Posters by Owen Smith, whose New Yorker covers I've enjoyed, are now popping up around the BART system. This one adorns the EC Plaza station.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
A little art on BART
Posters by Owen Smith, whose New Yorker covers I've enjoyed, are now popping up around the BART system. This one adorns the EC Plaza station.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Partial Solar Eclipse
How do you spell "piss poor"?
Quicken and Bank of America Software User Friendliness
We use BofA for checking, and Quicken to keep track of the account. It's usually pretty convenient - a few key presses to download all recent transactions and balance the account. Quicken keeps track of which transactions it's already seen, and only adds new ones.
For some reason, BofA just decided to change how they identify transactions to Quicken. They've been warning that "there will be changes to your account" for about a month, so we'd have time to prepare, even though there was actually nothing to be done to prepare, so the warnings were kind of pointless. But that does mean that this wasn't an accident and they had lots of time to check that everything would work properly.
Today was D-Day for the conversion. I went to update the account, following the instructions carefully. The account re-connected successfully.... and imported 173 duplicate transactions. No problem, you say: just delete them. Easier said than done! Quicken, in its infinite software-engineering-wisdom, has made it impossible to delete multiple transactions. You have to go through them one by one. Not only that, but you have to use menus and mouse actions. You can't delete downloaded transactions with keystrokes. So I get to spend 30 minutes moving the mouse, pressing buttons, finding the menu target for "Delete" and then confirming.
Nice work, BofA and Quicken! (Thanks to MD for the title of this post.)
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Monday, September 19, 2011
Geometry sux
Updated: See below.
Originally posted on 9/19/2011
Could anything possibly be more useless than high school geometry (I avoided saying "pointless" - ha ha)? If ever there were a course better designed to drain the beauty out of math, I can't imagine what it might be. I think geometry is in the curriculum because it gives a fairly visual and intuitive introduction to the axiom / proof approach to math, which is what professional mathematicians do. But for most people math is worth studying because of its usefulness as a collection of tools applicable to the real world. And you can learn its beauty by learning the tools and gradually seeing how they hang together into a coherent architecture of quantitative thinking. But geometry, as taught, gets at virtually none of that. What's taught has virtually no value outside learning the axiom / proof stuff - or at least the applicable parts are a tiny portion of what's taught. And the rigor is of an extremely irritating "memorize these axioms" sort (which is what so much high school education seems to come down to).
It's not that there's no value in learning to distill the underpinnings of intuition into clearly stated basic inputs. Euclid did that (I'm told - I don't read greek) and it's worth understanding the how and why. But to spend an entire year on it is a crime. There's a lot of other useful math that could be taught instead. Basic probability and statistics, for example. Probability is an incredibly interesting subject and doesn't seem to be anywhere in the HS curriculum. But it's absolutely central to decisionmaking. It's intuitive, and sometimes counterintuitive, which is even better. And a lot of it can be taught without much math beyond basic algebra.
It probably won't surprise anyone that Anna has just started taking geometry and is not enjoying it...
Updated on 4/9/2013: I just stumbled on the passage below in a review of the essay "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart. The review is here. The original essay can be found here.
'The author reserves some of his strongest criticism for high school geometry, which he considers an “instrument of the devil.” In fact, his criticism is even more strongly stated: “A geometry class is by far the most mentally and emotionally destructive component of the entire K–12 mathematics curriculum.” Forcing students to follow a rigid and dogmatic format in laying out their proofs, he argues, destroys the very essence of what geometric proofs should be and undermines the students’ intuition.'
Originally posted on 9/19/2011
Could anything possibly be more useless than high school geometry (I avoided saying "pointless" - ha ha)? If ever there were a course better designed to drain the beauty out of math, I can't imagine what it might be. I think geometry is in the curriculum because it gives a fairly visual and intuitive introduction to the axiom / proof approach to math, which is what professional mathematicians do. But for most people math is worth studying because of its usefulness as a collection of tools applicable to the real world. And you can learn its beauty by learning the tools and gradually seeing how they hang together into a coherent architecture of quantitative thinking. But geometry, as taught, gets at virtually none of that. What's taught has virtually no value outside learning the axiom / proof stuff - or at least the applicable parts are a tiny portion of what's taught. And the rigor is of an extremely irritating "memorize these axioms" sort (which is what so much high school education seems to come down to).
It's not that there's no value in learning to distill the underpinnings of intuition into clearly stated basic inputs. Euclid did that (I'm told - I don't read greek) and it's worth understanding the how and why. But to spend an entire year on it is a crime. There's a lot of other useful math that could be taught instead. Basic probability and statistics, for example. Probability is an incredibly interesting subject and doesn't seem to be anywhere in the HS curriculum. But it's absolutely central to decisionmaking. It's intuitive, and sometimes counterintuitive, which is even better. And a lot of it can be taught without much math beyond basic algebra.
It probably won't surprise anyone that Anna has just started taking geometry and is not enjoying it...
Updated on 4/9/2013: I just stumbled on the passage below in a review of the essay "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart. The review is here. The original essay can be found here.
'The author reserves some of his strongest criticism for high school geometry, which he considers an “instrument of the devil.” In fact, his criticism is even more strongly stated: “A geometry class is by far the most mentally and emotionally destructive component of the entire K–12 mathematics curriculum.” Forcing students to follow a rigid and dogmatic format in laying out their proofs, he argues, destroys the very essence of what geometric proofs should be and undermines the students’ intuition.'
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Desolation Wilderness
From Meek's Bay to Mt. Tallac, via Phipps and Dicks passes, in 3 1/2 days. Perfect weather, still lots of snow at higher elevations. Eaten alive by mosquitoes.
Stony Ridge Lake
Phipps Pass
Second night campsite at Fontanillis Lake.
Dicks Pass
Dicks Pass
360 degrees of Desolation Wilderness - view from the summit of Mt. Tallac
Mt. Tallac, on the way out
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