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.)

Sentence du jour

"France would not be France unless 30 per cent of the electorate appeared to favour a rerun of 1789 at the earliest opportunity."

Well this is pretty funny...

Close call on Angels Landing still haunts California cop

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.'

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

Apparently we haven't learned much

From Plutarch's Lives

...[A]mbitious men, who embrace the image and not the reality of virtue, produce nothing but ugly deeds. To become the people's leaders, they make themselves the slaves of public opinion. Steered by the applause of the multitude, they are really not leaders at all, no matter what title they claim. The wise and virtuous man has no need at all of glory, except inasmuch as it eases his way to action by greater trust. ...[W]hen the passion for popularity goes too far, it is dangerous in all men, and in the government it is utterly destructive. Those with power and authority are carried away into a sort of insanity, and they begin to think that glory is the cause, and not the effect, of goodness. Such men should tell the people, "I can't be both your leader and your slave," just as Phocion told Antipater, "I can't be both your flunky and your friend."

Leaders should learn from the snake in the fable: The tail complained to the head that, although the tail constituted a majority of the snake, the tail never got a turn to decide on its path. Taking the lead, the tail soon blundered into trouble, and the head suffered along with it -- justly punished for following, contrary to Nature, a guide without eyes or brains. Such has been the fate of many, who, submitting to be guided by the caprice of an uninformed and unreasoning multitude, could neither prevent, nor escape, the confusion and disaster that followed. So much for the glory that depends on the voice of large numbers.

Visit to Portland

Catherine & I went to Portland last weekend while Sam played Ultimate in Corvallis.

In our 20 hours we

• took the streetcar up to the north end of the Pearl District and went to a brew pub
• went to Powell's and spent an hour or so wandering around
• walked to the Japanese garden
• walked back to the hotel, on the river
• went to Andina, where the waitress drove me nuts by repeatedly calling us "you two", as in "How were the desserts, you two?" The food was excellent though.
• got up early and sped off to Corvallis

Very enjoyable city with a small-town feel and a pretty setting. We actually got a little sun while we were there, so it was a bit atypical.