nothing wrong with having a fortune, so long as it is used (invested, donated, etc) wisely. And I may be able to do so.

I'm also certainly at a different stage of life and in a different financial state than Mrs. Hamilton. I don't know that I would want $636 million to worry about, but I wouldn't mind seeing tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt disappear, or of seeing a few hundred thousand big ones appear in a retirement account for my wife and myself; it's not that this would make me quit my day job, but rather would let me pursue a job which would pay less but carry more satisfaction (like teaching, or thinking and writing, and not merely about physics).

Winning enough money to wipe out debts and afford a house or put away for retirement would be nice, and I think I could manage that. But enough to buy a neighborhood is also more than I could really fathom. Though the temptation to buy an island somewhere and to leave the country before things get any worse s strong...


OFA's Awful "Talking" Ad

There's not really any other way to describe Organize For America's (@BarackObama on Twitter) new ad. It's just as classless as the last round, and is again urging people to hijack the holidays to sell Obamacare. This time, they're using a nearly-adrogynous racially neutral onesie-wearing douche bag of a model.

He looks to be young, meaning part of the target demographic of folks who are (or were) enthralled by Obama's razzle-dazzle campaign-bedazzle bullshit. There are really three things which come to mind which others have said, and one more which I would add.

  • Everything about the ad screams "douchebag." I mean, really: plaid onesie pajamas? Discussing serious issues (however much Obama et al. may be treating healthcare reform as a joke, it is serious) with supposedly serious grown men while sitting around in pajamas? The hot chocalate thing is fine, I guess, if taken on its own. But the rest makes the thing laughable at best.
  • This is, moreover, another attempt by Obama (et al.) to place himself (and his policies) at the center of the holidays. Because you know, the holidays are about serving the party and celebrating the dear leader, not about spending time with family or celebrating traditions (religious or otherwise) or anything so unhip as that. It's an ongoing trend with Obama, everything's about him.
  • If Obamacare had done a better job of selling itself, we wouldn't even need to spend the holidays trying to sell it for him. The complete top-down incompetence in implementing the websites and exchanges is a part of the problem, as is the fact that he has been a) lying and b) changing the rules of the game since day one. However, even that is only a part of the problem, since Obamacare itself would be aweful without those problems.
  • My own observation: I notice that the age of the guy in the ad appears to be young(ish?). It's hard to get a good estimate, based on his lack of distinction from "generic guy/gal", but I would guess 20-something [edit: over 26, as some have pointed out]. Well, with the way Obama's economy has been treating 20-somethings, I guess that many of them really do have nothing better to do this winter than sit around in pajamas and drink hot chocalate. It's not like many people in this age group have full-time jobs to go to.

2017 cannot arrive soon enough.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Fake Job References, Real Job Problems

Daily Dot has a story up about a guy who makes a living by providing fake job references. He apparently puts some serious effort into it, designing websites and even LinkedIn profiles for the fake companies and then matching them to a person's desired career. He apparently also goes through the trouble of providing phone references, though he tries to stick to email because it's easier to keep the story straight (Mark Twain is nodding in his grave).

The article leaves the ethics of this as ambiguous, and of course there are certain risks (including for one the risk of termination and a lawsuit if a company should find out that it's been lied to). With that said, it's nice to see somebody finding another way of sticking it to the hiring agencies and HR departments. Too many companies seem to believe that their entry-level jobs should have the qualifications of a degree and several years' experience: this for the kind of positions which once might have been had direct from high school or at least direct from college.

In many fields, an entry-level job becomes available only after having obtained an expensive college degree and undergone some (oftentimes) unpaid or underpaid internships ("to gain some job experience" of course). Any company which makes those kinds of its employees deserves any curve-balls which come its way.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Some Links About Story

A few quick links about story and story-telling, mostly science fiction. The first come from Ace of Spades, who is talking about the sense-of-wonder which should be included in any good science fiction (or fantasy) story. This, in the context of the Godzilla remake:
I'm always wondering to myself: Where, when they were writing the script, did they expect a 10 year old boy (or the 10 year old boy in all of us, including in women) to go, "Wowww...!!!"
The only Wow factor they're offering CGI Cartoon shit happening faster and bigger.
This reminds me of why Metallica stopped playing speed metal. They realized that the competition in speed metal had simply become unidimensional -- it was simply to play things faster, and then faster, and then faster still, and then, when that got boring, to try playing things even faster.
What is the endpoint of that, they wondered? Is that a competition worth winning?
CGI hasn't had the effect of liberating filmmakers' imaginations -- it has had quite the opposite effect. CGI promises, they think, a guaranteed payoff: We'll just make our cartoons bigger, louder, and faster than they were last time, with more pixels and more texture-shading, and there you go. Art has been made.
But Bigger, Louder, Faster is a creative ditch just like speed metal's Faster Faster Faster....

And I don't care about Godzilla at all. I'm not a child. I don't care about giant monsters knocking about cities. I've seen this before.
In the last ten years, I've seen this kind of thing about 35 times now.
And blog favorite John C Wright continues his discussion of strong female characters, also in the context of science fiction and fantasy. I forget how many of these I linked the last time, so here's part 5, and here's part 6. Part 6 is especially worth the read. Instead of quoting some passages which are representative of the whole, I give these two nuggets from part 6:
"More truth is held in the pages of trashy romance novels than in all the worthless books penned by college professors."
"I read with some skeptical bitterness that when neurologists first started publicly admitting that there were neurochemical differences in brain structure between males and females, Gloria Steinem said that social conditioning could overcome this innate genetic predilections. I understand that the Left also says that homosexual attraction is caused by innate genetic predilections, but that to use any form of social conditioning to overcome such predilections is illegal in California. Consistency is not the strong suit of the Left."
Indeed. Here is a more representative passage:
The story logic requires that if a superheroine falls for a guy, he has to be virile and potent in relation to her, in some way her superior, so that she has something she thinks is sexy to admire and adore; and likewise she, even if she is physically stronger and shows directness and leadership and cooks outdoors and has great clumps of underarm hair and in every way is masculine and manly, she has to be shown as devoted, because fidelity is what sexually attracts men to women.
The old cliché of rescuing a damsel in distress is based on the idea that a woman rescued from danger by a man will be devoted to him, because ingratitude in such life or death situations was unthinkable, particularly for an admirable female lead.
Again, the logic of Political Correctness requires that men and women not be complementary because the concept of complementary strengths and weakness is not a concept that Political Correctness can admit, lest it be destroyed. The concept of complementary virtues undermines the concept of envy, and Political Correctness is nothing but politicized fury based on politicized envy. We can define Political Correctness as the attempt to express fury and envy via radical changes to legal and social institutions.






Saturday, December 7, 2013

BCS Chaos Scenarios

The BCS--and the playoff which replaces it--is about giving the people what they don't want.

It seems to me that there are several scenarios for the BCS Championship. Actually, both Sports Illustrated and ESPN came up with the same 4 (ESPN had more, however):
  1. OSU and FSU win today and place for the BCS national championship
  2. OSU and FSU win today, but Auburn jumps OSU and so FSU and Aubrun play for the championship.
  3. OSU loses and so FSU plays the winner of Missouri/Auburn for the national champinship
  4. OSU and FSU lose, so Auburn and Alabama stage a rematch of the national championship
Apparently, OSU, FSU, and Auburn all losing isn't a viable outcome, nor is OSU winning but FSU losing. Neither, apparently, is a split championship, between (for example) an undefeated OSU getting left out and a 1-loss Auburn beating FSU. For example: OSU, FSU, and Auburn all win today, but then OSU gets left out and wins the Rose bowl by a lot. Alabama loses it bowl game, and Auburn edges FSU. The voters sheepishly realize that OSU was better than their schedule permitted (the only two games they played even close so far are against 10-2 Wisconsin and rival Michigan), and that Auburn last-second win over Alabama is less impressive than it appeared (all far-fetched, but possible).

So how does this tie into the 4-team play-off? The very strong implication is that in this year, the four teams would be FSU, OSU, Auburn/Mizzou winner, and Alabama.So there are no aggrieved teams under those rules, right?

Wrong. For one, suppose that Oklahoma State and/or Baylor wins today, and in so doing finishes 11-1. "They played a weak schedule." Perhaps, but is it weaker than the schedules of FSU and OSU, or for that matter Missouri (assuming they win)? Oklahoma State will have beaten an 11-1 Baylor team, a 9-3 Oklahoma team, and an 8-4 Texas team which had improved dramatically since its first two losses (after which they replaced their inept defensive coordinator with a rather better one). Ohio State will have beaten an 11-2 MSU squad and a 10-2 Wisconsin team, and an 8-4 Iowa team. FSU will have beaten a 10-3 Duke team, a 10-2 Clemson team, and a decent 9-3 Miami team. Missouri will have beaten an 11-2 Auburn team and a 10-2 South Carolina team, and an 8-4 Texas A&M squad. And are these 1-loss teams all really better than say Stanford or ASU, who have played two of the toughest schedules in the country?

The 4-team playoff is supposed to be better because, supposed, the #5 team isn't quite as deserving as the #3 team to play for a championship. Perhaps, and perhaps not. The actual result will be that the #5 team is ignored (as the #3 team often is now), when the #5 team might easily beat any of the teams ranked ahead of it (I think of the 2008 USC team which would most likely have clobbered Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and even Florida, and which did clobber both the Ohio State which took Texas to the wire in the Fiesta Bowl and Penn State, which was the #6 or 7 team that year).

This could be resolved by either going to an 8-team play-off (5 conference winners from the major conferences plus 3 at-large and no more than 2 from any conference) or a 4-team play-off with only conference champions allowed. An alternative, I suppose, would be the multi-team system I proposed in an earlier post. The playoff we'll have simply isn't going to improve things.

The good news is that NIU lost, so maybe the PAC-12 will get that second BCS team in.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Quick Link: World Cup Draw

Apparently, whoever was in charge of the first round draws for the world cup hates the US. Talk about a tough group: besides the US, it's Germany, Portugal, and Ghana (the team that's eliminated us from the last two world cups). Yikes.

Go figure that both France and Mexico would get easy draws.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

GoldieBlox and the Three Mares

When I first saw the GoldieBlox "Princess Machine" ad, my initial reaction was, I'm not going to buy anything from these guys for my daughter. This is because I saw the original version with the parody of Beastie Boys "Girls". This version has disappeared, apparently because the Beastie Boys began inquiring as to why their material was used without their permission. Meanwhile, GoldieBlox reaction has been to sue Beastie Boys over this inquiry.

This is all basically in the background of my mind, actually. It's a bit classless for GoldieBlox to go about it this way, but that's not really where my complaints lay. Rather, I took exception to the parody lyrics (and their implications--I've empasized some):
Girls. You think you know what we want, girls
Pink and pretty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.
You like to buy us pink toys
And everything else is for boy
And you can always get us dolls
And we’ll grow up like them... false.
It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same

And we would like to use our brains.
We are all more than princess maids.

Girls to build the spaceship,
Girls to code the new app,
Girls to grow up knowing
That they can engineer that.Girls.
That’s all we really need is Girls.
To bring us up to speed it’s Girls.
Our opportunity is Girls.
Don’t underestimate Girls.

For crying out loud, I know that these lyrics are making fun of a song about girls being treated as nothing more than "maids", though they're really also making fun of housewives, stay-at-home moms, home-makers.
Girls!
You deserve better
Girls!
Than thinly veiled whining
Girls!
About the old patriarchy
Girls!
And an imagined glass ceiling.

Note the insinuation, "That's all we really need is Girls." Boys are not needed, we can dispense with men. This may not be the intention of the company or the ad, but in a society which is saturated with this message, that is what comes across. The further insinuation that women who choose not to pursue engineering careers--or really any careers--but rather to embrace the vocation of home-maker and mother to the exclusion of other careers don't use their brains is, well, demeaning to say the least.

The commercial itself was really not too bad, though. With the lyrics removed, it's actually pretty well-done, and exactly the kind of thing I'd like to do with my children when they are old enough to appreciate it:




Well, other than perhaps the fact that all three girls look very bored with their pretty-princess show. That kind of thing would probably bore some girls. Others really like it--and it's not a matter of just "gender-socializing" or some other psycho-babble nonsense. Indeed, my (rather progressive) sister once commented to me that her daughters had socialized themselves to like the whole Cinderella/Disney-princess/dolls thing. Actually, the look of the three girls at the beginning is less bored than angry, which I suppose fits the attitude of feminists the world over.

It's just unfortunate that the approach to this is, "We don't need boys!" which reads a lot like "Up with womyn, down with men!" in our cultural milieu. Similarly with the attitude that traditional "girl toys" (and by extension, feminine gender roles) do not require a functioning brain. There are no "mere" housewives, and nobody is "just a mother."

Anyway, my children currently consist of a baby daughter. She's not old enough to play with these kinds of things (they tend to present a choking hazard at her age), but I have big plans for science/engineering exploration with her (her mother, on the other hand, plans to do the same with music). The fact that this company felt the need to turn me off to its products would seem to be rather unfortunate for them, and it unfortunate for us too. I like the idea of my little girls getting into engineering and science (more fun for me, too!), but not at the expense of their femininity. Certainly, not at the price of having some chip on her shoulder against the men in her field, if she does some day decide to go the STE route. To be blunt, that's a true mark of equality between the sexes: when women can enter the field without having a chip of their shoulders against their male colleagues--and when men can look at these women as partners and not merely rivals. Ads like the one first put forth by GoldieBlox do not help to accomplish this.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Manic Monday Musings--A Few Short Thoughts after a Long Weekend

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I don't like being a grad student, but I really hate the constant pressure being placed on me to get results. My equipment--which I get a turn on once every month or so--is constantly breaking through no fault of my own. I can't conjure a working experiment from non-working equipment. Meanwhile, every other aspect of my life is suffering from work-life imbalance. Hence, few updates here. Here are a few thoughts that I haven't time to expand on now.

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The secular-minded folks would conflate evangelizing with marketing. They might throw in proselytizing for good measure, or perhaps suggest that proselytism is to a person's religion what marketing is to a person's spending habits, and that evangelism is the same thing as proselytism. Um, no. It's even more disturbing when Church leaders make this mistake, however.

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Given that "settled science" sometimes undergoes paradigm shifts, it becomes foolish to base defenses of perennial truths on it. Since philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and ultimately the pursuit of these perennial truths from the vehicle of human reasoning, philosophy itself cannot be based only on science*--which might fairly be true even under the older meaning of science as "knowledge." It needs a firmer foundation than science can offer, which may also be why scientists are often such poor philosophers. He who marries the spirit of this age finds himself widowed (or more often than not divorced) in the next age.

*Based only on science: I mean here science as only human "knowledge," which may be disproven and is generally incomplete. Of course, since human knowledge is generally incomplete, we have to work with what we have, but I have seen a few philosophical arguments--even professionally published ones--which hinge ultimately on scientific "facts" which have turned out to not be so factual.

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The publish or perish mentality has done more to undermine the academic enterprise--to say nothing of the concept of a liberal education--than most more "systems" or ideologies could ever hope to achieve. The problem of publish or perish is an insistence on newness or (worse) novelty, which does not necessarily mean mastery of the subject at hand. I think it will also be the death of science as such.

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Meanwhile, we're slowly replacing science with engineering, and then replacing sound engineering with mere technology. This won't end well. And furthermore, computer science is not one of the natural sciences.

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The Black Friday Rule is this: the day after we pretend to be thankful for what we have, we go out and attempt to add to it. Because nothing says "gratitude" like consumerism and the desire for more stuff.